The Jevons Intern Paradox
Why your most capable intern gets the least useful mentoring and how to fix this absurdity.
Let's talk about a weird economic concept from the 19th century: the Jevons paradox and why this idea (grounded in coal 😳) haunting your student mentorship today.
Ok,you know exactly who I’m talking about: the intern who walks in with that annoying aura, dripping confidence and armed with an obnoxiously complete LinkedIn profile. On day two, she's already charming your toughest client. Day three, she's casually building dashboards that make your own look like kindergarten art projects. Day four, she gently advises you to reconsider your "writing style." You think desperately: MUST-KEEP-INTERN. MUST.
And then, day five rolls around. What now?
Absolutely nothing.
You abandon mentorship altogether because, let's face it, she's clearly running the team and possibly your life and stock portfolio better than you ever could.
So you go back to important things like organizing your office plant.
Congratulations: you've stumbled into the Jevons paradox of internships.
A brief history of coal (because why not?)
Back in 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons discovered a bizarre twist: better steam engines didn't reduce coal consumption; they boosted it. Efficiency didn't create savings, it fed addiction. More usage, more coal.
This odd little twist became known as the ‘Jevons paradox’.
The Jevons intern
Fast-forward to the modern intern apocalypse. Interns now arrive absurdly over-prepared, complete with polished LinkedIn profiles and self-reflection apps that probably know everything.
Ok, now here’s the paradox: The more capable and prepared interns are, the less mentorship they receive. The better they perform, the less we guide them; creating a bizarre discrepancy between capability and coaching. You’d expect excellent interns to attract even better mentoring, but the opposite happens.
Why waste mentorship hours explaining meetings when she's already running your agenda like a highly efficient robot assistant?
Why talk developmental goals when she's managing hers on a Gantt chart so detailed you can see it from space?
Why teach feedback when she's already sprinkling "feed forward" into conversations as smoothly as corporate confetti?
Outcome: less mentoring, more exploitation, and ironically, significantly less real learning.
Real mentorship isn't teaching Excel
But lets be frank: Mentorship isn't about memorizing Excel shortcuts or pretending KPIs aren't just a way to procrastinate productively. Real mentoring means decoding the weird rituals of your company’s culture:
-How to write emails without sounding homicidal or overly enthusiastic (equally suspicious).
-Whether lunch actually starts when your manager ceremonially opens their sad salad.
-The true meaning of "come up with something creative": just replicate exactly what we’ve done for decades but pretend it’s innovative and look really smart doing so.
Without cracking these codes, even your superstar intern is merely an outsider, fluent in jargon, a no-no in nuance.
Too much mentoring? Welcome to disaster
On the flip side, relentless mentoring; daily emotional check-ins, reflections that would make Freud blush, and buddy systems tighter than a Netflix family account with to little bandwidth on a rainy Sunday creates interns who won’t move without explicit instructions. They become professional passengers, always waiting to be chauffeured.
Here Jevons' paradox laughs at us again. Excessive mentoring creates more dependency, not less.
How to escape the paradox
Mentor strategically: step away when it's safe, step in when it matters. Give interns breathing room; not just for efficiency, but sanity.
Harness intern brilliance to humorously audit your office rituals. Future interns (and anthropologists) will thank you.
Mentorship conversations limited to “how’s it going?” could be more effectively directed at your office plant, it at least looks more engaged.
We don't have to regress to fax machines and floppy disks, but occasionally switching off the glamorous lights of productivity expectations reveals what’s genuinely important.
Even if that means occasionally withholding direct guidance from your star interns, reminding yourself that efficiency should prompt more meaningful mentorship; not less. After all, mentoring isn’t about doing less work; it’s about making sure the work you do actually counts.