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I think a lot of it truly is passion. Interns have goals that typically don't align with the company they go to work for. That's why they take crap pay. They ge

I think a lot of it truly is passion. Interns have goals that typically don't align with the company they go to work for. That's why they take crap pay. They get to not care and in return the company doesn't have to care about them! Everybody wins, and it's a choice all around. So it's mutually agreeable that the intern will put in some effort and get some reward. Speaking for my own open source projects; There are already better, cheaper, and easier alternatives to my software. I'm already paying out the ass for something I could just download. I'm doing it for reasons that I can't, or won't, buy. And I know that sounds cliche because it is cliche, but passion is cliche. We're programmers and hackers here. Just like a hot rod enthusiast spends $200k and 3 years building a car he could buy in a catalogue for $75k; we don't pay as much attention to cost/benefit relationships as we'd like to think.

slg 8y ago
How is having a passion for a particular piece of software different than having a passion for a specific job or company? Plenty of people have enough passion for an internship that they are willing to take it for free. However society has been discouraging that over recent years because that route is only available to people who have outside financial support and it can easily be abused by employers. Open source software has the same potential drawbacks. Not every piece of open source software is diminishing the value of enterprise software developers just like not every unpaid internship is reducing the value of entry level labor, however both systems can easily (and even unintentionally) be abused by businesses.
midasz 8y ago
The interns' goal is to learn the trade. The companies goal is to attract talent and/or get a ROI. In my company an intern conducted research on scalability - creating tools to measure and monitor the software in the mean time. So not only does the company have some neat monitoring tools now, the intern actually found a bottleneck and improved the product. The company is now offering her a contract... Caring about eachother doesn't have much to do with it.

slg 8y ago

How is having a passion for a particular piece of software different than having a passion for a specific job or company? Plenty of people have enough passion for an internship that they are willing to take it for free. However society has been discouraging that over recent years because that route is only available to people who have outside financial support and it can easily be abused by employers. Open source software has the same potential drawbacks. Not every piece of open source software is diminishing the value of enterprise software developers just like not every unpaid internship is reducing the value of entry level labor, however both systems can easily (and even unintentionally) be abused by businesses.

midasz 8y ago

The interns' goal is to learn the trade. The companies goal is to attract talent and/or get a ROI. In my company an intern conducted research on scalability - creating tools to measure and monitor the software in the mean time. So not only does the company have some neat monitoring tools now, the intern actually found a bottleneck and improved the product. The company is now offering her a contract... Caring about eachother doesn't have much to do with it.