What's the Difference Between Recent College Grads and End-users?
What's
the Difference Between Recent College Grads and End-users?
by Bill Bouchard
Nothing, Doug, and that's really freaking scary.
I
have to take on three interns every semester and I hate it, even though I
usually just have them shadow one of my techs. I've already had to get rid
of them all and frankly I'm just going to drag my feet and milk not having
any here. You want a horror story? I'll give you horror stories, but first
I'll explain the background of working for a state agency. The agency has deals
with local colleges to "reward" the outstanding MIS students with
an unpaid internship at the Department of Children, Youth and Families for a
semester.
Intern #1- Doug, this guy was like a 16 year old at McDonald's. He didn't want to do anything. He would say, "I'm going to get a cup of coffee" and he'd be gone for 45 minutes. All he wanted to do was surf the web and talk on the phone and oh, I forgot, he went to the bathroom every 5 minutes. I'd ask him to do something and he wouldn't do it. I know these kids aren't getting paid but they should at least appreciate the opportunity they have been given ( a lot of these interns end up getting full time jobs). I'm not a babysitter, if I can't use blind faith for you to get the job done I don't want you here.
Intern #2 - You know how you think things that you would never say to someone's face because you're a "professional"? Well this guy said those things. Quotes he actually made to end users "what are you stupid", "moron", "as long as there's people like you, I'll always have a job" and my personal favorite "what are you retarded". Of course I'm still laughing hysterically at this, you just can't do it
Intern #3 - Only myself and my three other network guys are allowed to touch the servers. That's it. There's a very good reason for this, this rule is because of people like intern #3. He spied the RCONSOLE password looking over someone's shoulder and brought down our freaking payroll server in the middle of the day. Since backups only run at night, 6 hours of work was lost. (most of it in payroll is linked up to a mainframe at the state capitol and the records are sent over in a batch process which hadn't run yet) Why did he do this you ask? Well an end user said the server was slow today, and without anyone's permission he decided to do that. Arghhhh.
I figured you could use a good laugh. By the way, more proof that recent college grads are becoming more like end users. How many times do you say in your site that pay is heavily determined by geography? When I get a reply to my little blurb I stress this heavily and I won't tell them how much to ask for because I, in Rhode Island, have no idea what they pay out in say Oregon. Yet they reply to me 400 times saying "What do you think I should ask for?" One word for everyone in this economy...Salary requested = OPEN. Then there's the other half of people that say, "I know this, now find me a job." The wonders never cease