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I am so mentally drained from having to deal with the intern who I have to literally spoon-feed every single thing. My previous posts illustrate the situation...

The language and cultural barriers are too much, and I am too afraid to open my mouth because of the sensitive nature of my country's history and I'll get labelled as some horrible person.

I told my manager today that I'll stick it out until end of January (thankfully I am on vacation for most of December and January), but I cannot work with her. She was supposed to move to the data team end of December, but my manager told me if she can't even properly grasp this HTML and CSS stuff, then she will not be able to do the other tasks they have for her.

This was a disaster of an experiment and I'm somewhat traumatised ( I am sure the intern is too) and I never want another intern again, nor do I want to manage people. I never said I want to be a people manager, I just want to quietly code at my desk.

This company sells MBTI psychometric assessments and they damn well know my preference, so I'm seriously annoyed that they threw this horrendous surprise on me and kept ignoring my requests for revisiting this intern's role, because I noticed a long time ago that she was struggling with basic concepts and all they did was make her do Udemy courses.

I told them multiple times that she seriously needs computer literacy training because she will not survive in this industry if she still struggles to understand how files and folders work. Other employers would have fired her a long time ago.

She's just too slow for this job. I feel sorry for her, but I do not have the capacity to do this anymore. I'm tired, it's been a long year.

Comments
  • 0
    @Kernel I am not sure, but judging by when she completed high school she should be about 27 years old. I might be a year or two off. She completed her university degree in 2019.
  • 5
    Oh man, that reminds me of an trainee we had. I gave him so many 1-on-1 sessions. It took him one year to grasp the syntax and be somewhat comfortable with the IDE (PhpStorm).

    I seriously started to doubt my teaching skills because that boy just did not improve.
    There where other things too like not actively asking questions: I assigned him a very basic coding task in the morning after the daily (with lots of help and a starting point in his playground codebase). And when checking on him in the afternoon, he said some variation of "Oh, I didn't even know how to start so I did something else instead." This happened several times.

    In the end, I came to the conclusion that he is either not willing or not able. Then I learned that he started slacking and his vocational school performance was poor.

    Then he quit after two years before finishing his training. Afterwards I learned that he had mental health problems which explains a lot.
  • 2
    (cont.)

    I felt bad for at the time, but him quitting was the best thing for everyone involved I think.
  • 2
    @SuspiciousBug It's frustrating when you put in so much effort, to the best of your knowledge and the other party not seemingly willing to even try. I hope that dude finds his true calling in life. Do you think he enjoyed programming at all?
  • 1
    @dissolvedgirl That first part is so true!

    To your question: He had some programming accomplishments, which he was really proud of and very thankful to me for helping him. But overall, it was hard for him to translate problems into code. He just didn't seem to "get it" if you know what I mean? So I guess programming was more of a chore for him.
  • 1
    I feel you. If they are not willing to put in the hours that are needed in our line of work it is better to let them fail.

    If they don’t improve over time it might just be that they are… stupid and lazy.

    And there is no joy in that at all.
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