No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor. For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term. They take more time for supervision than it would have taken for a senior developer to just accomplish their project.
If you assume that interns are actually cheap labor, I have to assume you've never run an internship program.
> I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are.
So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term, training actually makes the shortage more acute (as you have to move senior engineers into training programs).
The far more sensible solution is to just bid higher until you can get the senior developers which are actually out there. Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
Of course, they would always like to pay less for developers (just like I'd like to be paid more and would like to pay lower taxes). Fortunately, unless you have a magic training program which compresses 10 years of experience into 4 weeks, salaries are likely to stay high for quite some time.
You're kidding, right?
>For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap.
>For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term.
So are many dirt cheap outsourced developers. That doesn't change the why they are hired.
>So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term,
For a long term investment pay off.
>Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
I've literally never seen a company make a net profit on interns. Talk to people running intern programs: it's explicitly seen as a hiring funnel for full-time, not as an end of itself.
> A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
The lawsuit came after the cartel had already stopped functioning. Facebook refused to play ball and started recruiting aggressively from the other companies (particularly Google), directly undermining the wage-fixing.
Other industries (law, finance, fashion, media, etc.) heavily exploit interns to profit off their desperation.
(which is something the tech titans are trying to "fix")
Or just cheap labor.
>Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.
I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are. That's why several of them engaged in a wage fixing cartel.