Software Internships Have Lost the Plot

Software Internships Have Lost the Plot.

I’m convinced that tech companies have forgotten the value of young professionals, and it’s going to come back to bite us all in the ass.

A seasoned industry veteran once taught me why tech companies hire interns, and I have never understood it clearer: In software, every new hire is a big money bet. This bet, when it fails, costs the company a hiring bonus, months of pay, and eventually severance. This means every new hire is a risk to the company that could easily cost them $150,000 or more. Instead of gambling millions on new hires every cycle, most tech companies chose to run big internship programs. In these programs, interns that are up to the company’s standards walked away with a return offer in hand. Ones that didn’t only cost a fraction of a failed new hire => crisis averted.

On top of this, internships are a huge learning opportunity. Universities can’t keep up with how fast industry technologies move, so internships are a chance for new grads to learn skills it will take for them to succeed at that company. This success only increases when these young professionals pick up the company’s culture and build a loyalty to the company, a loyalty that can only happen when fresh grads have only a handful of work experience to base their expectations on.

Only now it’s become clear that companies are forgetting all this, and like with most things, we can thank AI for its role in the downfall of software internships.

Companies are no longer investing in the growth of their interns. At most companies, interns are judged by the magnitude of the projects they ship. This was already a problem before AI, pushing interns to learn the bare minimum technologies and best practices before pumping out commits. Now with AI, you have no choice other than to prompt-spam your way through your work, otherwise it’ll look like you’ve done nothing comparatively. To fix this, companies would have to put less emphasis on high-visibility presentations and foster a culture of engineering quality where every line of code holds weight.
Companies have figured that interns aren’t worth return offers. A few short years ago, tech companies were handing out return offers like hotcakes. Now, return offers are the exception, not the rule. With tariffs, interest rates, and a looming AI bubble, it makes sense that headcount is uncertain. Plus, the prevailing narrative claims that the job of a junior engineer won’t exist in a few short years. So why send an offer now if you can just wait a few quarters and decide then? But here’s the problem: to young professionals, SWE internships without a return offer are like appetizers without the entree. Every recruiting cycle, students spend countless hours applying, resume optimizing, networking, and cold outreach. Spending all this time to secure a job helps absolutely nobody. When interns are denied return offers, often the main reason they wanted the internship, those same companies lose loyalty, trust, and the skills that they want to see in new grads.

But I can claim confidently that the necessity of the junior engineer will never ‘go away’, here’s why: Software has worked it’s way into every crevice of our world. Even with how saturated the job market is now, the total effort of all software engineers is spread thin over the amount of technology that has to be updated, scaled, maintained and produce just to keep our world turning. Don’t believe me? Just think about the recent outages, attacks, vulnerabilities and shitty consumer experiences you’ve had in your day to day life with software. AI won’t be able to fix this problem, because the problem was never the amount of lines of code in production. It’s the attention to detail, the choices made over every scale of abstraction that make software and technology work for us. AI can code. But it has no clue what needs to be coded.

Computer science students: I know it’s going to be hard, but if you have the means to ignore the noise and focus on being a better engineer, please do it. You are valuable. The world is going to need you. And if anyone’s looking for an intern because they want to build up a good engineer, HMU. I’ll be over here, reading engineering books and writing code with my hands.