Working in a company during placement year is more rewarding. Apart from knowledge that you gain from working with experienced colleagues, you get valuable connections, technical knowledge, references and higher chances of being employed by other companies once you graduate. It serves as a push in your career!
Setting up a company means you need to learn about business and legal side of things, which is a waste of time if you’re going to look for work in the industry once you graduate.
Companies tend to pick employees who had prior experience in the industry.
It’s not that complex or difficult, especially when an education establishment (EE) could contact the local business hubs that are common in the UK for assistance, then again don’t most EE’s have business/enterprise courses today?
And existing businesses could provide lighter mentoring and assistance, imagine a game studio or business hub that every year sets up new businesses and provides networking and mentoring services from existing studios.
You could scale this up compared to the impact of a single studio being able to take on and mentor a couple of students.
My local community college’s programming course had a business class but it was just a basic introductory class. I don’t remember if it was just one of the optional classes you could take or if it were part of the actual associate. It’s been entirely too long since I looked into going to college.
I don’t see it in PVCC’s current computer science degree requirements though.
Such places exist, but you’re missing the point of an “internship” if you think that a brand new startup without anything established provides value in that regard. It would provide great value for people who want to work in that specific environment, but it’s not much use for someone who wants to get experience at doing a job to a professional level.
Sure, scale isn’t a factor. An established legit business is one thing, a single hobbyist developer with no commercial projects/background trying build a complete staff from interns… won’t fly. Certainly not legally, but more importantly not with the institutions or applicants.
Here in the valley, internships are often largely about getting your foot in the door, building contacts and getting a great bullet point on your resume, as much as they are about work experience. My old studio would get a couple of thousand applicants each season. We would take on 6-8 a year, depending on availability for people doing the supervising. It was always a negative impact on productivity because many of us had to split time between actual work and training. But the upside was worth it. Often we would hire 3 or 4 of them after graduation. And it was also valuable to help potential developers get a realistic view and understanding of the real world. (so many regular applicants were completely clueless). One of TA interns was hired directly into ILM after her internship and now helps administer the creature pipeline for film. Not bad for her first job in the industry. (well deserved, she was brilliant).
Indeed. There are plenty of established businesses that are a single, experienced consultant or specialist who just does their thing. And that’s something that an intern could validly learn from.
It doesn’t matter if it’s one person or a hundred. It’s the “established” part that matters. Do you have a product or a service that you’re reliably getting out to real customers on a consistent basis?
In my industry it works the other day. Interns are massively productive. Mainly because they do all of the projects that no one else has the time to get around to. Sometimes they prove the project is rubbish, and we can stop talking about it. But other times they can make major step changes.
From university perspective, they would have to maintain dozens of companies for students’ sake. Which means additional staff would be required for it = additional cost.
On top of that, I don’t think I would want that as a CS student. That would be great for more business-oriented courses but not for courses like computer science.
They would be totally different learning experiences, one setting up and running a business the other improving and learning skills to do a specific job/role within an existing business.
So the Question is does the industry need more skilled workers or more creative startups?
Are you sure, why not ask interested business students to join in and help run the companies, e.g. providing accounting services, markets services, management services.
The thing is most courses try to teach the full field of a topic however most jobs are very narrow in focus, surely setting up and running a business would give a much wider experience and learning experience than joining a company and being an understudy to someone who does one niche role.
Basing your studio off of intern-style labor is a terrible idea.
This is not simply because you would be exploiting the young and inexperienced for cheap/free labor. (although that would also be happening) It is because you would most likely spend the majority of your time training that labor. This wouldn’t even be a matter of choice, it would be a necessity. As some of the other posters have pointed out, inexperienced interns have to be trained to do their job properly. A big part of why they are looking for an unpaid internship in the first place is because they don’t have industry experience. And that means that 9 times out of 10, they will not have the skills necessary to start working immediately.
Heck, this is usually true of staff that you have to pay. Any job requires some level of hands-on experience in order to get up to speed. Focusing on acquiring interns as labor means that the level those interns start off at is lower. It also means that your turnover will be CONSTANT. Once their internship is up, they’ll take the experience they gained under your tutelage, and go get a paying job at a studio that can afford to employ them. Even if you can replace them quickly with another fresh intern, it’s back to square one with them, and now you’re training again.
It’s not impossible, but you would have to get used to the idea of doing little to no development yourself, and being a constant training churn for the inexperienced. How much do you like to educate, and hold the hands of beginning developers?
I should amend my comment a bit. The drop in productivity was primarily on the engineering / tech side. Intern engineers required a lot of hands time from our senior engineers, to learn the project, architecture, methods and follow up and such. A senior engineer can tear through a lot if they are focused, but much less with constant interruptions and bulk of their time training. And the trade off for the work interns were doing (primary bug hunting and prototyping), was much less value than the senior could be doing on their own. (not a bad thing, just the cost associated with interns).
However, it was a different story on the art side. A bulk of an artist’s work were skills that the interns already brought to the table, (some really freaking good too…), so their productivity was very high, and much of the training involved less hands on time, mostly pipeline and process outside of painting, modeling and texturing. Having an intern “build a damaged x-wing fighter with x texture/geo budget in this art style”, will typically happen with little (no more than usual) AD input and a few questions. Having an engineering intern “design and implement x feature”, will require a lot of specific knowledge of the application and architecture. The ramp up for new engineers on a large project can be time consuming, let alone those who haven’t worked in professional environment before.
Same general rule applies that I mentioned earlier. The whole point of an internship it to learn from and hang out with the professionals in your industry. A business student will benefit more from going to an established accounting firm then from trying to do it on their own in a indie game studio.
@zombiegorilla Totally agree, our intern is doing a new level, and I just need to give him pointers on how to place lightprobes etc then he is pretty much self going since a level is pretty much doing the same thing, over and over until the level is done