Ask HN: What tips do you have for interns?

"Strongly dislike", it's not like any rational person waits in the wings with mallet to abuse someone for being new. :) If you do face a culture of blame (like playing an online game) your office culture probably is a bad fit. Never work with assholes. It's never worth it.

Study their workflow and design process well. Learn DVCS (git, hg) very well and the best practices that come with it (especially branching).

Once you have branching down, you can create your own branches without affecting their work.

Never use --force.

That makes is basically impossible for you to be a headache.

Use local databases only for testing/dev. Make sure you have a development server ready that's ok to wipe at will (so other devs don't cry about it).

Sometimes not even challenging work, but sometimes menial work that is below others.

Every internship I have had, I was with a team that tried to give me the best experience I could, and never gave me boring or menial tasks just because I was the intern. In fact they actively avoided doing so and did these things themselves.

On my first internship there was a task that came in. As part of a security audit, we had to verify that all ssh keys that had access to sensitive infrastructure. That had to be done by hand, by running around and finding these people and checking their keys manually, which was nearly a days work. I volunteered to do it, as really that's the sort of stuff that I should be doing as it would be wasteful for the others to be spending their time on it.

Things like that got me a lot of respect. As an intern, you need to make the lives of those you work with easier. If this means occasionally taking some menial work or writing scripts to automate their tasks.

Glad to know that someone else feels exactly the same as I do with work. You're not alone on this one.