First off, I think any innovation in the tech hiring space is good, so glad to see new models being tested. Couple questions:
1.) How do you discourage companies from intentionally using these fellows to do "grunt" work? Given that these are only 4 week projects, for a lot of complex projects, that isn't enough time to ramp up even a senior engineer to deliver a finished working product in that time.
2.) One of the huge barriers to this kind of "contract" work is the potential for a whole bunch of unmaintained code to be written. A big reason that smaller companies don't have interns is because of the time suck in terms of ramp up and long term maintainability of the code. How will this program deal with these issues?
> How do you discourage companies from intentionally using these fellows to do "grunt" work?
Great question! A couple of ways:
- First off, we talk to them. We qualify every company through a conversation with the mentor, looking at the project the engineer will be working on, and assessing their onboarding process. It becomes pretty obvious when people just want "free work." We don't place Fellows at those companies.
- Our North Star for this program is delivering an amazing educational experience for the Fellow. Everything else is secondary. If a company is getting real work done that's valuable to them, that's great, as long as they're delivering on the educational experience for the Fellow. We have pulled Fellows off of projects where the company is not delivering on their end of the bargain.
- Finally, as you mentioned in your question "that isn't enough time to ramp up even a senior engineer to deliver a finished working product in that time." The 4 week timeframe naturally limits the usefulness for "free work." A company would have to be pretty desperate to try to get significant stuff shipped via rotating Fellows through. And companies like that would be found out pretty quickly via the above two points.
> A big reason that smaller companies don't have interns is because of the time suck in terms of ramp up and long term maintainability of the code.
Again, great point. Internships are not great, not because they _can't_ be great, but (I believe) because they haven't been thoughtfully designed to deliver valuable work, which it turns out, is also a superior learning experience.
Let's take your two points in order:
1. "the time suck in terms of ramp up" - We saw this as a problem from the start as well. To combat this, we built out a Mentor's Guide(https://www.notion.so/lambdaschool/Lambda-Fellows-Program-4c...) with checklists and docs that streamline the onboarding process. We've placed 40 Fellows at different companies over the past 8 weeks, and we see our average Fellow get their dev env set up by EOD 1, their first ticket pushed to prod by EOD 3, and a WIP pull request opened with the first part of their project by day 5 of week 1. It's amazing to see how quickly you can get to productive work with just a little intentional design.
2. "long term maintainability of the code" - This is exactly why we pair each of our Fellows with a single, dedicated Mentor at the host company. The Mentor is responsible for reviewing the Fellow's code, giving feedback, helping them get unblocked, guiding them towards the right type of solution, etc. This is not "hire some interns and stick them in a corner working on something semi-interesting." It's simultaneously a more involved process for the company, while also being more focused and valuable.
1.) How do you discourage companies from intentionally using these fellows to do "grunt" work? Given that these are only 4 week projects, for a lot of complex projects, that isn't enough time to ramp up even a senior engineer to deliver a finished working product in that time.
2.) One of the huge barriers to this kind of "contract" work is the potential for a whole bunch of unmaintained code to be written. A big reason that smaller companies don't have interns is because of the time suck in terms of ramp up and long term maintainability of the code. How will this program deal with these issues?