Perhaps the parents have laid down the law, and he’s discovered he has to return between semesters!
That’d bum me out!
Or the other way around. For me, a new relationship was always a boost in performance. A failed relationship in my late teens/early 20s could send me off-track.
Drugs, mental illness, major medical difficulties, family/personal problems, possibly a combination of these. The fact that he keeps falling asleep makes me wonder if he has some kind of medical condition. Either way, he should be up front with you about whatever’s going on and I don’t think you’re obligated to bend over backward to accommodate him if he doesn’t seem to be giving any effort.
Also, how the fuck does one get a paid internship these days? My grad school internship was 24/hours per week unpaid and I had no room to dick around like that.
Depression was the first thing I thought of. Seems late to worry about it now.
Sounds like an internship at a tech company, as opposed to an internship offered at the college. Tech internships are often paid.
He has a girlfriend, and I thought they had been together for a while. Dunno if they are getting more serious or not - not really my business and I don’t inquire unless he brings it up first.
It’s surprising to find a Tech internship that isn’t paid. In fact, some tech intershipspay between $4850 and $7000 a month. We don’t pay quite that much (we’re a small company and we’re not in Silicon Valley), but it’s still paid internships unless you go to a really bad school.
Waaah, I’m paying somebody with no degree the full time equivalent of $37,000 a year and he thinks nice weather is a legitimate excuse to take off work with 5 minutes notice.
Internships are supposed to be opportunities to introduce oneself to professional work. Looking good on a resume and earning some money should be secondary, even if that’s not the case in the intern’s mind.
I don’t know how many interns I’ve managed. At least a dozen. The vast majority did varying levels of great. Some got to a point where I could treat them almost indistinguishably from an full time entry level employee. Others needed more hand holding, but that’s ok because they’re interns.
I’ve only ever fired two interns. One turned out to be woefully unable to perform in a professional environment, even though he was doing his best. Firing him was difficult, even though it needed to be done. The other guy sounded much more like yellowjacketcoder’s intern - capable of doing professional work but refusing to do so in spite of frequent feedback. Firing him was easy. Largely because he was obnoxious to deal with and wasn’t worth the money we were paying him, but I do hope it taught him there are repercussions to doing a horrible job.
It’s the drugs.
His employment with your company is of no concern to him.
If he doesn’t care then I don’t understand why only part of you wants to fire him.
From your description he does not want to be working for you at this point. It’s just a massive chore compared to the other things going on in his life. Plus, I don’t know if it’s the same with Korean as with other Asian students, but there is sort of a emotional burnout some of them experience after years of being under meat grinder levels of pressure to perform. He could be there.
So, in MPSIMS, is the sarcastic attitude necessary?
Agreed, though I’d deemphasize “something happened” and “decided”. There may not have been a specific event, or an explicit decision. It may just be that he had a bunch of enthusiasm initially, and eventually it just… wore off. Now you see his default performance level, which isn’t so hot.
Anybody in their 20s sleeping throughout the day is either depressed, addicted, or is doing something more interesting than sleeping during their nights.
I vote for the last choice. He has a new GF, a second job that pays real money, or has finally discovered basic college party hearty life that most of us get over in the second semester of our freshman year.
Regardless of the above, for reasons good or bad he doesn’t much care about his job w the OP’s firm. Out he goes.
More importantly: if you’re going to have one, spend a little time getting to know how it works.
Mainly because I feel like I’ve failed as a supervisor for not being able to turn things around so he would have ended as a decent employee instead of a bad one. I realize that’s not entirely something under my control, but I still feel like I did a bad job as a supervisor if I let it get to this point.
OK. Fair enough. You’re operating under the premise that this person wants to work at your company. His actions don’t indicate this is so.
It’s possible he has taken on too much and is living off of 3 hrs of sleep but the lack of concern doesn’t seem to line up.
This goes back to the purpose of internship. I could be wrong but I thought it was an opportunity to learn real world skills and prove oneself for employment.
Has this person given any indication of his intentions?
I know he was looking for a job in the states - a few of the “I have to go now” times were him going to career fair. Dunno if anything came of it.
He’s back at work today. Apologized for falling asleep. We’ll see if it has any effect.
Is having an honest complete and only slight judgmental conversation with this person practical?
Since both you and he know there’s a problem and both you and he know the internship ends soon, there’s at least some chance you could have actual communication rather than just accusations and stonewalling.
It’d be interesting to get a straight answer from him and provide some straight-talking friendly advice to him. Might help him in the long run; might not.
As a supervisor you seem to have a charitable disposition here, not merely a punitive one. That’s excellent. Will he let you work together to act on that attitude?
That’s my read on it too. Unfortunately it’s the sort of problem that doesn’t lend itself to opening up to one’s employer, and even if he wasn’t leaving soon you couldn’t really help him unless he admitted what the problem was.