Hire Interns Today!

Do you have reduced budgets? Are you getting pressure to offshore work? Are you restricted from hiring full-time employees? Consider hiring interns.

In tough financial times, it can be very hard for new college graduates to find employment. I have been very successful at both helping new college graduates get training and get a foot in the door as well as helping companies get more affordable help and have a chance to qualify future employees.

Here are some tips in using interns:

• Look at graduates from non-name schools with degrees in the areas you need
• Find people with good attitudes and good communication skills
• Don't do long interview cycles
• Find a contract house that will manage their employment
• Free up more senior full-time staff from doing ineffective tasks
• Expect to spend some time training
• Hire a group at one time

In tough times, employers hiring full-time employees often pick employees with the best pedigrees. There are a lot of great candidates with great skills that went to lesser known schools. I often find candidates through referrals from someone who knows a graduate working at a local gym or restaurant. The candidate much rather be working in a job that will provide them with experience pertinent to their long-term goals.

I typically will interview candidates for at most 30 minutes on the telephone before making them an offer. You cannot expect them to have great expertise in your product. The idea is that you will train them. I most screen for basic knowledge (tell me about a college project) and I screen for attitude and communication skills. You should know fairly quickly if they will be effective and you will not risk much if you learn there is not a match after a month.

I tend to find these interns through referrals but have them managed through a contract house because they are not full-time and they have already graduated from school (so it is not a co-op). Reputable contract houses can provide low end management including paying employer contributions and workman's comp for about 25% overhead. Many also will provide the employee with the ability to purchase their own healthcare.

You should be able to have the interns target work that frees up senior full-time employees to work on projects that require their experience and skill. While you will have to train the interns, a little investment will go a long way. Try to hire them in groups so you can train many at one time thereby lowering the overhead. In the end I have hired many of the interns for full-time employment at the end of 6-12 months.

This will be a win-win for the intern and for your company.

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How should you measure engineering?

One of the common questions I get asked is how should you measure engineering. It is a loaded question. Usually there are personal biases and long painful experience that color the question. However, the sentiment of the question is correct. If we do not measure ourselves we cannot get better.

The common industry term for these measure are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). As a general guideline, I like these to be simple and easy to measure.

The following three questions are important to the business, can give you an idea about how we are doing and have answers that are reasonably easy to measure:

• How productive is engineering?
• How good is the quality?
• How quickly can we respond to customer problems?

The first two are solely engineering measures and the third is a joint measure with support.

You can easily measure engineering productivity by measuring the number of features that engineering releases to customers per quarter. In order to create this measure, you need to have a common denomination or coin of the realm to normalize the size of projects. You can classify your projects into small, medium, large and extra large where you can size those project sizes and provide some basic equivalences. For example:

• Small - less than 1 development week effort == 1/3 medium project
• Medium - less than 1 month of development effort
• Large - less than 3 months of development effort == 3 medium projects
• Extra Large - greater than 3 months of development == 9 medium projects

You could clearly make the measurements exact but this method also provides a normalization that both reflects the impact of larger projects by virtue of rounding up and removes anomalies by capping the translation. This measure will have a direct effect on the company's ability to compete and to manage costs.

You can measure quality by how many bugs need to be fixed in patches per quarter and in the next release per quarter. The idea here is that it does not matter what the company marks as the priority or severity of a bug. Instead if the company requires the bug get fixed in a patch or release, then for whatever reason engineering had to expend resources to fix the bug. Quality then becomes about addressing issues earlier and removing the need for the company to spend resources after software has been released. This measure will have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and engineering productivity.

Finally, we all know that there will be critical problems that we cannot foresee that the company must address. It is important that the company reduce the time for customer relief for critical bugs and measure it at least quarterly. The fix could be a work around developed solely by customer support or a complex engineering based fix and therefore this is a joint measure. Efforts like customer training, robust error-logging, and code assertions can help reduce time-to-relief. This measure will have a direct impact on customer satisfaction.

If you don't measure you cannot get better.

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