We use internships as a pipeline to hire. We pay them for their time, they get real world experience. We both get quality time together to see if long term this is a good fit. Those who start full time ramp up much faster and are generally successful in their career.

I was hired at the end of my internship and switched over to regular work and grew as an independent employee to handle more serious workloads. My internship was an investment that the company paid into me (and other folks) and by the time I left the company I feel like I more than paid that back.

It's essentially just a probationary period at the start of employment but with much less expectation to retain the employee and less commitment from the potential employee to stay on.

As a computer science student, us students idealize those internships because the benefits and longer hours means more money to pay off student loans.

When I was in college, I did a paid internship at a health insurance company, wherein I audited, documented, and updated requirements for a large SQL script that pulled data from hospitals and used it to calculate reimbursement for Medicare/Medicaid claims (RAPS). Basically, you have to map hospital billing codes to federal ones.

The script was written several years prior by my mentor, and the risk adjustment department had no visibility into how the codes were mapped -- and if it was wrong, we could be fined up to ~$10M (depending on severity), or be missing out on ~$1M in revenue. (It turned out my mentor had done a pretty good job and we only needed minor adjustments, although we also updated the architecture so the risk adjustment folks could define the mapping themselves going forward.)

So in short, I can definitively state that

1) it would have cost the company less for my mentor to do the work directly.

2) The several thousands of dollars that the company spent between my salary and my mentor's was definitely worth the millions in mitigated risk/liability.

3) My mentor enjoyed teaching me much more than he would have enjoyed doing the work himself.

And I'd like to think that I ended up doing a slightly more thorough job than my mentor might have done -- his long tenure at the company and accumulated knowledge of these sorts of scripts being job security of some sort ;)

Anyway, the point here is that internships don't have to be a zero sum game. They can cost more than paying your existing employees to do the same work, and still be valuable.

The point is to build relationships with a good school and get a pipeline of applicants that will eventually become great engineers.

I recall someone whining he couldn't find good junior engineers. I suggested he go to his local (pretty good) CS school. He then started to whine that they all were already interning at good companies and were transitioning to full time and there was no way for him to break-in!

I've worked at places where the onboarding was generally terrible and I'd still say 80% of the co-op interns we hired were value-positive.

Although, when I do reflect on it, I suppose there was a lot we did right: - always willing to help newcomers - answering their questions - knowing when not to answer questions and let them learn through failure instead - reassuring them through mistakes (and just being positive overall) - checking in on them once in awhile

But none of these things take any sort of preparation. It's all just cultural.

> Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity.

Well, you could be correct. I've definitely seen the situation where developers have a reputation that I know first-hand through their work isn't merited. It could also be that maybe your standards are just a little too high for what you expect people right out of (or still in) college.

But that's for a Senior or Principle dev - for intermediary devs I wouldn't expect positive gain for the company for a good two months and junior devs tend to be more expensive with that training phase lasting for something like six weeks.

Interns are a loss for companies - but please don't stop hiring them, you'll get some great employees out of the process and you're also investing in developing better communication and mentorship skills for your long term employees. As someone working at a company that was teensy tiny when I started this latter point is quite important - I actively invest in my skills to keep up with the curve and make sure I'm still providing as much value as is reasonable for my position. If I had been locked away to dev code in isolation when I was hired I'd be super rusty at a lot of skills that provide my employer real value.

One thing I'm still not sold on is that interns are a net loss. They would often get to do work that was novel to them and tedious to your full-time developers. Work that was nice-to-have but no-one-wants-to-do. It's hard to put a price tag on it. Especially with externalities that come with that kind of work; bad ones like killing employee morale for whoever has to do it and good ones like increasing the team's productivity. Interns, in my experience, are not prone to the former yet still contribute to the latter. Examples of such work are things like updating tests and documentation or tackling some not-so-urgent tech debt.

Assuming that they still create tech debt of their own because they probably were (and we all are, aren't we?) my experience has been positive.

When I mentor college students, the only times we hear about unpaid internships are:

1) Unfunded wannabe startups or small family businesses who don't understand what they need, but they assume they can convince some naive kid to do it for free. No one with actual skills or prospects takes these jobs. Job boards remove these posts if they're moderated.

2) Students who struggle to get a normal internship, so their dad/uncle/cousin/neighbor lets them do an unpaid "internship" off the books at their company to get something to put on their resume. They don't really do much work, but now they can put a line on their resume and claim some work experience for the next interview.

In non-tech fields this sort of thing is much more common and, at least when I went through school in the States, the fact that you might have to work an unpaid internship was a reality we all accepted (the cultural perception may have moved on). It's not illegal but it's possible very few HR person would allow such a posting - internships aren't profitable for companies, so most of the unpaid internships were teensy companies that hadn't realized that their interns would actually cost the company money regardless of the salary.

1. Here's the DOL's Fact Sheet including the seven evaluation metrics: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

2. Which is it's own problem - working an internship at Google is basically having Game of Thrones on your IMDB page and the FAANG companies do exploit this perceived prestige.

I'd rather have Alien, but each to their own.

Unless this claim is scoped to the tech industry, it's absolutely wrong. Frankly I don't know the actual legal status but it's standard practice in a lot of industries, esp. things like publishing.

That said, the interpretation changed some in 2015 and again n 2018. Here is the Department of Labor's "test" on whether or not you can provide unpaid internships: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

That's federal, but some states have stricter laws.

> Unpaid internships are legal if the intern is the "primary beneficiary" of the arrangement. This is determined by the seven-point Primary Beneficiary Test.

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internshi...

Moreover, if companies weren't getting value out of internships, they wouldn't continue hiring interns.

But they cost so much of my time that I no longer want to hire any.

If they were at college completing courses, they'd be giving up their labor towards that. If you consider an internship an educational opportunity, then the argument that they should be paid holds no water (since they don't get paid for college work, instead they pay for the experience).

Obviously, not all internships are _really_ educational opportunities, but I would expect most of them to be to at least some extent. To argue that all of them are just "the intern doing work for the employer, and the only difference is the amount of work compared to a full employee" is naive at best, and possibly disingenuous.

- the junior individual (intern, student) is doing work

- the junior individual expects to learn during the experience

- the senior entity (college, company) is expected to put effort into making sure the junior has learning opportunities

- the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee

Now, how similar/dis-similar they are depends heavily on how much the internship focuses on the learning experience and how much the intern adds to the company.

But to say that the intern is definitely contributing more than they are gain is factually incorrect. And

> They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly.

The thing is, "accordingly" is open to interpretation and, in some cases where the intern is getting a lot more than they give, it's reasonable to argue that it is "not at all".

This depends. I am a student and at my last internship I was given work that nobody really had time for but ended up (towards the end) becoming a key part of a revenue-generating, customer-facing feature. While a senior could have done the same stuff in less time, I feel like the fact that this stuff was initially something nobody at the company had time for initially provided some sort of value to the company.

And the pressure to deliver only increases when talking FAANG internships, which pay (hourly) at the same rate as a junior engineer. It seems absurd to me to pay an intern that much to deliver negative value to a team, don't you think?

I do agree, 100%. I think many interns add value and should be paid accordingly. I think many other interns cost more than the add (and gain a lot), and I can see where needing to pay them would mean they wouldn't be there at all. And I think there's a lot area between those two cases.

> This depends.

Honestly, that's all I was trying to say originally; that it depends on the situation.

> the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee

College students don't "contribute productivity" at all, because they don't have an employer/employee relationship with the school. The work they do is entirely orthogonal to the school's revenue. This comparison fundamentally does not make sense.

For six months I worked as an intern, getting paid less than my rent. If didn't have parents that could've supported me, I would've been unemployed.

I don't work for free. You presumably don't.

Pay your interns and pay them a livable salary.

I've only had interns at one job, and I had a similar complaint.

My boss told me that's exactly what's supposed to happen. He explained that they're not free labor. I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn.

I guess in some ways he was right. Many of the most valuable lessons I've learned at work have come through mistakes I've made. And probably a bunch when I was an intern all those years ago.

I had intended to say this myself.

Computer programmers rarely train themselves. Very few of anything train themselves. Autodidacts who can become masters of <insert field here> are extremely rare, and even those that have that capability can still pick up a lot of information from someone with decades of experience.

Our species seems to learn best through being taught by those with more experience than us.

Somewhat like nearly every entry level engineer.

You are right that "free labor" is a inept way to think about internships, but it's also true that its one of those things where returns are somewhat dependent on investment. A good internship program can get a lot of useful things done and also be useful to the interns. There is certainly variability, but typical interns can be productive withing the scope of their term. Great ones will outproduce some of your full timers.

Biggest win is if you do it right you can make some great hires.

When I was in Uni, I did a 6 month paid internship. A year and a half later I joined the company and stayed for two years. When I left, there was still code that I wrote during my internship running in production. I'm sure the other staff could have done it faster and better than I did, but it was clearly good enough to keep 3.5 years after my internship ended.

I managed interns for years in my role as a UI development manager. The main reason to hire interns was as part of our hiring pipeline. It basically served as an extended interview. Any actual work they produced was a bonus.

We were also able to keep interns on through the academic year (part-time), which made the time commitment even more worthwhile. The lack of productivity wasn't because they were interns - it was because they were new to the job. This did require flexibility around their school schedule, so instilling good communication habits early was necessary.

We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.

Yes, most of the time they have negative productivity, but as an intern I had some demanding projects where our work was part of the final (revenue earning) product.

But that's how it goes. Pay people for their time.