399
Noob
7y

A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

Comments
  • 70
    Ordered list starting with 0 = ++
  • 53
    Load them on a bus, drive it off a cliff.
  • 15
    All i can say is goodluck! (And hope they all decide to quit at the same time)
  • 3
    All the best..
  • 42
    Wait one of those dudes was messing with one of the girls because she was fat? That's extremely uncool and grounds for a small chat with HR so he can get canned before he escalates that and it becomes a real issue.

    You don't want that guy working on your company until he's comfortable enough to become more offensive against his coworkers.
  • 3
    This gonna be good
  • 0
    Some of the mistakes you mentioned I've managed to make in my first internship on my 3rd univ year, some of them are pretty bad. Maybe tell your managers to consider choosing only the better interns out of the group since the rest make it look more like a kindergarten
  • 1
    Case 6 made my eyeballs bleed.
    I hope it gets better mate!
  • 4
    @PostmodernJerk I should have probably mentioned that she's not fat at all. In fact she's very skinny.
  • 1
    delete putty
  • 3
    What exactly was the internship?
    I don't see how they could have been accepted.
  • 3
    Finally a proper rant. I was about to leave devrant because of re-posts.
  • 12
    @QuantumAtom Think of an advanced, devops oriented NOC entry position.
    It's 13 of them. Part have already majored in some made up professions, part are students. The only female is a psychology student obviously.
    I had no part in the interviews but judging by their LinkedIn profiles they may have over exaggerated in their CVs about skills and past experience. They aren't technology oriented at all.
    I will write a post about their next adventures, there are a lot of those.
  • 0
    @EgorLu subscribing for future adventures!
  • 4
    @EgorLu make sure to give them admin access to all the git repos
  • 2
    I couldn't read this post because it was missing break statements.
  • 1
    @Photon156 glad you've seen it my way!
  • 1
    I would start with something simpler, like word-excel-powerpoint-browser-email.
  • 0
    Man and I thought I had it bad with interns. Have fun with that and be sure to tell us many more stories. If that's the first 2 weeks this should be interesting!
  • 2
    @Devintrix there are many more stories and they accumulate rather quickly. I will post more soon.
  • 0
    @EgorLu can you comment here when you do?
  • 0
    If (error 404 === brains not found) {
    Load stupid();
    }
  • 4
    @AngryDev New post is up.
    Also I changed my name because I'm a noob.
  • 0
    Can someone explain case 1 to me? Googling only gives results for "test". :D
  • 1
    @Fabian It's called a fork bomb.
    Fork, because it multiplies itself, and then runs the created children, which multiple again and again, exponentially.
    Bomb because it depletes your system's resources.

    You can run it on your PC, no damage will be done. Just be prepared to terminate the process or restart the PC.

    Basically a function that calls itself again, twice.
  • 0
    Let them do production servers! :D
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