Creating an Internship Program for Software Engineers - Case Study from Redbubble

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Tom Sommer, Director of Engineering at Redbubble about creating an internship program for software engineers. Tom tells stories about setting up the internship program at Redbubble and the iterations they've gone through over the years to give you a headstart at building your own program.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Mistakes while creating an internship program for software engineers
• Recruiting to an internship program
• Evaluating candidates going into the program
• Evaluating candidates at the end of the program
• Choosing teams and mentors for interns
• Stages and expectations in an internship program

Excerpt from the interview:

"Early on, we put the new interns into their own team, gave them a task to rewrite a system or a project for us, and checked in on them periodically. The point wasn’t to test whether they could do it, but we thought it was a good way to gain experience.

It didn’t work out well.

This is why we transitioned to embedding interns into teams to give them the full experience of working on a product engineering team."

Click here to read the full interview!