Some hiring managers hate the idea of hiring interns. They see interns as unformed and insufficiently skilled. To some extent, that’s true. Interns are not as experienced as experienced employees (no. Really?!). You’re going to have to invest in them a little bit more and it’s going to take some time before they’re up to speed. The good news about our field is that the really great programmers often started programming when they were 10 years old. And while everyone else their age was running around playing “soccer” (this is a game that many kids who can’t program computers play that involves kicking a spherical object called a “ball” with their feet (I know, it sounds weird)), they were in their dad’s home office trying to get the Linux kernel to compile. Instead of chasing girls in the playground, they were getting into flamewars on Usenet about the utter depravity of programming languages that don’t implement Haskell-style type inference. Instead of starting a band in their garage, they were implementing a cool hack so that when their neighbor stole bandwidth over their open-access WIFI point, all the images on the web appeared upside-down. BWA HA HA HA HA!
— Finding Great Developers - Joel on Software
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