Five Things Learned From Software Engineer Interns During COVID-19
In 2013, a small group of people led by Prashanthi Ravanavarapu and Jot Powers sought to offer their technical skills to solve problems facing local non-profits. In the seven years that followed, what started in San Jose, CA, has now enlisted assistance from over 1,000 people around the globe and has helped over 125 charities in need.
At PayPal, we have many examples of grassroots efforts impacting our community. With PayPal Gives, we are encouraged to volunteer our time, and with the PayPal Giving Fund, we enable easy donations to many charities. In the eyes of Prashanthi and Jot, Opportunity Hack creates durable software engineering solutions that go beyond writing a check or a singular volunteering event, to create global impact.
As COVID-19 started to cancel summer internships, many students were scrambling to find companies that were still hiring, that hired distributed-first, and that aligned with their career aspirations. To test the water, I created a simple survey and posted it to LinkedIn. Would students be willing to work on a volunteer basis, to help Opportunity Hack solve technical problems for non-profit organizations? 🤔
Within a few days, we had 50 students who wanted to work on a volunteer internship. After couple weeks, we had over 100 students.
Most students (73%) were seeking software engineering projects, with data analysis, mobile app development, and program management all tied for second place. 90% of students were okay with a volunteer internship and most (73%) were willing to dedicate at least 11 to 20 hours a week. I wasn’t surprised to see that 84% of students were willing to work in a group, since working on group projects in school made this an easy transition.
Given the immediate need, I wrote a GitHub README with 11 projects based on five years of previous non-profit knowledge working with Opportunity Hack.
1. Recognition is a catalyst
86% of students want to be recognized after they complete their summer volunteer internship with 82% of students also asking for recommendations from the program. Compare this to 50% who wanted to receive a t-shirt and you’ll see that people value validation of their work over physical gifts. For many students, this may be their first opportunity to get experience writing code outside of school and it’s great to see a desire for education and validation as their primary motivation for working on these projects.
2. The RSVP epidemic
Each of the 118 students who expressed interest were added to our Opportunity Hack Slack organization, where all communication over the summer takes place. Of the 118 students added to Slack, we have about 55 active (reading/sending at least one message per week) and about 30 actively posting messages.
Said another way, 46% of students went from RSVP to Slack, and 25% went from RSVP to active contributions via sending Slack messages. There are millions of reasons why someone may have indicated their intent to join this summer, but what we’ve seen from previous hackathons is that roughly one out of three people who RSVP show up to put in the work. This is the difference between sending in a resume and backing it up with tangible evidence.
3. University recruiting is not always the best vector
In the grand scheme of things, once you spend time creating a resume, it’s easy to set some time aside to submit that resume to various jobs and show up to a career fair to wait in line, have a 10 minute chat with a single person, and leave your resume. At the end of the day, there may be hundreds of resumes with notes and ratings for each person.
In the weeks that follow, many people will need to re-review, re-interview, and continue the traditional hiring practice. What we’ve done this summer and through Opportunity Hack is create the right amount of friction to surface folks with grit. Of the people that work on projects either during this summer or during our hackathons, we see motivation, passion, and perseverance — key traits that are not obvious on resumes or during career fairs. While the work is hard, we learn, as people collaborate, that they are looking for experience, and are always trying to get better.
4. Unlike microbes, passion is visible
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” -Albert Einstein
Of the 118 students who expressed interest and the 55 active in Slack, with the 30 posting messages, we sent out a retrospective survey at the end of June to see which students were the most engaged. So far, we’ve received 15 responses (13% of the 118 who RSVP’d) from this retrospective.
They gave us meaningful insights like:
- 100% of all 15 are participating in the agile practice of sprint planning
- 86% are performing software design
- 73% are participating in agile standup (through DixiApp, a free standup app for Slack)
- 66% are writing unit tests
- 33% are recording sprint demo videos
The most important takeaway for me is that I see 15 diverse individuals from New York, to Phoenix, to Los Angeles who are self-motivated, want to learn, are highly collaborative, and have been able to get something accomplished over their summer when they could be doing anything else.
5. The people who have the RSVP vaccine
Something that keeps me up at night is trying to understand the other side of this — why we, over five years, only see 30% of people who go from RSVP to “showing up.”
There are a multitude of barriers to entry including personal issues, technology challenges, and financial hindrances — but it’s hard to figure out how to help. I choose to look at this from the optimistic “motivated people will persevere” angle, but focusing on the reverse side of this coin will potentially uncover new problem statements for us to consider.
I’d like to end with some quotes from some of the students’ retrospective submissions. The key theme in all of these is continued learning, something that software engineers must have as an innate thirst that will propel them forward in their career.
- “Learnt web scraping using BeautifulSoup, learnt concepts of Natural Language Processing.”
- “I’m happy to put all the things that I learnt into practical use. And working with a team has helped me hone my collaboration skills.”
- “Learn how to use Docker, Git and Jenkins.”
- “I have learned basic React and have created a few components on the react web app.”
- “I learned various aspects of web scraping though this project. I did not use web scraping so extensively earlier. It’s been a great learning experience so far. I hope to improve my skills and continue to contribute efficiently.”
If you’re looking to recruit one of these motivated students, take a look at their projects here.
We’d like to offer more than reference letters and t-shirts. Please see this page if you would like to be a sponsor.
