I worked on multiple co-op and part-time contracts as a data analyst for the same employer over the past 1.5 years. The team consisted of myself, another co-op student when I was working part-time and the manager, who had been there since last winter (2025). He has a degree in CS from about 15 years ago and his technical skills are SQL, Power BI/Tableau, Excel. His main tasks were to gain requirements from stakeholders and update the ticket planner. One thing I noticed is that he delegated all technical tasks to the students:
- A large part of the codebase is in pandas, but he never learned it since he said it would be too hard for him to understand code. I tried to encourage him since he knows SQL and transitioning to pandas is not challenging. Even though his CS degree was a long time ago, he would still have that programming background and he mentioned that he already learned harder languages in his degree (e.g. Java, Prolog). However, he always refused and just cared about running the scripts. I also tried to teach him Git, but he did not care. At the end, I was responsible for trying to understand the other student's code and merge everything together.
- When a co-op student joined the team, he would give them a dashboard and data pipeline to complete. If the co-op student did not finish the task by the end of the term, it would just be given to the next co-op student. If one student finished early and the other student started later, the project would be uncompleted for 2 weeks since he did not work on it.
- Many tickets on the backlog had not been looked at for months, since myself or the other co-op student were busy with our own tasks and the manager expected the tickets to be only completed by us. Some of the tickets were Power BI dashboard updates I am sure he could do.
- When migrating data pipelines to Azure, the main IT team was responsible for building the infastructure (e.g. VM, Self-Hosted Integrated Runtime) and the manager said we should just give them all our code so they can deploy it to Azure. Luckily, we still kept ownership and our team needed to build the pipelines to Azure Data Factory with the Python code. The director above my manager asked him to take Azure courses, but he never did. When the project was starting, he said it was a priority for leadership and I asked him what he was doing for it. He just laughed and did some random test contribution and I had to complete the whole project. Although I learned a lot, it did not make sense for a part-time student to build a whole data pipeline in Azure Data Factory and try to learn everything fully myself. When I told the director and manager this, the response was that "rotating between co-op students and giving them projects is what makes the team innovative and you should be glad to have this experience with Azure."
- The manager gave challenging interviews for co-op students that would be meant for junior, mid-level. During the behavioural interview, the students would be disqualified if they said that they wanted to "learn and improve their technical skills" in the co-op because the manager said "he cannot teach them anything". He also gave students a technical assessment and a take-home project of creating a dashboard and doing an in-person presentation. Even with competitive companies, I have not seen such a long process.
I am not trying to say the manager did not do anything because talking to stakeholders and understanding their requirements is important. He also seems to be a nice guy and praises my work. He believed that doing data pipelines with Python, SQL and Git was revolutionary since he would just use Power BI transformations, which means he would just give the students all the technical work. While I understand he did not have the technical skills, he could have learned them given his background. This would help with business continuity since temporary students would not be responsible for everything. It is also unfair for the students to be paid a very low wage and do a lot of the big projects.
But, I am not sure if my concerns are valid. Maybe I should not complain since I did learn a lot and some students don't do anything. I am starting a new co-op at a larger organization where there is more structure so I am wondering how I will adjust.