Internship timing - up and down

People have prejudice, some even love it. And my prejudice about internship time is that "In the whole year, between October and February is the worst time to look for an internship position". That thought came around a year ago when I learned the fact that at the end of the year, companies tend to finish off projects and wrap up the paperwork rather than optimize the management structure or looking for new positions. I once thought that it would be better if I could have my internship start at March.

Seems like I was wrong, again. As there is always something going wild in a software project, this period of time is like a sprint and much more interesting than a marathon. Along the way to the ultimate goal, a release, bends and ravines are just appearing from no where and those involving in that race do not even have time to take a break, let alone arguing with customers. This is the precious time where decisions are made, and different from the elaboration phase, these decisions are highly practical and many times go against what I was taught at school (badass practice)

Market at the end of the year is pretty lively with dozens of customer yelling "Gimme the web site, we need it for the Christmas campaign" (Christmas CDs) or "Look at the site, it is not biopeutic enough" and "we are considering changing the layout for the coming Christmas and new year" at the same time (customer's business is somewhere between biology and therapeutic). So these days the office runs at its full capacity, at least for the boss and the little intern who happens to live at the office. Crap, the red fat bastard is against him!!!

But only during such high time an intern can be put in charge for a new project (either because others got caught in ongoing projects or they get bored of such type of project already). And that experience is precious. You learn, in the hard and only way, to become a full-stack developer. It takes a lot of further practice, knowledge, and experience to become a growth hacker, but this indeeds a vey good start already.

Well, every coin has two sides, doesn't it? A dozen of bad things occur when year end and internship come together

• People are incredibly busy and asking a question is such a pain, regardless the importance and intelligence level of it.
• Researching new technologies and services are happily waiting 'till next Spring (and at Vietnam where cool stuff get blocked)
• Having the heart breaking feeling as if your app is crashed 10 minutes before assignment deadline for 2 months
• People cannot keep being calm all the time and the innocent intern has the tendency to become the source of trouble/argument even through he has little to do with the problem (or even didn't do a thing)

Oh man, Christmas "the celebration of the birth of commercialism..." people are sure trying to get the most out of it.