The GitHub lists are good. They just can't tell you anything.
The community internship repos are one of the better things about early-career recruiting. Free, fast, well curated, run by people doing it for the right reasons. This page isn't an argument that they're bad. It's an argument about push versus pull.
A repo is something you have to remember to check. An alert is something that finds you.
Side by side
Each row is how that tool is built to work, taken from what it says about itself. None of this is a benchmark we ran.
| GitHub internship lists | Trakker | |
|---|---|---|
| How you find out | You open the repo, or watch it and read the commit noise | An email, filtered to your tracks, when the job appears |
| How often it updates | When a maintainer merges, which is fast on a good week | Every pass, all day, on a schedule |
| What it covers | Usually software, sometimes quant, by season | Seventeen tracks including hardware, design, banking, consulting |
| Filtering | Ctrl-F | Track, level, season, location, and saved filters |
| Cost | Free | Free plan with a daily digest, $5 a week for instant |
What the repos are better at
Being free, being transparent, and being run by people who know the space. You can read every change, the curation is often excellent, and there's no account to make. If checking a page once a day works for you, that's a perfectly reasonable way to run a search and it costs nothing.
When not to switch
If you're already in the habit of checking daily and your track is well covered by a list you like, you have most of the value. The case for switching is about the jobs that open and fill between two of your checks.
The detail
- Watching the repo isn't the same as an alert
- GitHub can notify you on every commit, which on an active list means dozens of notifications a day covering every track, every company and every formatting fix. Same information, none of the filtering, which is why most people turn it off inside a week.
- Use both
- Plenty of people do. The lists are a good sanity check on our coverage, and more than one company got added to our watch list because it turned up there first.
Other comparisons
- Trakker vs LinkedIn job alertsAn alert built on an index can't be faster than the crawl that feeds it. Reading the employer's hiring system removes that step.
- Trakker vs HandshakeOne feed is defined by your school's employer list. The other is defined by the employers' own career pages, which is a different and much larger set.
- Trakker vs job boardsIndex, then notify. We drop the first step, and the second stops being a schedule.