The Problem with Experience
I’ll admit it: we didn’t set out to become an intern-only engineering org. Like most companies, we thought experience mattered. We believed in mentorship, in technical leadership, in “building a strong bench”. We kept hiring senior engineers, but nothing changed. Over time, we noticed a pattern. The more experienced someone became, the more they questioned things. They slowed us down with concerns about quality, scale, even ethics.
That’s when we asked the question no one dared: what if we just hired people who didn’t know better?
When we dug into the numbers, it was worse than we thought.
At first, we assumed it was an anomaly - an artifact of our reporting pipeline or a misconfigured JIRA filter. But the data was clear: fewer years of experience correlated directly with more shipped features, faster deploys, and 80% less Slack arguing. That’s when we knew - we had been doing hiring wrong all along.
Our Breakthrough: Intern-First Engineering
We didn’t set out to disrupt hiring. We just wanted to move faster. But every time we tried to scale, experience got in the way. Senior engineers questioned roadmaps. Staff engineers asked for “product clarity”. Principals insisted on “doing it right”. It was exhausting.
So we made a bold move: we stopped hiring experience altogether. No more mid-levels. No seniors. Just interns - fresh, unburdened, and blissfully unaware. We call it Intern-First Engineering™, and it’s the leanest, most Agile hiring model we’ve ever implemented.
Think of it like refactoring your org chart. We removed the cruft. We deleted the comments. What’s left is pure velocity.
Implementation
Most hiring frameworks focus on finding people who “know what they’re doing”. But in a world of rapid change, what if knowing things is actually a liability?
Intern-First Engineering™ embraces this paradox. Our teams consist exclusively of interns on 90-day rotations, ensuring our codebase is touched only by those uncorrupted by history or context. We’ve removed knowledge silos by removing knowledge entirely.
There’s no onboarding because there’s nothing to learn. There’s no legacy because we delete the code quarterly. It’s not just Agile - it’s amnesiac development at scale.
But culture is fragile - easily contaminated by memory or opinions. At our company, mention of Tabs vs Spaces is a fireable offence. Talk of a JavaScript framework triggers - an automatic LinkedIn post tagging your re-education and announcing your departure.
To maintain psychological safety, every intern is paired with a mentor: another intern with enough tenure to have found a bathroom, with a title like “Associate Senior Junior” to maintain ignorance and competition.
We’ve pioneered a Reverse Onboarding System™, where the new hire is encouraged to explain to their mentor why they’re too old, too slow, and too enterprise to be relevant anymore.
It’s not harassment. We call it proactive succession planning.
Metrics: Sounding good over doing good
Since our paradigm shift, our dashboards are nothing but green.
- PR velocity is up 400%
- Architectural discussions, reduced 98%
- 3 day PI planning events replaced with Slack threads
Has the thought of one of your senior developers departing or getting hit by a bus kept you up at night? Embracing Intern-First Engineering™ has finally achieved Zero Bus Factor thanks to constant turnover.
“It just works”
– Steve Stevenson, VP Infrastructure
No code solutions
In Q2, one intern cohort misunderstood “production deploy” and simply emailed screenshots of Figma mockups to the customer every Friday.
Client satisfaction spiked. Our support ticket volume dropped to zero. Investors praised our new Zero-Code Delivery Pipeline™ and made the front page of HackerNews with our engineering blog Deploy Less, Deliver More.
The team is now leading our innovation lab, and expects to launch blockchain-enabled PDFs later in the year.
Learning from mistakes
Traditional retrospectives bred emotion, reflection, and worst of all - accountability. None of which contributed to velocity. We sunset the practice.
Instead, we’ve implemented the 4F’s - Forward-Facing Failure Forecasts™. After each incident, interns submit fictionalized accounts of future disasters we haven’t caused yet. The goal isn’t to fix anything - it’s to stay one step ahead of blame.
The most imaginative submission receives an irredeemable UberEats gift card for $14.73 and a public Slack emoji in their honor.
A group of interns attempting to stand up a dev sandbox accidentally launched a fully operational neobank in the Balkans.
Within 72 hours, the app had 12,000 users, $400,000 in assets, and one surprisingly stable crypto token. When asked how it happened, Kelsey of the Spring 2024 rotation replied, “We thought it was a staging environment.”
Legal is still investigating our exposure. In the meantime, the interns have been granted fiduciary authority and are hiring to handle compliance. We consider this our first successful international expansion.
Experience is Over
We tried mentorship. We tried career ladders. We even tried listening. But in an AI-first world, shipping is the only KPI that matters. Teams that ship faster, win. Teams that think too much, lose funding.
Eighteen intern cycles in, no one remembers how the project started - or even what it was supposed to do. That’s not a flaw. That’s focus. What began as a hiring strategy has evolved into an operating philosophy.
Experience is the legacy system we forgot to sunset.
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