TLDR: We're announcing an externship program for students whose summer internships were canceled.

I graduated during the 2008 recession. I was a computer science major, but even for programmers, opportunities were scarce. The economy was in crisis, I was not able to find an internship junior year. After graduation, I remember months of applying for hundreds of jobs and just never hearing back. Fortunately, my career eventually worked out just fine. But I still remember that feeling of graduating into an economy in chaos, and just not being given a chance.

Now COVID has hit and we're under recession again. Tech companies have slowed hiring and slashed internships. Many students and recent grads are in the same situation I was in: with the skills to be successful, but without an internship to get the work experience they need.

I'm excited to announce that we have partnered with Tido Carriero (Chief Product Development Officer at Segment) to do something about this problem. Together, we're launching a “Just in Time” Externship Program. We're going to match promising CS students whose summer internships were canceled with startups that can offer flexible, remote summer externships.

The externships will come in all shapes, sizes, and lengths. Some will involve working on a company's core product. Others will be open source work. Some will be paid. Others will be unpaid. (The details will be worked out with each company.) But all will provide real-world work experience.

If you're a student looking for a way to get professional experience over the summer, you can apply here. The process starts with our background-blind screen. We care if you can program, not what credentials you have.

If you're a company or engineering lead with the ability to take interns, please reach out to Tido at tido@segment.com. Tido has spent countless hours mentoring software engineers, and he's running the company side of the program.

We already have 200 students signed up, but I think the program can scale far beyond this, and we need the engineering community’s help to do it. Tido is an expert in engineering mentorship. At Triplebyte, we know how to evaluate and match engineers at scale. Let’s work together and make the COVID crisis suck a little bit less for students.