What the interns have wrought, 2024 edition

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The purpose for internship programs generally are to grow the interns skills and establish a talent pipeline, _not_ for their immediate "code lift".

Unless you think that AI is going to completely replace developers, then there will remain value in having interns.

internship programs are ways to lock in top talent from top universities. I don't know the stats but I bet the majority of graduates end up taking a job at a company they interned with. You still need to hire juniors to have the eventual seniors.

This mis-identifies the purpose of intern programs.

Interns aren't there to get a bunch done. They're there to evaluate them and convince them to come back after graduation.

Even with Cursor + Claude (maybe even because of them?) there is still demand to hiring software engineers. Intern programs are hiring pipelines.

The whole point of an internship isn’t to get low cost work. It’s part recruiting and part teaching students about working in the real world vs. in educational environments.

I think companies will take advantage of AI in the future to create efficiencies with the existing workforce and free up their time to solve other problems that AI cannot solve such as user research, reasoned architectures, etc.

Can you provide data on the trends so I know where to position my recruiting efforts when internships are “no longer viable?”