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Comment by bornfreddy | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand they had no idea if the information was valid or wildly outdated. But better something than nothing I guess. :-)

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This is where modern "learning" falls down. You load a page, read its contents, compare with what it is supposed to be, update if outdated, move on. I know I know, that sounds like, egad, work, but that's called a job.

Your immediate dismissal of an actual task I've been assigned irks to the point of being given a snarky response.

Sorry if it irks you, that was not my intention.

My point was not that this job doesn't deserve attention (it does!), but that it would deserve attention from the senior personnel, not (just) the interns. I've seen too many times how important tasks, which are difficult to achieve for someone who wasn't there, are given to newcomers with little oversight and guidance. Maybe that's not how it is here, in which case - good for you!

How does a new hire know "what it is supposed to be"?

The information is transferred through a method called "communication" by another human.

It is shocking how many people fail at this. If you were the employee and did not have enough information to perform the task, speak up. You are not going to get in trouble or whatever other type of situation one might imagine for not asking.

OP originally pitched the website clean up work providing a way to learn about the company, its products, history, etc.

If something is obvious, sure, but how is the new intern even going to know when to ask?

Being able to do this is a marketable skill. It’s one thing to write it but quite another to correct it

What is the point of assigning something to a new hire, if they can't do it without another person watching the whole thing over their shoulder AND they are unlikely to benefit from this knowledge in the future (since it's a legacy page that is supposed to be deleted)?

Anytime a website is created, the information/text to used in the site is provided to the devs. You provide the same data to the QA team to ensure the Dev team did their job.

How are we seriously this obtuse? Is it deliberate?

Instead of snark please re-read the entire comment thread from the beginning and you'll realize that the scenario you're imagining is completely different from what is being discussed.

I often assign things to new hires because I expect them to approach the question without the biases of long-time team members who have learned to overlook and normalize some bullshit. Either the new person is wrong, and I explain why, and they learned something, or they're right and the existing stuff can't be defended or justified, and I learned something.

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