The Intern Factory

Ah, the memories of early consulting missions. You walk into a new client’s office, expecting the usual setup: a grizzled senior dev nursing their third coffee, a stressed sysadmin, and a project manager asking for the impossible by Friday.

But sometimes, you walk into something entirely different. You walk into a modern-day “cost-efficiency” miracle.

In Belgium, there’s a well-known reality for startups and budget-conscious companies: student internships are often unpaid. During one of my very first missions, I encountered a company that didn’t just use this system… They built their entire engineering department around it.

The client proudly introduced me to their “development team.” I walked into what looked like a university computer lab. It was a sea of 20-year-olds… an entire army of eager, nervous interns banging away at their keyboards, desperately Googling “how to connect to SQL database” in real-time.

Their mission? To build a full-fledged application destined for production and actual paying customers. Their supervision? One single, deeply overwhelmed senior developer trying to herd cats. The architecture? A magnificent, towering plate of spaghetti code, held together by sheer willpower and final_final_real_one.zip version control.

The client’s idea of code review was walking behind their chairs and asking, “No errors, right?” as if the temporary absence of a red screen meant the system was scalable.

This comic is dedicated to that army of interns who built an MVP on hopes, dreams, and Stack Overflow. They were unpaid, but the bugs they shipped to production were truly priceless.