7 ms·
> They’re all well-funded, growing rapidly, and have competitive salaries for interns. Excellent. Unpaid internships should be illegal.
by moosey 8y ago
> They’re all well-funded, growing rapidly, and have competitive salaries for interns.
Excellent. Unpaid internships should be illegal.
- wbronitsky 8y agoIn California, at least, they are
- badfrog 8y agoThese are software engineering internships, where top firms pay interns around $10,000 a month. Ethics aside, it wouldn't be in a company's best interest to offer unpaid internships because they wouldn't get any good candidates.
- ttoinou 8y ago> top firms pay interns around $10,000 a month Source ?
- ampersandy 8y agoCheck Glassdoor if you doubt it. Numbers probably aren't including housing, which in Silicon Valley puts a ~$7500 monthly salary roughly up to $10k.
- notyourwork 8y agoThe # sounds about right, I work at a big well known company.
- alehul 8y agoIntern at a top tech company like Google or FB, and (I’ve heard as of this year) you’re looking at like $8-$9k/month plus housing and even your laundry taken care of for you (specifically FB here). Meanwhile, the top HFs and prop traders will pay the same or better (often higher pay, no housing). Jane Street is a big one (esp. if you go to Brown), Citadel isn’t even top-notch and will offer that, and then obviously D.E. Shaw, Renaissance, Two Sigma, and so forth.
- thedufer 8y agoTwo Sigma and Jane Street are known to pay their dev interns $10.4k monthly ($125k annualized). You can find this in #talkpay on Twitter and on Quora, and I can corroborate one of them. I don't think those are the highest, either.
- nv-vn 8y agoAllegedly they've increased it to 12.5k this year
- baby_wipe 8y agoNo they shouldn't. If someone wants to work for free they should be able to. And forcing paid internships will reduce the number of internships available.
- ForHackernews 8y agoIn industries with many unpaid internships, only the children of the wealthy can afford to work for free to establish themselves. This leads to those industries being (even more) dominated by the upper classes.
- moosey 8y agoI grew up quite poor, and that makes this a near-and-dear issue.
- elcomet 8y agoI don't agree at all. If you allow unpaid internship, then employers will abuse this for fields where there is a lot of unemployment. And jobless people will be forced to accept those internships because they can't find any other job due to lack of experience. Some slaves were ok to work for free and be owned by someone. Does it mean slavery should be authorized because some slaves are ok with it?
- somethingle234 8y agoThere are a few things with this: 1. That could be true in only some areas. I doubt it's true for the technology sector where there are a lot of players competing. 2. Companies are already trying to pay as low as possible. If a company could pay $1 for a software engineer, it would. 3. It's absurd in its reasoning to distinguish between "unpaid" and $1 a month internship. So, a company hiring a $1-a-month intern is fine? If not, then what's the number? After asking this, then it'll be boiled down to supply-demand force in the market. This is back to number 2. If a company could pay $1, it would. Comparing unpaid internship with slaves is also absurd. For one thing, slaves can't walk away. I also don't think my volunteer job at an animal shelter is slavery.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 8y agoUnpaid internships seem to be a way for unscrupulous companies to ensure they hire the "right kind of people" that already come from a cashed up family.
- nindalf 8y agoI don’t think the phenomenon of unpaid internships is primarily driven by a wish to shape wealth dynamics of society. It’s mostly about companies thinking “why pay ... when we don’t need to”. It’s still despicable because it has the same side effect in the end - only folks from wealthy families can afford to take these internships. But I thought it was worth drawing a distinction between the primary motivation and the inevitable consequences.
- shkkmo 8y ago> I don’t think the phenomenon of unpaid internships is primarily driven by a wish to shape wealth dynamics of society. The person you are responding to is not at all claiming the companies are driven By "altruistically" trying to shape the wealth dynamics of society. Their claim was that the goal is to self-select for a certain type of desirable intern, not to give a certain type of person an overall economic advantage. I don't buy that paid vs. unpaid internships offer a significant enough difference in cost to companies to be able to dismiss non-cost motivations as "not primary" without actual evidence.
- nindalf 8y agoFor a large enough corporation, very few employees can make a significant enough difference in cost savings. Every employee moves the needle a bit and the aggregate effort of thousands of employees is significant. With these internships, it's possible that the person in charge of hiring interns decided an easy to way to have impact is to reduce the salaries of interns. They do it and at the end of the year claim in their performance review "reduced the cost of the intern program to $0 while not compromising on quality". Great, here's your bonus. Another possibility is that some folks need interns but don't want to go through the hassle of fighting other departments in the organisation for budget. The workaround is to offer unpaid internships that cost nothing. And then there's just plain greed. The Kardashians run a business empire that makes hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue annually. They offered an unpaid internship as a gopher because they were stingy and knew people would do it anyway. All of these strike me as more plausible motivations for unpaid internships rather than wanting to shape society. I'm sure that exists in some places, like elite law firms, but I think the scenarios I highlighted are much more widespread.
- jrochkind1 8y agoTechnically, unpaid internships ARE illegal, if, among other things,"the employer providing the training derives immediate advantage from the activities of the intern", or the intern's work is used as a substitute for work that would otherwise be paid. https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-resources/unpaid-internship-rules.html https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-r... Unless a Trump Department of Labor changes it's mind about implementation again, I guess. There was some point in the last decade where the Dept of Labor got more serious about enforcing this, not sure the current enforcement environment.
- chapium 8y agoI always wonder if unpaid internships function like a cartel. As soon as an employer offers $$ for a given internship, do they undermine everyone else? It seems like a huge disadvantage to let the talent go where the money is when you offer experience in place of a paycheck.
- ttoinou 8y agoDepends on what people are looking for... If I had to choose between a recently-funded startup offering 600 USD a month for grunt work with founders I don't like, compared to unpaid internship with founders (self funded) I like, seems to explain technical stuff very well, in technologies I am interested into, I would choose the latter.
- anyfoo 8y agoIf the company is so early that you cannot even afford them a meager internship salary, then what you need is co-founders, not interns.
- ttoinou 8y agoHow can you make that decision for other people ?
- anyfoo 8y agoThe same way that society decides that people are not allowed to defecate on the street, no matter how much they think it's a good idea: By issuing legislation.
- ttoinou 8y agoYeah you're right, let's legislate on every little things we don't like in life. I hate people wearing sandals and socks, let's ban this bad fashion yay !
- robhunter 8y agoI disagree very strongly with this. As a YC founder who's raised millions of dollars and employs dozens of people, I got my start - and may not be where I am now - without an unpaid internship.
- rmrfrmrf 8y agoThere's nothing noble about the theft of labor. Internships can and do exist with fair wages.
- barry-cotter 8y agoNo one stole anything. Two adults came to a mutually agreeable arrangement in which labour would be provided in exchange for training. Theft would at the least require that someone was deceived. Unpaid internships are a vastly lesser evil than demanding a four year degree for an entry level job. Those four years could have been spent earning as well as learning. A six month unpaid internship is a hell of a lot cheaper than an associate’s degree, never mind a Bachelor’s.
- rickbutton 8y agoUnpaid labor is wage theft.
- ttoinou 8y agoThey already are, and shouldn't be
- anonymous888999 8y agoWhere do I report ethics violation (promised vague conditional pay and unpaid internship) at YC company? Would this stripe YC membership from an offending founder?
- chasing 8y agoActually, my understanding is that it is in fact illegal to have unpaid interns do work that you would otherwise pay someone for. Internships are for the edification of the intern, not the company. That's the reason they're allowed to exist at all in spite of minimum wage laws. https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-resources/unpaid-internship-rules.html https://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-r...
- ABCLAW 8y agoIn theory, sure, sometimes? 1) The determination if an intership covers a function they would have otherwise performed is very deferential to the company. 2) Interns do not have the resources to litigate if they believe their position is illegal. Even if they did, they would likely recover less than their costs. They also do not uniformly have access to competent labour regulators who follow-up on these matters. 3) The protections offered vary by jurisdiction as well as by industry/profession. 4) Interns also require networking and references in order to gain the full benefit of their work. Sounding the alarm on a company's hiring practices is a great way to poison the well.
- ddebernardy 8y agoThat would depend on what one means by internship. If the institution doesn't care and the company expects the intern to do work they'd expect from an (however underperforming) employee, which is what all too often happens, then the case is clearcut and I fully agree. But if the institution expects the company to show the student around and give them a lot of tutoring, then the case is less clearcut. I've mentored a few interns in that scenario myself, and it can easily take a day per week on average. Requiring companies to pay such interns more than something symbolic can make the companies a lot less willing to take interns to begin with. The side effect of that is that it then reenforces the early career problem of "all jobs require x years experience; how am I to get those years of experience if I can't apply to any job?"