How to fully use student attachments?

Question

From time to time, a student will be attached to our projects, of course, I would like to assign a lot of things to him, to do this, I can learn more. But many times we have come to terms with the purpose of things like documentaiton, updating ui mockup screens, etc. The problem is that it is difficult to trust the quality of work provided by students, and another thing is that they are still young and their enthusiasm may not be there. How do we better use them so that they really reduce our workload, and also, in turn, mean learning more materials that will help them in their future job opportunities?

Answer 1

I am afraid that this may seem disappointing, but it is not a good idea to use students to reduce the burden on the organizational unit. Probably, if your goal is to reduce workload, it is best not to take students. Read on to see why.

Although you did not indicate the level of knowledge related to the work that students possess and you did not mention the duration of their attachment, I believe from the tone of your question that their experience is not enough to get into the starting position. It is also reasonable to assume that they will not stay for more than 2-3 months.

Significant benefits that your organization can extract even in a limited time:

• Pay attention and capture talented workers before they even enter the labor market. Later in their working life, they probably will not be so accessible.

• Turn every student into your salesperson. Let them tell everyone how good your product is, conclude contracts in the future or make their colleagues envy their work experience, increasing the number of good candidates for your company.

• Outsiders can help blind your processes, procedures, product, identify inefficiencies, etc.

• Check out their latest university teaching materials.

• Boost your morale: Maslow's theory of "need for respect." Even the youngest member of your team is getting a little older, as these students have yet to reach this position.

Reducing the workload means that you will need to find a set of tasks that is fairly independent, does not require knowledge or skills that students do not have, and it takes most of your team time to transfer. Tasks cannot be strategically important if they shake it, but cannot be operationally important. So you left with dusty requests for management reports or research and development.

Most likely, R&D is considered a more desirable job in your organization, and if you give only to students, then some people feel that they will suffer.

Answer 2

How long do students study? When we had students in place for two weeks, there was nothing else but that we could test them.

If the student has the enthusiasm that you are coding, program a couple of programs through an error and let them write unit tests to verify the fix.

Answer 3

Even if you, as a rule, do not do pair programming, I think that it is sometimes useful with a junior developer if he / she would run a couple of programs with a more experienced developer for the following reasons:

• I would not assign coding tasks only to the junior developer, because his code should have been carefully examined by someone else in any case and, most likely, would have been rewritten or substantially modified.

• On the other hand, how can a junior developer learn if not program? So, you want him to somehow participate in programming tasks.

• You get some of the benefits of pair programming: the most experienced developer is less likely to make stupid mistakes (even a very young programmer may indicate things like “hey, you made a typo”) and less likely to disable stackoverflow.com every 10 minutes during a pair session programming.

Of course, I will also rotate the youngest with several elderly during the day, so they do not feel “slowed down” or annoyed by the young guy for an extended period of time.

Answer 4

Why not assign one or more "sheperds" engineers to the student and let them keep track of their work or even better combine with them. The student will get a good idea of ​​your project and real work, and also learn that in case of trouble someone can also give direction. The Shepherd / Mentor gains a new perspective and the joy of learning.