What the interns have wrought, 2024 edition

I think this is very cool. I ran an intern program at a mutual fund for a few years, and at a major bank for a few more years. We had lots of successes (and some things that never worked out).

One year we had an idea for a system. I brought Anderson Consulting in, explained what I wanted, sent them off with a quote. There were two interns in the meeting and they said they wanted a chance. 3 weeks later Anderson came in to pitch what they wanted to do. They did their side show to build a prototype ($175K) and then the system, another $650K. Elapsed time about 7 months.

Interns said they wanted to demo what they had come up with after talking to the business people. So they did the demo, Anderson people were going awesome, we will take these active wireframes and build the prototype and come back in 2 months. Interns said, no, this is a full working system, pulled up the code that was behind it, interfaces to the primary DB, etc. Another hour of stuff.

So it turns out the interns had built in 3 weeks what Anderson wanted $825K and 3/4 of a year to build. I was (and am) so proud of them. Love interns that you can just unleash. They spent the rest of their internship doing the docs, putting it into production. At the end, my boss, the CIO gave each of them a $100K "scholarship" and job offers to come back when they graduated.

I wonder what % of the time all the interns have names starting with an A.