IBM Uses Interns for the iSeries, and So Can You

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

During those times when I am feeling particularly overworked, I joke to my wife that what I really need is an intern or two so I can offload some work onto them in exchange for a chance to get some real work and a good reference. Having seen the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer gets an intern from New York University to do his bidding as he develops his crazy business ideas, I remember how that didn't exactly work out for Kramer or the intern, and then my wife looks at me kinda funny, too, so I put the kibosh on the whole idea. But in many cases--such as in the iSeries development labs, in ISVs, and maybe in your data center--an intern might be exactly what is called for to cultivate new talent.

For many years, IBM has been working through a program called Partners in Education for the iSeries and now has established an IBM-wide, cross-divisional program called the Academic Initiative to try to get iSeries machines (and now, other gear like mainframes) in the hands of colleges and universities around the world so IT faculty members can teach and students get exposure to technologies like the iSeries.

According to Linda Grigoleit, iSeries education program director, her most conservative estimate is that of the hundreds of schools worldwide that teach the iSeries in some form or another, about 30,000 students a year get some exposure to the box. That exposure runs the gamut from a minimum of teaching its architecture alongside alternatives to putting out seven or eight detailed programming courses on the machine. Exposure is good, and teaching the box is better, and the entire iSeries division knows that it has to boost education and awareness about the iSeries. Grigoleit is also aware that IBM, business partners, customers, and educational institutions that are actually teaching iSeries skills have to do a better job of coordinating their efforts. "We have to figure out a good mechanism for students to find the iSeries jobs and the iSeries jobs to find the students," she says. The Monster.com and Dice.com job-hunting Web sites are not the answer, but IBM is working on the problem, and I threw IT Jungle's hat in the ring to help as well. I am perfectly happy to host a job-hunting site that doesn't have junk jobs in it just for companies that are doing resume trolling and that has qualified candidates from the schools and qualified, real job openings from partners and iSeries shops. IBM could do this as a clearinghouse as well, obviously.

But there are more direct ways to build talent, and Grigoleit has first-hand knowledge about how to do that. Last week, a group of interns at the Rochester labs comprised of 15 teams of four college students, some working on bachelor's degrees and others working on higher degrees, finished up their projects at the labs. They did real work, and they got intense exposure to the IBM bureaucracy and the technology behind the iSeries through a program called Speed Teams, which used to be known as the Extreme Blue intern program when it debuted back in 2003. While this program is aimed at cultivating talent from around the world--IBM has 16 facilities running Speed Team programs with a total of 150 students, with 40 percent of them being in the Rochester labs--there is no reason that business partners and fairly large iSeries shops who want to cultivate their own talent can't take the same intern approach.

This is the way IBM runs the Speed Team program. The product managers in Rochester figure out the projects they want the interns to do in September and October; some of them are based in iSeries-specific projects and some of them are based on other technologies, such as the Blue Gene massively parallel Linux supercomputer. They look at the skills that will be required for the projects--in some cases you need specific technical or marketing skills, sometimes you need both--and then they put a call out to the universities that participate in the program to find candidates. After the candidates are chosen, they come to Rochester (or one of the other 15 IBM sites) for the summer and get dropped into the deep part of the pool.

This is not necessarily an easy summer for the interns. According to Grigoleit, for many students, their entire knowledge of computing is the PC, and that usually means they have no idea about servers, networks, distributed applications, and the idea that a system running ERP software has different requirements than a PC. They may not have any idea how companies buy and use servers, and they almost never have any idea what an iSeries is. But after 12 weeks, the interns in the Speed Team program that work on iSeries-related projects are not just more savvy about servers or more likely to get a job offer from Big Blue (which happens about 70 percent of the time). They are ambassadors for the iSeries, and as we all know, the iSeries suffers from a mindshare issue out there in the market as well as potential skills shortages. The other 250 or so interns that come to Rochester during the summer to work who are not part of the Speed Team program are also ambassadors. But the numbers need to be a lot larger, and through enlightened self-interest, your shop might be able to help.

Just because an intern works for you, however, doesn't mean they will accept a full-time job, however, so don't think an intern is making a huge commitment to you. By accepting a Speed Team position, an intern gets a lot of experience that is a great resume builder, even if they have to give up a summer and move. Sepidah Gazeri, a student at the University of California, Irvine, who did the Speed Team intern program back in 2003 at Rochester as a programmer while she was working on her bachelor's degree in computer science, came back this summer as a project manager since she is working on her master's degree in marketing. Gazeri's team developed and put together the marketing plan for some future features for the Virtualization Engine hypervisor within the iSeries and pSeries line of Power-based servers.

I asked Gazeri if she would tell me what those features were if the IBM spokesperson sharing the line with us hung up, and she laughed and said no. So she passed that test, IBM. I then asked her what her plans were, and she said that her goal for the future was to do some sort of marketing in the high-tech area, so I naturally followed up and asked if she wanted to work at IBM and specifically in the marketing area for the iSeries. "I didn't necessarily do the Speed Team for that reason," she explained. "The experience has opened my eyes to what it is like to work for a large company--both the benefits and the disadvantages." She said her two times through the intern program have given her a good perspective on how projects work at IBM, that she got to work with a lot of great managers and developers, and to see a whole new culture in Minnesota. "It's a big sacrifice to give your whole summer, but you get a lot out of it," she said. But, she was absolutely non-committal about a job at IBM and in iSeries marketing, Peter. So if you want her to be on your team, you better start thinking about benefits and perqs.

So why should you care about the Speed Team program or the effectiveness of the Academic Initiative program at IBM? Well, it is very simple. The employee base at iSeries shops is aging. No one knows for sure how many people are out there, but we do know just from our own experience that many iSeries professionals are ticking that 50-65 box on their surveys--at least if they are telling the truth. There is a double-whammy looming out there on the horizon, which consists of the large number of iSeries experts retiring just about the time that there is a shortage of entry-level people that have advanced far enough to fill their shoes. Since 2000 or so, companies have been letting go of their weakest programmers and managers and pumping their money into their best employees as a way to get the most out of their IT shops. This is great in the short term, but deadly in the long term. Replacing those experts is very tough, and in many cases, companies will not be able to afford to replace and they will have to train them from within their own weakened ranks. This takes time and money, and it is the time that will be most disruptive to business--not the money.

Now, consider this triple whammy: the economy improves, and people start looking for better jobs down the road or in the next town, or consultancies start poaching your employees again as they did during the ERP, Y2K, and dot-com booms. There could end up being massive shortages of entry- and mid-level programmers and managers in fairly quick order, and the people you have could end up costing a lot more to retain.

While Grigoleit says that IBM is considering extending the Speed Team program to resellers and business partners to cultivate iSeries talent (and thus help make a pool of experts available and make the supply-demand curve stay in whack), IBM is only considering this. About half of the schools that teach the iSeries have intern programs, which is good.

If you have work that needs to be done but can't commit to a full-time person, maybe interns (summer or part-time throughout the year) are what you really need in your shop. And you can set up your own intern program with local colleges and universities--and I would even say juniors and seniors in high school that have their working papers--to give students some job experience and some cash and get some of your projects done and a prospective employee in the ranks. But don't think this is easy.

"It takes a bit of work to create a good intern program, which means making use of interns for something other than making copies and coffee," warns Grigoleit. If you want to start your own intern program, I am sure someone at the local IBM office and the local college would be thrilled to help.