Monday October 11, 2004

Students in a workplace

I thought it would be interesting to work out how many years we have had students in our workplace. We started with one ( who is now back with us as a full time employee) and we then moved onto three and last year I inherited another lab with two more students. So I reckon we are in our sixth year. I would have re-employed more of our previous students if I had the vacancies...

What does Sun and the student get out of this ? Well lots of things.

If we get the right candidate they are enthusiastic and keen to learn as much as they can in the year they are with us. This means they don't mind doing what some might see as boring work, setting up lab systems to reproduce customer problems. In this area they can be setting up a small desktop type machine all the way up to a complicated E25K configuaration, San environment or cluster for example. One candidate likened this to 'real computing'.

The students also get to help us manage the servers we run our business on.

They bring ideas. We can be set in our ways and although we innovate it is amazing how an outsider can see things we do not.

They get the chance to be treated as peers to the full time lab staff. One student has commented in the past that he was impressed we did this. But it is only fair - after all what is the difference? We all need a sandpit in which to learn. Making mistakes is ok as long as it does not mess up the whole operation or if there is a way of recovering from the situation. My experience is that I am just as likely to make mistakes as any student I have employeed.

The students sit with the smartest technical brains Sun has in IMHO. Special skills that mean these clever engineers prefer to solve customer problems and innovate tools to do this instead of developing new products. So the students can sit in and listen to seem pretty mind blowing conversations.

Students can contribute to REAL projects. In our lab there is always a list of things that need doing a mile long. So they redesign our internal networks, introduce new services/servers get to use the latest Solaris releases and hardware as soon as it appears.

We have had some wonderful experiences with students. As the years have gone on I think we have made better choices of students to work with us. We have also gone international. A lot of students we have are from other countries who choose to study in the UK. Chinese, Hong Kong, two Greeks and we have in the past had two female students. The candidate has to be right for us. I am insistant that they must know Linux or Unix a Windows/NT expert will not enjoy or be enjoyed.

So if you are in a position to think about students it is worth doing. You need to start recruiting in January for them to start in July when they do their gap year ( in the UK ). You need to think about what they will do and be prepared to sell the job to them. What training will you offer, mentoring etc. We are lucky in that our students usually stay until September so they can help train the new students who start in July.

One last thing. At forty four I am no old age pensioner. But twenty year old students do keep you young.