Darkened Software

Bare min Programming Lead Schedule:

8 hour day ( not really but lets dream )

- 2 hours of meetings

- 1 hour of play game, assign bugs, verify features, code reviews check-ins, track schedule

- 1 hour of debug broke builds and peoples crashes, shoot down feature requests

= 4 hours left

• Average intern requires 1 hour a day just for checking in to ensure they are not spinning their wheels or off track ( 20 min 3 times a day )
• 1 hour a day if significant tech discussion is needed such as the case of starting a new task they have not done before which is most of them.

- ( 1 hour * 3 + 1 hour )

= 0 hour left

At best you can put 3 interns under a lead before they have zero time to do anything preventative or any duties beyond the min a lead should be doing to keep things from falling apart.

So unless you have senior programmers that can offload the mentoring and monitoring of the interns having a whole bunch of “free labor” is not all that free.  You will quickly reach the point were the whole team will suffer from a lack of lead attention just so you can get a some of questionable quality free intern coding.

Nothing is really free…