Friendless Summer

March 15, 2008 on 10:51 am | In Funnyish, Insider View, Jobs by Josh Jones | 28 Comments

Hey, as long as they’re cheap..

It’s hot in LA!

Which makes me think of summer!

Which makes me think of interns!

Which makes me think of hot summer interns!

Which makes me think of how sad I am to not be in Advertising!

Now, I know there are lots of other cool-sounding summer marketing internships available around this Internet world of ours, but hey, they’re not going to be very cool when it’s 96 degrees with 98% humidity in Manhattan and they’re on a street corner handing out flyers!

Meanwhile, you could be nice and cool, deep underground in one of our (assuming there’s no power outages..) climate-controlled data centres! (That was for the Brits.)

Being Los Angelenos, we don’t really know when this “summer” you speak of IS, or even really how to spell it, and because of that we’ve already “jumped the shark” and are looking to hire FIVE (5) summer interns… RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH!

A Glamorous Job!

I would explain how great it is to work at DreamHost, and all the details and what-ever-for-not here, except I already wrote it once on the jobs page there, and re-hashing old content is a job best left to the professionals!

I will at least mention here that #1 this is a PAID internship, at $18.50 / hour, and #2 we’re flexible with when you want to start and how long you want to do it for, and #3 sure, this could be a good way to perhaps eventually even get a real job!

Now, juuust to wrap things up, my friend sent me an email two days ago about his experience interviewing that was way funnier than everything I’ve ever written, so hopefully he’s okay with me posting a snippet here. I can only hope that any interviewing I do for this internship will score half as many douchebag points…

So then I went to this interview at this place where really the job description was 100% me, like every thing they needed, I have done, I had all the right skills, etc. The guy there was a bit wacky. First thing when we sat down he asked me who I WAS. Like to describe myself as a whole, what type of person I am, etc. Then he started telling me how he asked some receptionist applicant that, and she said “well I’m beautiful” and then he went on this story about how she WAS gorgeous but she went on to explain that she didn’t mean her outside appearance even though it was beautiful, but she meant her inner self, she’s a beautiful person, etc. We finally got on to the interview and during it he tells me to pretend I’m a shoe salesman and I just sold him a pair of shoes but he phones me and says he doesn’t know how to tie his shoes, can I explain it to him over the phone. I was like “haha oh umm ok, sure. Haha, I feel like this is going to be one of those trick questions!” and he assures me like no, no, it’s no trick, it’s cause communication is important in this job. So I go through it, put your left lace in your left hand, pull it over to the right side, yadda yadda. Then at the end he looks at me with this smug look and goes “That was good. But you forgot one thing. You forgot to tell me to put my foot in the shoe”. Extra douchebag points here because not only WAS this a trick question, but he said tell me how to TIE them. I just chuckled and was like “oh wow yeah, I didn’t, hah yeah”, but after I was thinking how awesome it would have been to just stare at him for like 2 seconds when he said that, say nothing, and then get up and walk out and drive away.

Agreed.

28 Responses to “Friendless Summer”

  1. Christian Says:
    March 16th, 2008 at 1:31 am

    $18.50 an hour? That’s more than I made when I was a full time employee!

    I sure hope you guys are paying TS’ers at least that much.

    Le sigh.

    Godspeed summer interns, godspeed!

  2. Tim Says:
    March 16th, 2008 at 12:49 pm

    @Christian

    $18.50/hr is *cheap* if the intern does for her boss what the intern pictured above did for her boss.

    I hear these days, that type of “work” goes for around $4000/hr.

  3. Miquel Burns Says:
    March 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    I don’t see myself learning Perl, so even if I wanted to move to California, that’s one skill that would block me from getting a job. Well, the jobs I would be good at in terms of what’s being offered (I’m not always friendly, so no tech support for me, might get too many complaints in the long run.)

  4. Jeff @ DreamHost Says:
    March 16th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    > I’m not always friendly, so no tech support
    > for me, might get too many complaints in the
    > long run.

    Sounds like you might be a candidate for Abuse/Security work, then. :)

    - Jeff @ DreamHost

  5. Tim F Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 5:00 am

    Hey Josh – not sure if this is intended or not, but you’re listing two different wages for the internship. Third paragraph you list $20/hr, and then under the ‘It’s paid!’ sub-heading you’re showing $18.50.

    PS – If you’re looking for an SQA Analyst – let me know. I’m sure Cali is far warmer than Canada!! :-)

  6. John Knowles Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am

    HHHmmmm a summer in LA sounds like fun. Especially as it’s my final year of university at the moment.

    On the downside I never did get round to learning perl thanks to the idiot IT guys at my university never configuring perl on the server. Although I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than a week considering PHP was pretty much built on the same architecture.

    The main downside at the moment is the $ to £ conversion being at an all time low.

  7. D A Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    I wish LA wasn’t that far from where I am… I just love to break stuff… especially if it looks like an important server :-)

  8. Miles Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    You should hire some interns for the SF office as well!

  9. Nick Says:
    March 20th, 2008 at 12:19 am

    18.50 hourly is roughly 1/3 of what Google pays their interns.

    Seriously guys, if you want to be cheap a$$es hire programmers from China.

  10. simon Says:
    March 20th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    “I hear these days, that type of “work” goes for around $4000/hr.”
    you heard wrong!

  11. jimnter Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 6:25 am

    pls send grenncrd

  12. Shawn Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 10:11 am

    18.50 hourly is roughly 1/3 of what Google pays their interns.

    Seriously guys, if you want to be cheap a$$es hire programmers from China.

    And Dreamhost is far less than 1/3 of the size of Google, so what’s your point?

    I seriously doubt that anyone bitching about Dreamhost wages on their blog is even worth half of what they pay.

  13. Shawn Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 10:16 am

    I forgot to add: At least Dreamhost is a real source of jobs.

    Not to mention, Google isn’t just a web host like Dreamhost. Maybe you can also cry that it’s not enough because surgeons and lawyers get paid more.

    If $18.50 is too cheap for you, maybe you’d prefer it if they just outsourced everything to other countries for chump change, like many of their competitors do?

  14. roger Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 11:30 am

    Hey John,
    why didn’t you just use the perl available to your dreamhost shell account?

  15. John Knowles Says:
    March 23rd, 2008 at 6:52 am

    The university bypassed the whole unit because they couldn’t config the server. Also this was before I was a dreamhoster.

    At the moment I am hitting the OOPHP5 heavily so perl will have to wait.

  16. RPG 79 Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    aqui tambem, será?

  17. Dave Says:
    April 1st, 2008 at 5:37 pm

    If I only had a free place to crash in LA! No subway rides to work.

  18. Eli Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    If only you had announced this before the deadline for accepting all those other summer programs passed….

  19. Meredith Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    If I lived in L.A., I would SO be signing up for this. I would love to work with you guys. Why can’t this be location-independent?! *sobs*

  20. Steven Seagal Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    You guys will have to start the intern program earlier. Most good interns have already gotten summer internships. I got mine in October (!)

  21. jarrad Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Im not sure about cali…but here in pa, im only making 15/hr as a sys admin for a huge hospital…must be a huge cost of living increase or they pay pretty good…

  22. Bojan Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 11:43 pm

    Is there any remote support work there? :o)

  23. Matthew Kosmoski Says:
    April 15th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    Too bad its in California. I make a bit shy of that in my current long-term internship (network engineering and Perl development)… but it’d be an awesome job to have. When I was a fancy student (assistant) network engineer at Purdue University I made a third of that…
    If Dreamhost were to offer paid travel to/from and expense lodging, I’d certainly apply.

  24. so Says:
    April 15th, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    18.50 hourly is roughly 1/3 of what Google pays their interns.
    Seriously guys, if you want to be cheap a$$es hire programmers from China.

    No it’s not, it’s about half. $55/hr is around 100K/yr – keep in mind Google new hires only make 70K base (in NYC at least, dunno about Mountain View).

  25. oscar menjvar Says:
    April 19th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

    Hi!
    I am a teacher at a high school. Do you guys take clever, fast learners, high energy, geeked’up 16 year olds? I trying to find some inner city kids a place to learn more about technology.

  26. afiq Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 am

    Heh, but the woman there is not pretty enough :D

    http://fiqo.blogspot.com

  27. Islami Kiz Isimleri Islami Erkek Isimleri Says:
    June 1st, 2008 at 1:10 am

    aqui tambem

  28. kareem Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 6:44 am

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