Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by JoachimSchipper on Thursday June 30, 2011 @06:51AM (#2713437)

You may have been better off as an intern, but I could see the argument that if nobody's willing to work for free companies will have to pay a decent wage - a degree of collective bargaining by students and recent graduates who are unwilling to sell their summers for almost no money.

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by wccrawford on Thursday June 30, 2011 @07:02AM (#2713473)

Interns don't produce much output. They're inexperienced. What would take a professional a day to finish might take an intern 2 weeks, and take time from others to boot.

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.

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by JoachimSchipper on Thursday June 30, 2011 @07:26AM (#2713541)

I'm not a software developer (researcher), but are there really no tasks simple enough for interns in your average software company? When I worked as a sysadmin for a couple of months, the two (paid) intern programmers seemed to do most of the work on some (small) contracts. They definitely had some things to learn, but they got it done (with some help) and were absolutely net positive.

Maybe we just had unusually good interns, though (this was in the Netherlands).

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by wccrawford on Thursday June 30, 2011 @10:24AM (#2714128)

Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience and we're back to paying them for work done.

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.

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by JoachimSchipper on Thursday June 30, 2011 @03:39PM (#2715449)

In this specific case, they created some simple Rails websites - one seems to have basically been a simple CMS (with a nice design) for a customer, another was an internal time tracking tool. Both had at least one (more-or-less harmless) WTF [1], but the customer seems to have been happy, time tracking worked, and they definitely learned something.

[1] To be fair, one was putting my sample code in production.

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by burgerbrain on Thursday June 30, 2011 @02:40PM (#2715214)

"Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience"

Utter bullshit.

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Re:Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships by klbarry on Thursday June 30, 2011 @07:32AM (#2713557)

Especially in the case of liberal arts internships. A programmer is one story - paid internships for essentially unskilled labor are very rare.

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