It almost certainly wouldn't have been legal in the U.S. to dock an exempt employee's pay, but I've seen plenty of U.S. startups with absolutely no understanding of wage and salary laws.

The $100 / month thing was for an internship, and I've seen plenty of U.S. startups straight up assume they can treat interns as unpaid labor.

Well, it clearly didn't take place in the US since she had an employment agreement that required a two-month separation notice from the employer.

$100/month pay surprised me as being way too low.

I'm Brazilian, I once interned (when I was still in college) for a 33 million pounds Star up for $200 dollars a month. They would pay me through Paypal who took 20 dollars as cut, haha. Those were dark times.

Not pounds, euros. Sorry

The behavior described means it was not a first world country, couldn’t be US, UK, EU, Canada, or Australia. The amount of money is also too small for those places.

You would be surprised by a lot of the shit that some US/CA based startups pull, theres no shortage of self-funded (broke) pipe-dreamers trying to create the "next big app" using cheap/free intern labor.

I worked for one briefly as an intern many years ago. The "CEO" had a self directed and "burn and churn" strategy, working interns as hard as he could till they quit, I saw him make one cry for not working hard enough. He would also split interns into cohorts to prevent communication between the groups, eventually interns wisened up by communicating through linkedin and quit en masse. The owner even got reported to and investigated by the labor bureau although not much came of that. Afterwards I ran into a couple other similar startups while looking for other intern/junior positions and knew to avoid them.

The people who run these companies know to target students/bootcampers. They hangout on beginner forums, discord channels, and college campuses, I remember going to my state university's job fair and probably 80% of the booths there were for some sort of pyramid-scheme/scam.

Ive never seen a software one come close to working, but sadly some people do find success with these shady business models, a good example would be "College Pro Painters". Once they hire you, you are required to pay them thousands of dollars up front for overpriced painting equipment, you are then expected to manage finding clients and painting all on your own. They keep a significant portion of what you earn plus charge all sorts of hidden fees. Most students who join end up painting a few houses before discovering they are only earning like $2/hr and quit, the company is also apparently quite good at scaring students into continuing to work for them by threatening legal action for not paying the "quitting fee"...

The $100/month was for an intern. There are tons of unpaid internships in the US, so I wouldn't assume it wasn't there. Though in the tech world with talent in demand, if they aren't paying interns then that may be a red flag. However, from sentence structure, I would guess that English was a second (though well known) language.

Legally it's not necessary to pay an intern anything (at least in NL). I probably earned 3x more when I did my internship. I think they should at least pay minimum wage

Internships in the US must either be unpaid (part of the educational process, intern can only do very limited work) or must pay at least minimum wage.

I would guess Europe possibly India

And if you are "salaried" normally that means no fixed hours of work its literally one of the defining characteristics in labour law.

Huh, i don't know which place of Europe you're thinking about but this seems highly unlikely. You can't exceed 48h/week in the EU, and 100$/month (84€) is just stupidly low for countries in western Europe, it would even be illegal in a lot of them: For example, in France, an internship longer than two months has to be paid 3,9€/hour a minima (for reference, minimum wage in france is 10,25€/hour).

I was thinking eastern Europe.

And for professional jobs aka "Cardere" as they are called in France the WTD doesn't really apply

Yeah, and probably these companies also depend on the student having the government's free public transport card

It certainly wouldn't be legal to dock an employee's wages in any central European country. Labor laws here are too good to allow that kind of abuse.