How to Build a Great Intern Program from Scratch | @shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar

Thank you, Lindsay. I'll get going. And I like what Lindsay said there, which is let's make it interactive. So if you want to unmute and ask a question, feel free to do that. If you want to use the chat to ask a question, that also works. Between Lindsay and I, we should be able to catch everything and be able to address it. All right. So this just actually came up on Twitter because a lot of folks talk about internships and what makes a good internship and what makes a bad internship. And I've worked many and many, many companies and I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. So I did want to walk through why I think it's important. I'm actually quite passionate about the internship program at any company because I think it is a— there's lots of reasons, but I think it's actually a great way to get in touch with the next generation of people coming into the workforce. All right. So why should I be you know, regarded as somebody who knows about interns. I mean, I think the easiest way to think about it is that I've actually been at a bunch of small and large companies and have run internship programs at both. So small, small companies like started my own company, as well as worked at some large ones like Microsoft. And I've seen, like I mentioned, what works well and what doesn't work well. And I'm hoping people take from— what they take away from this session is how to do this in a way that is effective for the intern and for your company. I've always had a focus not just on internships, but new grad hiring. I think it's amazing to bring new people into the workforce and how to make that successful. And I think the other counterintuitive thing is no matter what company you're at, whether it's large or small, you are able to compete with some of the biggest companies in the world for interns and for talent in general. And it doesn't have to be that you have to pay the intern more. One example is that when, you know, I was running Extreme Labs, The internship program there, the first time we went to Waterloo, which is a school that we hire lots of interns from, we couldn't even get interns in the third round. Like we would go for a round of interviews, we get zero. We go second round, which is all the interns who didn't get placed, we would get zero. We have to be in the third round before we got any interns. And we turned that around over, I would say, 2 or 3 terms to being the number one place for interns to work, even though we were, you know, Facebook, for example, was paying 3 times the salary. Interns would still come to us and we would get all our interns filled in the first round with almost 100% acceptance. So there are ways to do this, and it's not about just compensation. Cool. All right. So let's start off with what internship is. And I think this is important because I actually wrote an article about interns and some of these questions come up. So let's, let's first start here. An internship is a temporary placement. Usually it's about 4 months. It can be longer. I know some schools do like what's called a PEY. I wrote there, professional experience year, where they do multiple 4-month internships in a row. So it could last up to 16 months. I've had interns that have been around for that long. And sometimes even people change careers and do an internship. We saw this actually, there's that famous movie, right? Robert De Niro, The Intern, right, where he like leaves the workforce and comes back. So there are ways to use an internship as a way to get back into the workforce. The one thing I definitely want to clarify, because whenever I talk about internships or co-ops, somebody always comes in and says, "Make sure you pay your interns." And I 100% agree. I'm surprised that somehow the word intern gets equated with free work. It is not free work. It should not be considered free work. It is paid work. And so something to make sure people are thinking about is don't automatically assume if you see intern, that means unpaid. Sometimes they are. I've seen job postings, unpaid internship. I don't think companies should do it. I don't think anyone who is thinking about going into an internship should, should work for free, but it is something we see in the industry. So it is good to get that message sorted up front. And I've never been in a company where we've done unpaid internships. And I've also, I don't also recommend it. So, and I'll talk a little bit about how to think about compensation there. So why? So let's start off at the beginning. Why even have interns? Like, why are we talking about this? And why do people think it's an important topic? This was a great headline. I've kept it in presentations. It's from 2011. But when you think about hiring the best talent, what people confound is they try to always find people with experience. And the misnomer is, is that if I find someone with experience, it takes me less time to onboard, it takes me less time to get them to be effective. And that's why I want to focus my efforts there. What people forget many way— in many ways is that experienced people get experience somewhere and they learn, they become imprinted in their first few jobs out of school. And so what typically happens is The next generation set of companies tries to hire usually the younger workforce because they've grown up in a different generation, but also it is a feeder into becoming an experienced person in your workplace, right? So imagine an intern who works for you. Few years later, they're a full-time. A few years later, they're an experienced person. And what's different about hiring somebody from outside is that they would have tons of context about your company, but also because of them coming from the workforce at a different generation than you did, they'll bring different ideas and different ways of working. So I think it is important to think about interns paradoxically as a way to increase the diversity in your organization from a generation perspective. The other thing I found interesting is whenever I've had a really robust internship program, I find that it's easier to hire full-timers. And I think that's a combination of things, whether it's greater, a better sense of how to onboard, or even thinking through why are all the cool kids going to this company? The experienced people actually want to figure that out. And so I found that it is much easier to hire full-time when you have a robust internship program. All right. So I talked about some of these. It is maybe paradoxical for some folks to figure it out, to learn that you can learn things from your interns. It is definitely true. They, like I said, you know, here's a good example. When we were running Extreme Labs, the iPhone came out in '07. And when we were building mobile apps, the people who grew up with mobile right? The people who were growing up with, grew up with the internet and grew up with mobile, they started coming into our company and you could see that they were approaching the ways in which to use these devices differently than we were, right? We came from the desktop world. Their first computers might have been mobile phones and tablets, right? And so that made a big difference for us in seeing how those things were used. I think, you know, I talked a little about new approaches. You know, one example is I know a few companies who look to Y Combinator, which is an accelerator. To figure out what the next version of tech stacks are. And if you think of the probably demographic of Y Combinator, younger people, people who are earlier in their careers, and if big companies are looking at them to figure out the next tech stack, then maybe we should be looking at interns to figure out the next ways of working. Very, you know, you can see the pipeline growing when you have an internship program, specifically on converting them to full-time. They don't always have to convert, but I think it is a good way to get the those early engineers or early people in your company. It changes the energy equation. So I have definitely seen the, the amount of energy, whether even if it's remote, of the interns, they tend to want to figure things out. They tend to be more curious and they do change the energy in a group because of how eager usually they are. And so I think that can change the dynamic in your company. I mentioned career imprinting. There's a very famous HBR article that talks about the first few jobs you work in actually imprint you for the rest of your career. And so this allows you as an employer to impart your ways of working on the next generation of workforce, even if they don't work for you later on. And so it was very easy to see for some companies, for some people, you meet them and you're like, oh, you must have worked at Microsoft or Google or Facebook or McKinsey because of the way that they work.

And that comes from career imprinting.

And then lastly, I talked about diversity from a, you know, from an age perspective, but you can also, you know, use the intern diversity as a way to change the diversity in your company, right? So it could be age, it could be race, it could be gender. Those are things that you can actually use an internship program to help with because you can learn from how those— by bringing those people in, how much better your company is by having all sorts of folks from different backgrounds in your company.

Cool.

Questions on the why before I get to the how? Yeah, go ahead.

When you talk about their eagerness, how do you balance that with them getting frustrated in the workforce? So balancing, keeping their eager up high, but not getting them too frustrated with the flow.

Yeah, so I would say, so I'll get to this in a few slides, but my number one thing to think about with interns and with any, even with new hires, is you always want to give them real work. You always want to give them like a real project and real, a real job. And this happened to me in my own internships where I was at a small company of 5 people and one of the engineers quit. And so now I was the intern, like, who had to like take over that person's job because they were a small company. It would take them a long time to hire somebody. And they just threw— they just gave me his job. And it was amazing because I got to, I just got to take over all that work and I got to— and I ended up building like, you know, part of a significant system. And I think that if you're, if you're in a company, and you have interns, you have to think about them as not like having intern projects or like, here's a small sliver of something. You have to think of them as your full-timers. And if you think of them as your full-times, you should be taking their suggestions and feedback. You should be unblocking them. They should have the same level of access as everybody else. Like, that's the way in order for them to feel— for you to also feel like they're getting the full-time experience. That helps you also decide whether they're a fit for your company and you're a fit for them. So I think that is how I think about making sure that they're having the same experience. Now, if they're having an experience where they get frustrated, then maybe your full-timers are having that experience, right? Like that, it should be the same feedback. I would just be very, very careful on treating them differently. I remember I was at a company and this is like, you know, super annoying. They had different food for the interns. Like it was almost like a snack room for full-timers and a snack room for— I was like, why is this separate? They're like, oh yeah, yeah. Interns like eat a lot. I'm like, so? Like buy more food, right? Like, but there should be no difference. And it shouldn't even be apparent to anybody. You can be in a client services type business, product company, like no one should really know that they're interns. They shouldn't have— I know, I think when I was at Microsoft, maybe they changed it. You had like a different email address, like I- or something. And then people knew that was an intern. Like, I don't think you should delineate them in any way.

Thank you.

Cool. No problem. All right. So what are interns looking for? So like, think about the other side of that equation. If you are trying to figure out how to have a great internship program, and I've seen this because I go on campus and I talk to interns and I see companies trying to hire interns, how are they attracting interns? And I'll take the, the suggestions from Dan Pink's book Drive, where he talks about mastery, autonomy, and purpose. This is actually true, I think, for full-timers as well. Not just for interns, but everyone's looking for mastery, which is how do I become the best in my craft? Autonomy, how do I do it with some level of creativity and leeway? And then 3, purpose, how do I make sure actually working on something that is bigger than myself? Now, while full-timers and interns share that, I would say interns in specific actually look for other types of things because it's part of a community-building event for them, right? Internship programs. I actually tweeted out recently that I was the president of the intern cohort in like 1996 when I did an internship at Newbridge. And it is about community. So interns are specifically looking for mentorship.

Right.

Which, which means that if you're as a company have a, have a system designed for other mentorship. I know in my career, I've always focused on pair programming. And so we always had an easy, easy opportunity to hire interns because interns always wanted a pair program because it's a great mentorship opportunity. They want to network. They want to meet other people in the industry. They want to meet the other interns. 'cause usually interns come from different schools. They also wanna potentially try out your company and domain. So engineers could do an internship in product management. If you're in product management, you might do an internship in UX. That's actually a great way to do it. And we see this sometimes in career switchers, but also for people who are in school trying to figure out what they wanna do for their internship. So trying a new domain and then of course, trying a new company. Do I wanna work at Shopify, Facebook, Apple? Go do an internship. Actually, I think it comes up in a slide. I encourage people who I thought did a great job at my company, and I would give them a full-time offer, to still finish their internships at other companies. Because you want to make sure that you are getting that experience and you figure out, oh yeah, this really is the company for me. Right? And that also puts, I think, the onus on the employer to have a great experience for their full-timers and interns, because you're making a big bet if they— you're giving them a full-time offer, then they go work at Facebook for 4 months.

Right.

But we, I think, never saw anybody like not come back after that. So maybe one time. Cool. Questions about what interns are looking for? I think it is important to think of them differently than full-timers on the attraction side, because if you look at the bottom of the slide, that is typically different than a full-time employee. But the top part is the same. Any questions? No. All right. So how do you recruit interns? So I think this is quite interesting because there are different ways and different approaches. So obviously the job sites and your own website and the school has sites. Actually, that's maybe a little bit of a trick. Not everybody knows that the schools have their own websites. Usually I would email the administrators of schools and say, I'd like to put a posting on your site. And they always have some secret internal place. They don't usually have like a form you can fill. It might even just be an email address and say, can you post this? I actually, actually didn't put this in here. I email professors directly and say, hey, who are your top students? And I try to get— recruit them directly as well. I'm also, also not on here, and I'm thinking of them now, is I would do talks for classes. I would message a professor and say, hey, I would love to come in, you can interview me, or I can talk about a topic. And that's a great way to get interns as well. Career fairs is an amazing one because interns do have a specific career fair usually from each school. Of course, this is pre-COVID and hopefully post-COVID, There'll be career fairs. I famously hired 7 engineers at a career fair, like hired them, like not, didn't like just get their resumes or give them a t-shirt, actually hired them at the career fair. And so I think that there are amazing ways to reduce the friction to talking to people directly. And in my case, I just hired them on the spot and then they all showed up on Monday for work. And what we're doing now for COVID, and Shopify does this, is we have webinars where we actually explain about a certain domain-specific topic and then talk about our internship program. So we did one around UX. We did one, I think, around product management and engineering. We did one about like women in tech. And then we also talked about our internship program and why you should apply. My like super secret trick for info sessions was to have food. So this is like a, you know, as maybe people forget about their student days, but everybody wants free food and pop. I don't know if I had beer as much, but pop and beer and pizza, and I would do a tech talk. So I'd come in and talk about either how we work or talk on a technical topic. And because of the food, people used to show up. And it is a great way to entice people to apply. And an easy way to get people to apply is have prizes, right? You could say— I would just say, oh, I'm giving out an Xbox, and here is— I'm going to pick a resume out of this pile. And literally, I would just You know, people would go, people would leave the seminar, print out their resume and come back. Like it would generate a huge stack of resumes. And that was a good place to start looking for interns. And then lastly, the thing to figure out for your company is visas, because people on this call are probably from all over the world. You do have to think about if an intern is at a school in Canada and you're in the States, are you going to do the visa? Are you going to work with a legal firm? Does the school do the visa? It is something to figure out just to make sure that if you get excited about hiring an intern, you have a way to make sure you can bring the intern on. Actually, this happened with COVID because a bunch of companies in the US canceled their internships because they couldn't get through, I think, the visa process. And so these interns have to find work elsewhere. Question on the recruiting side. I'm a big fan of like, obviously post-COVID, like going to the school and doing these sessions. It's a great way to connect with folks. And I would run into old interns. It's always good to go back to the school. I would make sure to do that.

Questions?

All right, keep going. I see Jason's got like a graduation hat on. Cool. So interviewing, every school is different. So some of them do have an interviewing, like, you know, I know Waterloo has like a building where they do interviews. I'm a big fan of doing like group or automated interviews for the internships because you're going to have a large volume of candidates applying and it might be an easier way to figure out how you can see if they're a fit for your company. Again, interviews, I've been very vocal about this. Interviews are not that good a predictor of performance. Actually, it's on the slide. And it's really just a way for you to figure out if somebody might be a fit for you. And so the shorter you can make that process, like I wouldn't recommend hours or hours-long interviews for interns, because I don't think you're going to learn that much. Interns are in this amazing growth phase where they're just trying to learn and be curious. So the more you can do on the filtering side, which can be automated in a group setting. I know we sometimes, we even have like a, like 50 people in a room and we would administer some sort of like programming, like assignment just to figure out, hey, do these people know how to code? And maybe it's more even on the easier side for us to mark. It is, it is a good idea, I think, to use internships as a way to figure out if people are a fit for your company. And so you don't have to have anything super crazy here, but there's a lot of great tools out there and you should try them, right? Maybe you try a tool and you like it and you're like, hey, I could use this for my full-time program as well. Cool. I see a question in the chat. Um, what advice do you have on adapting your approach right now for the pandemic? So it's a good question from Vic. So disclaimer, Vic and I used to work together 22 years ago at Trilogy. But the question is, yeah, what changes with the pandemic? Well, so a few things. One is you can't go to on-campus and do info sessions, right? Everybody's remote. So we have switched over doing webinars. I do still try to do like talks. I did a class, I did a talk for like a university class. I did a talk for a high school class. You can still do that. You can either message the professor directly because they're all using Zoom or Google Meet and you can still do those talks. The other thing that changes, of course, interviews. Interviews are remote. So an automated assessment tool is probably more palatable by candidates right now. I know in some cases people are like, I don't want to do this. Like it's, it's maybe I mean, you feel like you're being treated, you know, not humanely, 'cause you're going through an automated assessment. But right now it's much more in vogue because everyone's gotta do something remotely. And so I think that you do wanna make sure that you take— you don't miss out on hiring interns, right? Like we hired— Shopify hired hundreds of interns last year, right? I think over 450. We're gonna continue to be in the same range for this year. So I don't think it means you should slow down. One thing to think about though is when you think about the move to remote work, There are many companies that focus on more senior hires for remote or people who have done remote before, and interns tend to fall off their priority list. So this is, you know, due to a few things, but it could be an opportunity for companies who wanna hire because great people are out there and not everybody's hiring interns. The second thing is, is you do have to make sure, you need this for full-timers too, to have a very robust onboarding program. Make sure that interns are paired with a mentor. You have an onboarding program that helps them understand your technology stack, your, you know, first day package, right? Laptop, maybe there's swag in there, has a book you want them to read or a training course. All of that stuff should be set up in a way that helps them have a great remote onboarding experience. That's true for full-timers as well, but even more so for interns, 'cause they are even newer to the workplace. All right, how many interns should you hire? This is always a, an interesting one because I always wanna push people to hire more interns versus less. And there's lots of reasons for that. The, the big reason for me is I find that by bringing smart people into the company, they can increase the energy and also pair. And whether it's pair product management, designing, engineering, accounting, finance, there's ways to pair these people up with the great people already at your company. So in startups, I like to think of like one-to-one. When I was at Extreme Labs, like by the end there, I put in, you know, we have our ending stat there. We had about 65 interns out of 350 employees. But when we were growing, we had 1 intern to 1 engineer, like all the way up. Even at Helpful, when I started my own company, we hired 4 interns before I even had 4 engineers. And that forced me to make sure I had engineers lined up to pair with these interns before they arrived. And so I'm a big fan. At Shopify, for example, we do about 150 a term. I'd like to get that number up even higher. Because I do think that there is a great, amazing energy and things you learn from interns that will allow you to accelerate your product roadmap and actually have career development for them and for everybody else at your company. So I think I talked about it here, pair programming, it's a whole nother talk, but pair programming is a great way to have people work together in high, in high fidelity. And if you've ever thought about moving to a pair programming model or pairing anything, like I used to do pair, like finance, like pairing with somebody on doing all the invoices every month. It is a great way and not much of a lift because you're basically doing the job anyway. And you're having somebody work with you to do that job. So that's a great way to have two sharp people feeding off each other, keeping their intensity high and learning back and forth. And you'd be surprised how often somebody younger in their career can teach something to somebody much later on in their career because of their own different life experiences. I'm a huge fan. And even at, you know, at Shopify, for example, we have a pair programming sidekick program where one for an hour a week you can pair with different people. And so I'll be sure to be paired up with some interns this, this in the next few weeks as well as I learn from them. Questions about this, and I'll tell you one thing, if you don't have a robust internship program and all of the things I talked about so far set up, do not hire interns in large numbers because you'll have a more, much poorer experience. When I was at Microsoft, unfortunately, we had a group there that was 30 people. We had one intern and because of how our system was set up, we couldn't give that intern any real meaningful work. And so it was actually a really bad experience and I would have hated to have even more interns in that, in that cohort. So instead it was better to have that one intern for us to figure out our program and how we want to move forward versus trying to add more people to it. So figure it out, then scale versus just like, Let's hire. Now, I'm a little bit of a maverick there. I'd rather hire the interns and then figure out the program, but everybody's different.

I don't know, that's how I roll.

Questions about the ratio? All right, we talked about this at the beginning. Please, please, please pay your interns. And whenever I tweet about interns, somebody always replies and goes, you should pay people. I'm like, interns to me always means paid. So maybe I have to like have some autocomplete on my Twitter or something, but every time I say intern, co-op, any kind of job, please make them paid. This is one example. So here's a great one. I just went to the University of Waterloo website yesterday for this slide and said intern salaries. And they have it. So if you're ever wondering like, how much should I pay my intern, right? Like, this is a good, a good frame of reference and you can see the variability, right? Like some Some people are being, I mean, work term 6 as paying, being paid as much as $60 an hour, which is $120 grand a year, which is amazing, right, for an intern. All the way down to when you're first starting out, like $28 grand a year, right? So I think there's obviously huge variability. It depends on the company. Some companies will even give you a stipend for living, but every internship should be paid. I said that before. If you are looking for an internship, please get a paid one. If you are offering internships, Please make them paid. They are real money. Now, the other thing to think about is government programs can really help here. I know in Canada we have great programs that you can recoup some of the cost of an intern as well, because it's helping people get into the workforce. Questions? I put a little frowny face in there. Internship is never zero. Compensation is never zero. All right. So I wrote this article, and I talked about this a little bit, but interns should have real jobs and real work. The more you can remove the barrier between intern and full-time, the better. And that means not delineating them differently, right? Like, I think, you know, at some point you can probably look up in Slack or in some wiki, like somebody's job title, but outside of that, you shouldn't have a different email address and they shouldn't have to like put like intern in their email signature. Like the more you can make it feel like they're a full-time, the better it is for you and them. you will be surprised how well they can do. And this happens at every company from every size, from the small to the big. When people do things, I never go, oh wow, like an intern did that. Like just somebody did it. And it happens to be sometimes like an intern who, who pulled it out. So the last line here is probably the funniest. I did have some very bad internships in my, in my interning days. And literally when I started at Xtreme Labs, my buddy started the company. Him and I were interns and he goes, remember that internship we had in like '95? I'm like, yeah. He goes, don't do that. Like, that's like, remember all those things? Just do the opposite of what we did there. And so real work, mentoring, treating them as full-time. And the community is a big part, making sure that they have an intern community they can hang out with. Of course, now it's the days of Slack. So you can literally just have an intern Slack group where they can share memes and talk about outings and everything else, obviously post-COVID. But today they can watch movies and do other things. Don't give them like the crappy shitty work. Oh yeah, I have an intern. Let's have them do this kind of work that nobody wants to do. That's not how you set things up for success. Don't treat them differently. I mentioned that company that had different snacks for the interns. Don't do that. Same things for all interns, for all employees at your company. And don't forget, the intern is interviewing for your company, right? This is an interview. They're checking the company out. They're trying to figure out, is this the place that I want to work full-time? Is this a place I want to tell my friends about? And it's a great way to see if they're a fit, if they're a fit for you and you're a fit for them. And so I think the better you do this, the better it is for both sides. Community. So this is— somebody mentioned earlier, pandemic, what changes. This is a big part of it. You do have to have an intern community because the— with the pandemic, people are not getting together. Right? It's not like they're living in dorms and hanging out or living in the same city. They're all hanging out in their own places, probably by themselves. And so there are ways to make this community more vibrant. Of course, mailing lists and Slack groups and having a coordinator really, really helps. Depending on the size of your internship program, it couldn't be an employee, or like in my case, I was president of the interns when I was an intern. It can even be an intern. You can pick somebody and say, hey, you're going to be the the head of the internship or coordinator for the interns. Can you set up biweekly socials? Can you be in charge of the swag? I know even for my remote team, we did like a chocolate tasting or you do like a wine tasting. Like you can do all that stuff and have somebody help you with that. Could be, could be you, could be a coordinator, or it could just, could be an intern. I'm a big fan of swag, actually. Like I talked about this, like I'm a big fan of cohorting swag. So I haven't seen this ever since we did it at Extreme Labs. I'm trying to get every company to do it, but cohorting swag means like you do different swag every 4 months. And what I would do is I would give the swag to the interns and to the full-timers. And what was cool about the swag was you could tell when people worked at your company based on the swag they had. And it was really, really cool. We had some themes that were the same, right? So for example, at Extreme Labs, we had Extreme Labs on the back of the t-shirts, which is also A genius move, 'cause everybody went back to school and you would look at the backs of t-shirts and see everybody's companies they worked at. But the other thing was people then like wanted the different swag and the only way to get it was be at the company at that time. So I'm a big fan of cohorted swag and not something small, like 2014, but literally like a different design every 4 months. And we'd give it to the whole company. Other good things for swag, especially if you're in some sort of domain like product management, R&D, like UX or engineering, is you can give them the books you want them to know before they arrive. Right. So if you want to give them a copy of Clean Code or Clean Coder or Software Engineering at Google or Don, like, you know, Norman's like the Design of Everyday Things or Product Management Handbook, give it to them in their swag bag. Right. That allows you to— you can even tell them, hey, hoping you get a chance to read this before you start. And that's a good way to indoctrinate folks in like some of the ways in which you work. I would even put together an FAQ. Things to think about. And of course, you know, t-shirts. The other thing we did from a community perspective is we would do like a takeover. So at Xtreme, we had demo days. Of course, everybody would demo. At Shopify, we do a town hall takeover when the interns are almost done, where they present like the whole town hall. They talk about things they learn, present their products, and it's a good way to give them airtime, but also they get together and figure out what they want to present. Cool. All right, any questions before I keep going? I might be getting closer to the end to take more questions. Ending the term. So this is always, um, an interesting one. Should I offer, uh, a full— an employee— sorry, a couple things. Should I offer them a full-time job, or should I offer them even another internship? And what about if they want to work somewhere else? So lots of thoughts on this topic. First one is If they're an intern in their last term, they are expecting potentially a full-time offer. So if you're hiring an intern and they're in their last term before school ends, it's great because they showed up at your company, which means they're very serious about your company as being a full-time destination. It also means they're probably expecting at least a yes or no, meaning you shouldn't just let the term end. If you don't, even if you don't want to give them a job, you shouldn't just let the term end. You should say, hey, this has been a great term. Here's what we're looking for for full times. But you let them know that you're not going to be giving them a full-time offer. It's good feedback for them and good for you to actually walk through that, that reasoning. If they are a full-time, great. Give them an offer. This is a great way. I think in most companies I've seen like 70 to 80% conversion here in terms of like giving them an offer and then coming back. Now, if they are an intern and they still have many years left, there's a couple of different things you can do. One is for sure, give them an offer to come back. I know some companies offer them to quit school. You could do that. I haven't necessarily been a huge fan, although it depends on the company, right? Like right now I'm at Shopify and like, you know, Toby didn't go to university. So it is, it is quite normal to be like, hey, you should quit school and come work at Shopify. And there are people who have done it and done well. So that's a great avenue. I'm a big fan of giving them an offer to come back, but I'm also a big fan of letting people work at other companies to say, hey, what else have you wanted to try? Did you want to try product management? Did you want to try UX? You want to try engineering? Did you want to try like, you know, becoming a test engineer? Like there's different places to go. Did you want to try it at a different company and then keep in touch? I'm also a fan of giving people full-time offers that don't kick in for a few years. Like they're in second year. I feel totally comfortable giving them an offer right now. It's 2021. I would give them an offer to start in 2023. Like, I would be totally fine giving them that offer now. Um, what I used to do was give them, um, a signing bonus. I would pay the signing bonus now. And then if they didn't want to, they decided not to come, they just pay the signing bonus back. Right. Um, I found it was a good way to, uh, like give them some extra spending cash. Now they feel connected. The other thing I would do is I would add them to all the internal stuff. I would give them an email address. I would send them a swag bag. I would add them to our Slack instance, like all the things. So they feel like an employee, but they're not working yet. They're not even getting paid yet. They just have the signing bonus that keeps them connected to the community. We would invite them to all the socials and like Christmas party and everything. So they would stay connected. And then when they eventually showed up, they felt like they were there the whole time. And then of course, like I said, sometimes somebody is like, oh, you know, I decided after 2 years that I wanted to go do something else.

And that's fine.

Like, I think I mentioned one person ever, ever like came back and and gave me my signing bonus back. So it totally works as a good technique. Um, and then if people end up going somewhere else, create an alumni group, whether it's a mailing list, Slack channel that has external people in it, whatever you want to do. Um, because you can post job postings in there. You can ask for referrals. You can ask them how they're doing. Like, it's a good way to keep that community going and they don't have to be in your company. Like, this is a, you have to play the long, long, long game. And the long, long, long game is like staying in touch with your interns many, many years after. I still keep in touch with a lot of my interns, even from like Trilogy, like first job outta school, I still talk to some of those interns. And then I mentioned referrals. So referrals can be just, hey, you have anybody you think that you want would work at my company, but could also be like paid referrals and other things, right? We used to give away iPads for referrals. That's a good one actually, tends to work well. All right.

Another question. We have another question in the queue I can read out. Any concerns about the type of work you give interns due to confidentiality or risk of them taking your company's insights to a full-time job as a competitor?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think that you have to really treat interns, contractors, full-timers with the same level of confidentiality as anything else in your business. Which probably means just explaining it, right? So, and maybe the worry here is that interns don't fully grasp what's confidential and what's not compared to full times. So as long as you explain it and how, you know, like for example, maybe an intern works at Uber and then goes to work at Lyft, right? Those are competitor companies. So it's probably more of a conversation to say, hey, here's what I'm— here's what I think it means to be like working on this project. And when you leave, here's what you can talk about and not talk about. Actually, the— A very common question I get is, what can I put on my resume? And so I do tell people that if you're talking about high-level projects and technologies used, go ahead. If you're talking specifically like, you know, hey, I worked on this feature that's not like, and it's not out yet, right? Like, hey, I worked on this feature to help this happen and it's not released. Like that may not be kosher, but the ability to say, hey, I worked on a feature in this team and I used this technology stack. It's probably okay. And then when the feature comes out, maybe it's fine. You're like, hey, I worked on this feature, it's now out. So it is, it's a good question, Vic, because you do wanna make sure that you've explained it and people understand it. But I don't think it should be different for contractors and full-timers. Don't forget that the age difference between a full-time and an intern might be zero. Like they might both be 18. And so it's probably more of a conversation when they're leaving the company or what they're gonna put on their resume. And I'd rather not really have like a policy. I'd rather just talk to people who it's like, oh, I would say less than 3% of the people who you'd probably have to have an issue and you have to probably just talk to those people. Cool. More questions. Let me take a sip of water.

I've been talking.

Yes, Darshan.

Yeah, just quick question. When you bring in interns, do you have a program or emphasis on rotating them within different departments within the company, or do you find, having them focus on one area, one intern, and think long-term, or what do you, what do you, where do you sit on that?

Yeah, no, it's a good question.

I think it, it depends on the type of internship. So like a 4-month internship, you probably can just do one or two projects. That's my thinking on that. I mean, not a hard and fast rule, but usually an intern should get a rotation between like maybe one or two projects to see like what's going on in different areas.

Then when they come back, maybe it's a different one or two projects.

The longer ones, like I've seen, you know, when we did like the 16-month internships with some of the people from University of Toronto, for example, I would put them on like 2 8-month projects, like longer things. But I think it's good to move between maybe 2 things versus staying in one team. But I've seen success in like having an intern work on one 4-month project the whole time. So it totally depends on your company. It also depends on how long it takes to ramp up, because it takes you 6 weeks or so to ramp up. It probably doesn't make sense to do a 2-month project. And it might be the technology stack. It might be your domain. That's complicated. More questions. Am I the only one so passionate about interns?

Hey, Farhan, this is Raj Khera. Nice to see you. Thank you for your comments. So I've built a few SaaS companies. And I know one of the things that we did, because we we were not a brand name like Shopify. And we would actually reach out to university professors in the computer science departments or even marketing departments, and they would actually create teams for us as a team group project. Have you had any success doing something like that, especially for companies that don't have a brand name? Because, you know, students might be attracted to the big shiny objects and not realize there's really good opportunities at smaller companies.

I love it. So I love that idea. So I think there's a few things in there.

One, 100%, reach out to professors, reach out to the co-op coordinators, like at those schools, reach out to different departments. That's number one. Two, I love the idea of the team, like, hey, you want to have teams and either you hire the team or they work on a project and you compensate them. Like there's probably a good push and pull there. What I would add there is in order to get them excited about your company, maybe actually just a job and a team working together is enough. But I would go into the class, whether virtually or in person eventually, and do a talk, like come in and do a talk about how your company and how and what, what, like some topic that they might not know about. I think that for me has been a super successful way to connect with the students more directly. And then you can also say something like, if you have questions, like message me on Twitter or like email me and you can kind of keep a conversation going. But I love that idea. Like, don't forget the professors know also what the best, like who the best students are.

And so they always know.

They always know.

Exactly. And so you're, You're hitting on a really good secret, meaning not many people do this, but I've been doing it my whole career.

Email professors, get them to recommend you students, and then go after those students. So I think it's a great idea.

I love the idea of giving a talk. That's a really good one. I hadn't done that one before, but that's a good one. Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

And great idea.

I'd like to second that. Raj's idea is great. It reminds me that we actually went into a Stanford class where they did a group project. It was a course that the professor ran this way for many years, and I knew him, so I, you know, offered to basically sponsor a project for our company. And, you know, we got— I think we did it twice, and then one of the times we got a team of 5 where one of the guys was actually a high school student. He was just an unbelievably sharp, way advanced, ahead of his years kind of a guy. We ended up bringing him on as an intern, and, you know, I thought he was phenomenal. He ended up actually dropping out of college once he went to college, or at least taking a sabbatical, starting a company that was funded through Techstars and is doing well now. So it can be a great way to find hidden gems. Um, and the nice thing is that you sort of reduce the risk a little bit because it's coming in as a group, and you can kind of see in that group who the strong players are that you might want to bring on later as an intern.

Yeah, and I think the only thing— the only thing— yeah, I think I love that idea.

The only thing I try to worry about for myself is like I, I, it's hard to know who's going to be good and who's not. Like, marks is one, one, like, signal. So high marks is one signal, maybe a good signal. And so I love, I love talking to the students directly just to be like, hey, if people are passionate, have an idea, you know, it's more of like an internship is a really a trial so they can try it out.

The other thing is I'm always recruiting, whether it's full-time or interns.

I hired my next-door neighbor's daughter as an intern. She was doing computer engineering, and then she worked for me for like for 4 months at my last company. So I'm always looking when I meet people, I'm like, oh, what are you doing?

Like, oh, I'm doing this. I'm like, have you thought about interning?

Like, and you can create a, you know, if you're a small company, it's probably easier to create like a job opening as long as you adhere to some of the things in here, which is give them a real job, a real like chance at building something. And then even big companies like Shopify, like we have a big internship program, but sometimes people email me directly. And if I have a relationship, I'm like, oh, maybe I can have them work for me directly on some special project. And so I'm a big fan of trying to create those pathways because one, you're not gonna know who's a fit until they work for you, probably. And you'll, I guarantee you'll learn something from them.

I think that's the counterintuitive part.

You will always learn something from an intern, right? Actually, here's a funny story. When I was interviewing for interns at Waterloo, I tweeted out back at Waterloo, like, you know, hiring interns. One of my previous interns came by the room and brought my lunch, which is funny because I didn't have lunch, so he brought lunch. We went for a walk. And now he's doing a talk for me on crypto for Shopify. It's pretty funny. It all comes full circle that now I'm learning from him. And 10 years ago, he worked for me as an intern.

So I think that it always comes full circle if you have these long—

if you play the long game in your head around how long these relationships could be lasting.

More questions. I'll say, I'll add one more, one anecdote from a previous intern that I tried to hire many times and she never wanted to work for me again. But I think that the cool thing about an internship, and we talked about this a little bit, is because it's 4 months and they could try multiple things, you're really giving them a, like, a longer job trial before trying to figure out if they could be a fit for you full-time. And so this happened to me where I was working with an intern and over a 2-month period, she really struggled to kind of, you know, pick up like whatever was happening in the project and it wasn't really working out. And we never, you know, I never, I don't think I ever let go of an intern, but we were really trying to struggle to figure out where she would do well. Moved her into a different team in a different domain. And she, she was amazing and like really crushed it. We ended up hiring her full-time at that company. I tried to hire her again when I left to start a new company. And all I'm saying with that example is just like full times, it may not be a perfect fit and in your, whatever team you put them in or whatever technology stack. And so trying to figure that out, just like a full-time, just like with a full-time can be really impactful because we ended up hiring an amazing, you know, I think now she's an engineering manager. And we figured that out via her internship, but it took, it wasn't like a first try thing and it, and everybody's different.

Right.

So, oh, here's a question. I'm in a startup and finances are tight.

Is there a remuneration method that's based upon hiring interns as Salesforce paid tuition referral fees?

So, okay. So suggested salary ranges, I'll go back to this, like this, this was, this slide was, it really had a very wide range. Like for example, let's just look at work term 6 math. You'll see the average is $30 an hour. The lowest is $15, which is half, and the highest is double. So you've got a giant range there, right, from $15,000 to $60,000, right, like 4x. So I think in there is probably useful. Actually, so just so you know, what I would always do is I always just use the average. I thought that that was fair, or rounded up the average. Like, that was something that I think— well, I don't know what— actually, to be honest, I don't know what Shopify does now in terms of intern salaries, but that's what I used to do in my startups. Remuneration. So I think you should pay everybody a salary. What you should also do, this is from Craig Taylor, is look up government programs that might be in your area to help remunerate for interns. So in Canada, we do have a bunch of programs. I think there's other ones in the States as well, so that you can get that remuneration. You're saying, as Salesforce paid by commission referral fees, I'm not sure what you mean by commission or referral, but we did, like, I always, I mean, I did, I've hired interns in sales as well. and we would have a commission structure for them also. And someone asked about Dev Degree. So Shopify has an interesting program called Dev Degree. And what Dev Degree is, it's a program in conjunction with a few schools whereby you get your university paid for and you do your internships all at Shopify. And so it's actually a really amazing program. We've seen a crazy number of applications every year we offer it. And it's really like a go to school, do work, go to school, do work. And so you're basically completing both things at the same time. And then of course, at the end of your, you know, 4-year degree, there's a conversation on whether you wanted to, you know, whether you wanna be at Shopify full-time after that. So there's lots of information. I think the website devdegree.com or devdegree.ca to find out more. Cool. Any more questions? So we're almost out of time. Good ideas on how you can predict performance for non-technical internships from Lacey. So you're asking like a very, um, a very good question about performance prediction, which I would say for any job, it's really hard to predict in performance except from previous performance, meaning interviews are not a good predictor, but performance is typically a good predictor. So in a 4-month internship though, you have a lot of data. You, um, are not going to be, uh, using data just from like 3 or 4, even 8 hours of interviews. You're using data over 4 months of work. So I think you really do need to look at all of the indicators in that 4 months of work to figure out if they are— these are things and attributes that you want to have at your company. I don't think you have to guess, right? Like, here's a good example. When a— when somebody who used to work for me or a previous intern wants to come back for a full-time job, we don't put them in the interview process, right? Because unless you really just got to figure out one dimension of them, like you might want to figure out, oh, they worked for a few years. Do you want to figure out if they're like an engineering manager at your company or a tech lead? Like, you can do an interview for that, but you've got months and months of data. So the interview is not going to give you any more data. So I think Your question, Lacey, is probably closer to, hey, how do I, how do I do performance management of my team? And I think that's something that you can really take away from, like, the full-time work that you folks are doing in that, in that also. So here, somebody posted, yeah, devdegree.ca is the URL. So, yeah, so Lacey, yes, what I would look at is like, hey, after 4 months of work, and you can, you can do this in a, in a more structured way, do a 30, 60, 90-day check-in with folks. And say, are they doing the things I would expect somebody after 30 days to be able to do at my company?

Cool.

Lindsay's giving me the face, so I think we're out of time.

This was a great session. Thank you so much, Farhan, and thank you everybody for joining the conversation. We've got some more sessions next, so hopefully stick around. And again, thank you, Farhan, and we'll be in touch.

Cool. You can always, you can always tweet at me with your questions. If, uh, and my Twitter is somewhere probably at the beginning if people want to tweet. I'm always good at— good to talk about internships on Twitter. Actually, that's how this whole session got started with Jason saying, hey, do it, let's do a talk.

Awesome, thanks again. Have a good day, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye-bye.