You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring.
In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.
In that situation, the intern should be working for free (for the experience) and the company should consider any actual output to be compensation for the time spent having to help the intern along.
As the post's author noted, the 2 job descriptions he linked to do not fit the above criteria.
Any company that expects actual productivity from an intern is in the wrong.
Maybe we just had unusually good interns, though (this was in the Netherlands).
Complicated tasks need guidance and take time. But they're great for experience.
It's not even that they're really hard tasks, but that there are so many little details to software develop that everyone treats like common sense, but it's not... Until you have experience.
[1] To be fair, one was putting my sample code in production.
Utter bullshit.
You pay experience to interns. (IE People who take time from efficient employees and produce little output.)
When I started work I produced little output, because I was a newbie and knew nothing. I was paid just a little over minimum wage - but I still produced, even if it was crappy code and routine tasks nobody else wanted to do.
Companies used to do this all the time - you start at the bottom, fresh out of school, and you have to learn.
But you are still f*ing paid.
If (as an experienced hire) you start a job somewhere enterprisey, the amount of bureaucracy and induction procedure you experience in your first week can mean that you won't be a productive employee for at least a week, if not two. You'll probably still be taking time from experienced employees for months. You still get paid.
In such a place, the first week of employment of an experienced hire is exactly the same as it is for an intern.
Yes, an employee takes just as long to get up to speed as an intern, but hopefully that investment is paid off by years of work afterwards.
For a two or three month internship, you might spend half their time in getting them up to speed. And for that, you get the same amount of work (best case), then they are gone.
Yes, internships can be a great way of recruiting, probably the reason most companies do them at all, but saying that the upramp is comparable to normal FTEs is ignoring the fact that they aren't long term.
My point (possibly not particularly well made) was not that you should take on inexperienced pretend employees, treat them like real employees for three months, then get rid of them; but that you should take on inexperienced real employees and treat them like real employees.
Three months is a pretty normal probationary period for a real employee, so you can just as easily get rid of one if it doesn't work out; as you can an intern.
Very dependent on the type of internship. I saw one (unpaid) internship offering to give people experience working in a convience store. They basically wanted a normal employee to work as a cashier, but didn't want to pay them.
When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most.
The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience.
As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.