I have seen both sides of this. In a company run by "police" interns are often asked to do the "Commando" type work. ie: Proof of concept with no need to scale, work in other languages, etc. Well that's 99% of the real work so anyone can bang that out.

Startups on the other hand tend to think profitability and scale as some sort of fairy land they might get to after all their problems are solved, but right now they need X.