7 ms·

when you say 'student', you mean low-paid, right? Last I looked, it was illegal to have unpaid interns working on anything your company might actually use to g

when you say 'student', you mean low-paid, right? Last I looked, it was illegal to have unpaid interns working on anything your company might actually use to generate income.

modoc 17y ago
Really? I didn't know that. Reference? Not an issue for me, but seems odd to me somehow....
- imp 17y ago
  I think Mark Cuban wrote a blog post complaining about how he wanted to hire a bunch of people for cheap, but if they added value to the Mavericks then he would have to pay them minimum wage.
  - qeorge 17y ago
    That's where I first heard of this as well. Here's the link: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/ http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...
- jessriedel 17y ago
  This was a real surprise to me too. Here's some discussion I found: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/ http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi... I figured that if you were getting paid nothing while working on something profitable for a company, it was assumed you were being compensated with experience. But apparently, all the company can do is train you while deriving zero benefit from your training. This seems like a stupid law.
  - akeefer 17y ago
    I believe that the law is there to prevent companies from calling ordinary employees "interns" for the sake of getting around minimum wage laws.
    - dpatru 17y ago
      Turning the perspective around, minimum-wage laws can be seen as having the purpose of preventing low skilled people from learning on the job. One of the best ways to learn is take a job is the field you want to learn in. You get paid to learn. This is better than having to pay to learn. Unfortunately minimum-wage laws make this option available only to people who already have enough skills that they can produce at least minimum-wage value while learning. So an MBA-level person can take a manager's job in a restaurant for low pay to learn restaurant-managing skills, but a high-schooler may not be able to take a cook's job to learn basic job skills like showing up on time, being diligent, following directions, etc. because the high-schooler may not be producing enough net value to justify even minimum wage.
    - jessriedel 17y ago
      But the idea behind minimum wage (as I understand it) is to ensure a living wage to people who are supporting themselves with the job. If you aren't getting paid anything, then you clearly aren't supporting yourself with the job; you're investing in yourself, just like going to school. That's why I assumed it would be legal to pay people zero but illegal to pay people less than minimum wage.
  - WillyF 17y ago
    I wrote that! :)
- japherwocky 17y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=intern+labor+laws http://www.google.com/search?q=intern+labor+laws is what i'm going off of
price 17y ago
No. We looked at what students can make at jobs on campus, and then we pegged our wage to the high end of that. CS students have plenty of options, and if you don't pay your interns well ... you won't have any interns.
- nradov 17y ago
  Or rather, you will only have interns from wealthy families who can afford to work for free. Better to pay them and expand the applicant pool; it doesn't cost much.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  You are probably aware of this already, but there's a huge pool of CS students you're cutting out by pegging yourself only above, say, Starbucks wages. Most of the major companies (MS, GOOG, etc) pay in excess of $30/hr (some as high as $40/hr) for interns. This is way, way beyond the high end of campus jobs.
  - Hoff 17y ago
    And (an entirely serious question) how can one tap into this huge pool of idle CS students?
    - dfield 17y ago
      Most aren't idle. But to tap into this group, try campus recruiting?
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      I'm not quite sure what you mean - my impression from engineering and CS during college is as such: - most of this pool of students you do not want to tap into. They're the ones who will do more harm than good, assuming they were even interested in doing any work. My impression from my time in college was that the majority of my colleagues were utterly incompetent and had no real desire to become competent. There's no hope for these people, and IMHO they make up the bulk of the "there are no jobs out there!" crowd upon graduation. These are the guys who do the bare minimum on assignments and have never written a line of code that wasn't required by a class, and get indignant when their framed piece of paper doesn't automatically deliver big paychecks on a silver platter. - the rest are worthwhile talent, but competition amongst employers for many of them is fierce. I have a friend right now who has extremely high-paying offers from just about every big software shop out there, as a soon-to-graduate undergrad. In recent years I've seen MS (and some other companies) poach interns from other tech companies at the interview stage. Pay levels are quite high, approaching full-time levels in some places. As a cost-conscious startup, you have to work hard to find the people that the Big Boys have overlooked. Recruitment processes is an extremely imprecise science, and from experience I've seen a lot of qualified people unfairly rejected because of dumb things like not having the right keywords in a resume to pass the inbound filter, or edged out because they froze up on a single interview question. There are quite a few of these guys out there, but the problem is that because many do not know how to market themselves, it's hard to distinguish them from the incompetent, worthless demographic.
brown9-2 17y ago
The second paragraph of the article states that the student interns were paid.
wushupork 17y ago
It is quite common in Thailand at least to have internships that are unpaid. The way the company sees it is that they are spending resources and time making this person more valuable than they would be without the experience. I think that's the mentality over there.
pmjordan 17y ago
This seems to be one rule where the employee is more protected in the US than the EU. Unpaid internships are common here. Common to the extent that some graduates end up working for free for years before finally being promoted to a paid position. It's so prolific that the current generation of 20-somethings is frequently called "Generation Praktikum" (the internship generation) in Austria & Germany.
- scscsc 17y ago
  It's not that they are more protected; market economy simply works that way: MS/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc are competing for employers, the best way to get good ones is from good interns.
- ido 17y ago
  I don't know where you are exactly, but I am in Vienna and I haven't really encountered those unpaid internships much at all, at least not among the computer science & mathematics crowd. I and a lot of people I know are/were working (not as interns) alongside school and many internships at the university are payed. The pay might not be as high as what you'd get after you graduate but it's definitively better than most working class jobs that do not require any formal education.
  - eru 17y ago
    > I don't know where you are exactly, but I am in Vienna and I haven't really encountered those unpaid internships much at all, at least not among the computer science & mathematics crowd. The grandfather-post's observation applies more to liberal arts students (Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften). With a math degree in Germany I never had a problem getting a paid internship during my studies. Some of my friends in the liberal arts, however, have to do unpaid interships even after finishing their studies. Of course the media perception is dominated by liberal arts guys, because they are the ones who complain loudly and in a matter sympathetic to journalists. (While the more technical minded people are too busy making money and enjoying themselves.) Hence the "Generation Praktikum".
    - 17y ago

when you say 'student', you mean low-paid, right? Last I looked, it was illegal to have unpaid interns working on anything your company might actually use to generate income.

modoc 17y ago

Really? I didn't know that. Reference? Not an issue for me, but seems odd to me somehow....

imp 17y ago
I think Mark Cuban wrote a blog post complaining about how he wanted to hire a bunch of people for cheap, but if they added value to the Mavericks then he would have to pay them minimum wage.
- qeorge 17y ago
  That's where I first heard of this as well. Here's the link: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship-so-you-can-get-valuable-experience-screw-you/ http://blogmaverick.com/2009/09/05/want-an-unpaid-internship...
jessriedel 17y ago
This was a real surprise to me too. Here's some discussion I found: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/ http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi... I figured that if you were getting paid nothing while working on something profitable for a company, it was assumed you were being compensated with experience. But apparently, all the company can do is train you while deriving zero benefit from your training. This seems like a stupid law.
- akeefer 17y ago
  I believe that the law is there to prevent companies from calling ordinary employees "interns" for the sake of getting around minimum wage laws.
  - dpatru 17y ago
    Turning the perspective around, minimum-wage laws can be seen as having the purpose of preventing low skilled people from learning on the job. One of the best ways to learn is take a job is the field you want to learn in. You get paid to learn. This is better than having to pay to learn. Unfortunately minimum-wage laws make this option available only to people who already have enough skills that they can produce at least minimum-wage value while learning. So an MBA-level person can take a manager's job in a restaurant for low pay to learn restaurant-managing skills, but a high-schooler may not be able to take a cook's job to learn basic job skills like showing up on time, being diligent, following directions, etc. because the high-schooler may not be producing enough net value to justify even minimum wage.
  - jessriedel 17y ago
    But the idea behind minimum wage (as I understand it) is to ensure a living wage to people who are supporting themselves with the job. If you aren't getting paid anything, then you clearly aren't supporting yourself with the job; you're investing in yourself, just like going to school. That's why I assumed it would be legal to pay people zero but illegal to pay people less than minimum wage.
- WillyF 17y ago
  I wrote that! :)
japherwocky 17y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=intern+labor+laws http://www.google.com/search?q=intern+labor+laws is what i'm going off of

price 17y ago

No. We looked at what students can make at jobs on campus, and then we pegged our wage to the high end of that. CS students have plenty of options, and if you don't pay your interns well ... you won't have any interns.

nradov 17y ago
Or rather, you will only have interns from wealthy families who can afford to work for free. Better to pay them and expand the applicant pool; it doesn't cost much.
potatolicious 17y ago
You are probably aware of this already, but there's a huge pool of CS students you're cutting out by pegging yourself only above, say, Starbucks wages. Most of the major companies (MS, GOOG, etc) pay in excess of $30/hr (some as high as $40/hr) for interns. This is way, way beyond the high end of campus jobs.
- Hoff 17y ago
  And (an entirely serious question) how can one tap into this huge pool of idle CS students?
  - dfield 17y ago
    Most aren't idle. But to tap into this group, try campus recruiting?
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    I'm not quite sure what you mean - my impression from engineering and CS during college is as such: - most of this pool of students you do not want to tap into. They're the ones who will do more harm than good, assuming they were even interested in doing any work. My impression from my time in college was that the majority of my colleagues were utterly incompetent and had no real desire to become competent. There's no hope for these people, and IMHO they make up the bulk of the "there are no jobs out there!" crowd upon graduation. These are the guys who do the bare minimum on assignments and have never written a line of code that wasn't required by a class, and get indignant when their framed piece of paper doesn't automatically deliver big paychecks on a silver platter. - the rest are worthwhile talent, but competition amongst employers for many of them is fierce. I have a friend right now who has extremely high-paying offers from just about every big software shop out there, as a soon-to-graduate undergrad. In recent years I've seen MS (and some other companies) poach interns from other tech companies at the interview stage. Pay levels are quite high, approaching full-time levels in some places. As a cost-conscious startup, you have to work hard to find the people that the Big Boys have overlooked. Recruitment processes is an extremely imprecise science, and from experience I've seen a lot of qualified people unfairly rejected because of dumb things like not having the right keywords in a resume to pass the inbound filter, or edged out because they froze up on a single interview question. There are quite a few of these guys out there, but the problem is that because many do not know how to market themselves, it's hard to distinguish them from the incompetent, worthless demographic.

brown9-2 17y ago

The second paragraph of the article states that the student interns were paid.

wushupork 17y ago

It is quite common in Thailand at least to have internships that are unpaid. The way the company sees it is that they are spending resources and time making this person more valuable than they would be without the experience. I think that's the mentality over there.

pmjordan 17y ago

This seems to be one rule where the employee is more protected in the US than the EU. Unpaid internships are common here. Common to the extent that some graduates end up working for free for years before finally being promoted to a paid position. It's so prolific that the current generation of 20-somethings is frequently called "Generation Praktikum" (the internship generation) in Austria & Germany.

scscsc 17y ago
It's not that they are more protected; market economy simply works that way: MS/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc are competing for employers, the best way to get good ones is from good interns.
ido 17y ago
I don't know where you are exactly, but I am in Vienna and I haven't really encountered those unpaid internships much at all, at least not among the computer science & mathematics crowd. I and a lot of people I know are/were working (not as interns) alongside school and many internships at the university are payed. The pay might not be as high as what you'd get after you graduate but it's definitively better than most working class jobs that do not require any formal education.
- eru 17y ago
  > I don't know where you are exactly, but I am in Vienna and I haven't really encountered those unpaid internships much at all, at least not among the computer science & mathematics crowd. The grandfather-post's observation applies more to liberal arts students (Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften). With a math degree in Germany I never had a problem getting a paid internship during my studies. Some of my friends in the liberal arts, however, have to do unpaid interships even after finishing their studies. Of course the media perception is dominated by liberal arts guys, because they are the ones who complain loudly and in a matter sympathetic to journalists. (While the more technical minded people are too busy making money and enjoying themselves.) Hence the "Generation Praktikum".
  - 17y ago