I often wonder what would be the best outcome of an internship - for every one, the company, the intern, even society. I as an intern myself for most of the years of my studies - something not quite normal in Spain - and as a result I want to make sure that everybody gets something out of this.
Being an intern is good - for me was quite an experience - because you really start looking at the world from a different perspective. In my time that didn't mean too much, I was just cheap workforce, but nevertheless I came to see things from a different perspective completely: my colleagues were real workers, and the kind of things they talked about was not what I was used to see and hear with my fellow students.
In this case, this group is different. They are still located in a environment that is still mostly university related, and thus they will have a limitation on the kind of soft skills they will have. That is a pity, but makes things easier for them, as they don't have to be physically in a place, and can adjust their schedules to their studies.
On the other hand, they are involved in an amazing project, I would have loved to have an internship like this. And, more than that, we are making a great effort to have them trained. After this internship, our team should be the first ones to get a job - and I hope that Red Hat and our partners Logicalis and Produban are their first options.
Nonetheless, participating in an open source community makes thing
easier to get a job afterwards. Red Hat in fact employees a lot of
engineers that starting working in a community in their free time, and
finished working in the community under a contract.
So, it is training the solution? I want to make sure that any body that goes through this internship ends up being a better worker in the future, and quite biased to Open Source (and Red Hat). So we are getting them trough the best training we can get.
I believe that is good, it is something that adds value to the internship, students really need to learn a lot after they finish, and we are getting them access to a lot of great people inside the organization to make things even better. Of course they can't have a coffee with them - most of them being in the US (United States), only with me. It is hard to have a coffee with somebody in the US (Universidad de Sevilla) - but they have meetings, video calls, and the contacts to work with them.
Finally, and in any case, pressure is there, this is not coffee brewing, but doing work in a real environment, with quality, a real customer behind, something so good that can become open source. Sometimes I hear comments about how this work should not be done with interns... and I wonder if that is something we should say to all those people that are already contributing in their free time to open source: "hey, you don't know enough to do this, go and have some drinks with your fried".
The answer is no, I am convinced that in this group we have some of the future stars of the community. We need to train people to work with Open Source, not just hope that they will for whatever reason that got us here. Having them doing something meaningful, a challenge, having trust in them, is part of the open source way. Of course this will be more difficult for them that going around for three months doing easy tasks that nobody wants to do... but that would be a case of money only. I often find people that dedicate their careers to do manual things that should be automated, and the reason is the same: it' easier to make it start, it's easier to keep going without finding a new challenge every day... but it's a waste of talent.
Let God help us live up to the expectations. And let's put some value in people's life, just a little bit.
