Anybody in lead positions, have you had much success with work term / intern students? I’m considering offering 2 positions for students at my local college to get a couple helping hands and help these people out.

I used to help run an internship program, so this is my 2 cents, with some insights from the people that ran it for longer.

In the UK a student can opt to do a year in industry as part of their university degree, that's what we opted for. They were with us full time for a year, we paid them a reasonable salary. In a team of 8 software engineers we took on 1 intern. We had 3 teams and they would switch between software/firmware/hardware (python/c++/VHDL).

This has a few advantages. First, they need training. They're not as knowledgeable as a grad. It takes a good few months until they're able to work independently, and even then they need supervision and teaching. They're there to learn more than work, most of their salary was subsidised by the uni. We tended to put them on greenfield projects, then if the project became a priority we would parashute in someone more experienced (me) to get things sorted quickly.

We were doing computer vision/motion tracking/high performance computing. Some students we took from the physics department, others from the computer science department. The physics students understood what we were doing much more easily, but slim to no coding ability so needed teaching from scratch. Computer science students struggled much more with what we were doing but were better with the how. It was harder to teach the coders math than the maths kids to code.

Some people we offered jobs to for after they graduated. We already knew they were good, we'd put a lot of effort in to them. It also meant we could take in someone that had a very different skill set to us that maybe didn't fit long term but we could both get exposed to the other.

I would be wary taking high school students in (up to 18 in the UK), they would need even more effort to up skill. I personally found the physics students more productive in the long term, I was more on the maths side.

I wasn't a lead at the time, I was just the CTO's go-to fixer. And seriously underpaid for it...

They produced some really cool stuff. At the end of the year, all the industry students gave a presentation on what they'd been working on. I like to think ours was always one of the most interesting, so many places gave fluff projects without any business impact. Some of our students could actually explain a customer problem they'd helped to solve and show it in action.

I found it hit or miss, just like any employee. Some are really talented, some just put the hours in and don't really care.

Depends. I have experience from a lot of variants. Students comes in many forms. Where we work the number of systems are in the hundreds and the business processes…not easy. And so, some of the system has large complexity and we had a hard time putting some of the interns/students there. If was just…too long a learning curve for almost all of them. Engineering students we had better experiences with since they tend to learn quicker. I guess they are both smarter and maybe more important have learned how to consume new findings.

We also do joint thesis/phd supervising which is really, really good value for money. It is also something we prioritize.