Opportunism
During my internship over the summer I worked with three other interns in my specific department. I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in their clearing house. The CME is one of the largest derivatives exchanges in the world, and the clearing house takes a lot of the risk away from trading by matching trades and acting as the buyer to every seller and vice versa, ensuring that if one side can not fulfill the trade, then CME will fulfill the trade itself.
Over the summer we worked in a department that would receive emails and phone calls from firms that needed our help for something, where we would either complete the task for them or hand them off to the department that would be able to help them as part of our daily operations. Most of the help we did for them as interns had to do with testing how their systems worked with ours to ensure there were no problems. We would do these tests individually, but we would also have projects throughout the summer where we either worked together in teams of 2 or all 4 together at once.
As i mentioned before, most of the intern daily "grunt work" was entering test trades for firms that wanted them. They would email our department and we would take the specific emails for tests and then complete them on a first come basis. At the beginning of the summer I would try to get as many tests done as I could in order to get better and learn how to do different types of them. We had four interns, so much of the time only one of us would be doing a test at a time, usually no more than two at a time. This would allow for a chance for some of us to free-ride the daily testing grunt work. Even if one of us saw the email for tests, we could just ignore it and one of the other interns would have to do it. The person free-riding would get no punishment as they could say they had not seen the email yet, and the full employees would only tell all the interns that there was a test case in the inbox that needed to be done and that we needed to stay on top of it if it had been sitting there for at least an hour.
The way that the completion of these tests had been set up, it would be fairly easy for any of us to free-ride off of the other interns by merely waiting for one of the others to see the email and complete it. Also, even if nobody does the email, the interns as a whole would merely be told to get on top of it, so there would be no real punishment specifically for an intern that was acting opportunistic and free-riding.
This opportunistic free-riding does not happen when we work on projects as a group however. Most projects we are able to split up and we each have our specific roles. This way, we are all held accountable for our own specific part and do not have the ability to free-ride from the other interns.
This free-riding does not usually take place for the test trades, however another type of opportunism might. We all actually race to try and assign ourselves to the testing case. One reason may be that the full-time employees that work there use the same email inbox to solve tougher cases for firms, and are usually monitoring it. When we assign ourselves a case, our name appears on it and all people monitoring it are able to see that we are working on a case. We usually try to get cases as soon as we see them, and beat the other interns to the punch. This is likely because we want our names on the case and we want the full time workers to see us as working and being productive. However, taking as many cases as you can leaves the other interns with fewer cases to be able to out there name on and be able to say they completed to the full-time employees.
Over the summer we worked in a department that would receive emails and phone calls from firms that needed our help for something, where we would either complete the task for them or hand them off to the department that would be able to help them as part of our daily operations. Most of the help we did for them as interns had to do with testing how their systems worked with ours to ensure there were no problems. We would do these tests individually, but we would also have projects throughout the summer where we either worked together in teams of 2 or all 4 together at once.
As i mentioned before, most of the intern daily "grunt work" was entering test trades for firms that wanted them. They would email our department and we would take the specific emails for tests and then complete them on a first come basis. At the beginning of the summer I would try to get as many tests done as I could in order to get better and learn how to do different types of them. We had four interns, so much of the time only one of us would be doing a test at a time, usually no more than two at a time. This would allow for a chance for some of us to free-ride the daily testing grunt work. Even if one of us saw the email for tests, we could just ignore it and one of the other interns would have to do it. The person free-riding would get no punishment as they could say they had not seen the email yet, and the full employees would only tell all the interns that there was a test case in the inbox that needed to be done and that we needed to stay on top of it if it had been sitting there for at least an hour.
The way that the completion of these tests had been set up, it would be fairly easy for any of us to free-ride off of the other interns by merely waiting for one of the others to see the email and complete it. Also, even if nobody does the email, the interns as a whole would merely be told to get on top of it, so there would be no real punishment specifically for an intern that was acting opportunistic and free-riding.
This opportunistic free-riding does not happen when we work on projects as a group however. Most projects we are able to split up and we each have our specific roles. This way, we are all held accountable for our own specific part and do not have the ability to free-ride from the other interns.
This free-riding does not usually take place for the test trades, however another type of opportunism might. We all actually race to try and assign ourselves to the testing case. One reason may be that the full-time employees that work there use the same email inbox to solve tougher cases for firms, and are usually monitoring it. When we assign ourselves a case, our name appears on it and all people monitoring it are able to see that we are working on a case. We usually try to get cases as soon as we see them, and beat the other interns to the punch. This is likely because we want our names on the case and we want the full time workers to see us as working and being productive. However, taking as many cases as you can leaves the other interns with fewer cases to be able to out there name on and be able to say they completed to the full-time employees.
Your story suggests some questions about the work more broadly considered than our prompt. First, I assume they don't have interns outside the summer. Is that right? But the demand for testing trades must be all year round. Who satisfies that demand the rest of the time? Second, do the interns have a particular person who oversees them? In most internships, as I understand things, it is kind of a trial employment. The company evaluates the intern and the intern evaluates the company. If it is a good fit, then the intern is invited for a permanent job. Assuming that was happening in your case, who was doing the evaluation for the CME of you and your fellow interns? Third, the way you told the story, it sounded like they could have gotten by with fewer interns. Do you know what considerations determined how many there actually were?
ReplyDeleteNow returning to your story and the free riding, I didn't get a sense of why running the trades was unpleasant nor of what you would be doing when you were free riding. So you might elaborate more on this. Then turning it back to what was mentioned about the role of internships, would the regular work at CME, if you were to get a job in the division where you interned, also be unpleasant? You said in the group work there was no shirking because of accountability. But I wonder where the group work was also more interesting to do. So you might comment on that.
The last question that comes to mind is about whether you felt you were in competition with your fellow interns. Such a competition might impact the behavior you described. It didn't sound like like there was this sort of competition, but I'm wondering why there wasn't.
There are some interns that are there full-time, usually that go to school nearby. However, I do not think that for this specific department there are any interns for this school year. The testing of trades would be completed by the full-time employees then. We were delegated these certain types of cases because they are easy to do and they do not take much time and are repetitive. We usually did them in the background of our other project work or intern events. They are done by the full-timers when there are no interns, even during the summer when we were all at certain intern-wide events and not at our desks, but it is just the type of repetitive busy work that is easily delegated. When working on a project doing this may take away from what you are working on, but they can sometimes also be done as a break from the other projects. If there was a day where we had no projects or events to go to, then there would be a little competition as to who can assign themselves to these first. Sometimes if these tests did not go as the firms had expected, these could also turn into projects that you would need to solve, so when working on other things this would be another possible reason to free-ride and let someone else take it. I can recall one specific firm with which seemed to encounter problems more frequently from testing than others, and I specifically stalled assigning myself to a couple of cases where this firm was asking for testing if I was already working on a project and another intern was less busy.
DeleteYou said that the majority of your work was to do test trades throughout the summer. But, you also say that normally only one or two of the interns would be doing the test trades at any given time. Since the CME had hired four interns I assume they had other work for you. What else did the CME have you do and why was it not as important as the test trades?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that your problem could be solved with effective management. If a manager could delegate tasks, that would limit the free rider problem per say. Although, based on this post it does not seem you enjoyed your internship. Did you have other roles or projects? The CME seems like a wonderful place to work for, hence my questions.
ReplyDelete