Once clueless, always clueless - the saga of the intern who didn't get it!

A few years back we had an intern that can only be categorized as unique. I had hired him on the basis that he had no job experiences in the computer science and engineering fields and put him to do very easy tests. One of our internship positions involves doing certification tests for a large vendor that will offer our hardware in their machines. This requires little PC skills. It requires being able to read in English, and follow simple instructions.

The vendor that provides these tests provides detailed checklists that explains each test step by step. Anything that wasn't crystal clear we created our own document, with tips and tricks on passing the more difficult tests.  In my opinion any high school graduate who's used a PC to send email or surf the web should be able to do these tests. Most of the time these tests do not utilize the entire time the student has, and then the student is also doing the same type of testing as the rest of my team, which gives them a complete experience on Software Quality Assurance.

I've had to fill this position many students with zero PC skills but just a willingness to learn and they have done a wonderful job.  This particular student had lied in his interview about the quality of his English. I was clear that all the documentation for testing was all in English.  So in his first day, his first complaint was that he couldn't follow the tests because they were in English. We told him that he said he could handle it when we interviewed him. He tried to make a stink but since the checklists were made by the vendor and this vendor only provides them in English, he didn't have a leg to stand on.

Besides it wouldn't have killed him to use google or a dictionary. Last semester I had an intern with limited English skills, she didn't lie about it and I didn't have tons of options on who I could hire. She never complained once about fact everything was in English and in her stage report, she wrote that one of her challenges was understanding the checklist and she bought a french-English dictionary and used Altavista translations a lot. She also wrote in her report that she improved her English and she was very pleased with having had the opportunity. She will go far in life!  Him... not so much!

Since he didn't know what he was doing, most of the time he'd end up trashing Windows. His immediate supervisor would take to ghosting any system he complained he couldn't do tests with.  That got him paranoid, and he started calling his stage coordinator at his university and complained that his supervisor was sabotaging his work. Really because we have interest in hiring students JUST to sabotage their work?!?!   I'm surprised he didn't use the fact he was black from Africa as the reason he was having problems, and called us all racists.

[It would have backfired. He wasn't the first or the last black African I've hired, and he's the only one who had issues in my team - as it goes I hire students from everywhere and have had some from many nationalities, race and religion. It has never been an issue]

I mean he would spend more time pretending to work then actually working. The tests he had to do had to be done on particular systems with particular cards. One afternoon we caught him spending all afternoon doing those tests on a machine from the wrong vendor, with a card that we had shipped over 5 years earlier. His mandate was to test current cards in machines that were about to ship!  He couldn't even figure out how to cable stuff properly even despite several of us showing him more then once.  He would spend a lot of time talking to the student who sat behind him and was in the process of brainwashing him into his paranoid delusions when we had a talk with the other student.

He was in my team for several weeks and since it was not working out and we figured maybe it was my team that was the problem, I passed him along to the Hardware  Quality Assurance team. We didn't even swap, we just gave him away. The HQA lead paired him up with his student.  That's when the fun started. He realized that the student could not do anything on his own. Any task well explained and even demonstrated with step by step instructions would still require a fair amount of hand holding. In the end the HQA lead would ask him questions about the work he assigned, and have to stop him to get a real answer. The kid would ramble on for 2 hours about all the reasons he couldn't do the assigned task, when it would have taken him 5 minutes to do the actual work. 

That team wasn't anymore happy with this student and the team leader took the time in this student's last week to tell him that if he was considering a career in engineering that he should reconsider. That in all his years working in an engineering firm he'd never seen an engineering intern that had so little aptitude for engineering.

The shocker came this week when the HQA lead got a phone call from a HR person calling for a reference for this student.  The HQA lead never called the person back and I've told him if he happens to get him on the phone, to say he has nothing to say.  I've always been told to never say anything negative about a prior employee, that you can be sued for defamation of character. But saying nothing speaks volumes without being negative.

I mean how clueless do you have to be to ask for a job reference from a boss who told you that you have ZERO aptitude for engineering.  This kid FAILED his internship. What kind of a reference can you give someone who failed? Someone who worked in 2 different teams, with 2 different supervisors, doing different work and not being able to meet any of the requirements?

I actually found this post and that post where I talk about this particular student back in 2007!