We often talk about knocking down the silos and spreading DevOps culture at DevOpsDays, but it’s typically within the context of experienced engineers and developers. Unfortunately, the role of mentorship in DevOps and spreading DevOps culture to students and recent grads is often overlooked.

In many companies, interns are simply viewed as cheap or free labor with no regard for the intern’s education. In other organizations, interns are regarded as a time drain on staff engineers who must dedicate extra hours for training at the loss of productivity.

In this session, we’ll hear from a recent Datadog intern and a full-time staff engineer who started as an intern. We’ll discuss the challenges and rewards of starting an internship program and share some of the systems we’ve used to help interns learn the most while at the same time benefiting the company. We’ll also discuss how mentoring will shape the future of DevOps and your own organization.