Another ethical dimension of this internship has been the amount of trust involved in how my time is structured. Most days, Liz and I can only meet for the first 30 minutes to an hour. Once she’s confident I have enough to work on, I’m largely left to my own devices for the rest of the day. That setup requires trust, and it’s made me much more aware of how I communicate progress and account for my time.
Early on, we talked about the nature of the work, especially the more coding-heavy parts of the site. We both understood that this kind of work isn’t always linear. You can spend hours debugging or reading documentation and still have very little that’s visually obvious at the end of the day. While she understood that reality, she also made the fair point that I couldn’t spend an entire day coding and have nothing tangible to show for it.
My counterargument was that being incentivized to show the highest volume of visible output isn’t really an industry metric in tech. In many cases, less, well-structured code is far more valuable than a larger amount of messy or redundant code. Spaghetti code might look productive in the short term, but it creates problems down the line. What matters more is clarity, maintainability, and intent.
The compromise we reached was a balanced approach. I would spend part of the day on visible, design-forward tasks—things like banners, layouts, and cleaning up messy sections of the site—and the other part on less visible but essential work, like improving UX/UI flows, reading documentation, and adding clear comments and notes so future contributors can understand what’s happening without me being there.
This balance has helped maintain accountability without undervaluing invisible labor. It’s also allowed for more difficult, thoughtful, and ultimately more unique work to happen alongside the day-to-day deliverables. What I’ve taken from this is that ethical work environments don’t just reward output—they make room for quality, complexity, and trust, which is where the most meaningful work tends to come from.