4 ms·

Are you seriously making people code for you for free?

• bphogan 16y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your question. I'll try to answer anyway. An internship doesn't mean free labor. Although I guess there are some people who do try to get people to code for free and call it an "internship" or "portfolio building experience", that's not what I do. Where I work, we hire college students as interns, where they learn how to do test-driven web development using Ruby and JavaScript. They get to work with student data and records and it's a really great program. The students land excellent paying jobs and have access to a network of former interns who from time to time offer advice and sometimes share code.
  • sliverstorm 16y ago
    So, are they there for you? Or for themselves. Did you bring them on for their benefit, or yours? Or, more importantly (as this is the legal razor): Do you derive profit/gains from the work they do? Honestly from the sound of it you're deluding yourself, and are in fact, just another internships-mean-free-labor guy trying to make yourself feel better with talk of 'connections' and all.
    • bphogan 16y ago
      Their benefit. I work at a public university and the interns are ineligible after their separation from the university. I'm not sure why any of this matters anyway, because they are getting paid to work for me and are gaining valuable experience working on things that are much larger than what they would be doing in class. Not quite sure what you're getting at here. This is no different than a paid internship at Microsoft or Google, or many other companies in the midwest, just on a smaller scale.
      • rhizome 16y ago
        What he may be getting at is that your description of intern duties implies a violation of the US Federal labor law prohibition against interns doing work that provides immediate benefit to the company/institution.
        • bphogan 16y ago
          Are you referring to http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm by any chance? Because that applies to unpaid internships. "Interns in the “for-profit” private sector who qualify as employees rather than trainees typically must be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation for hours worked over forty in a workweek" We do all of that.
          • rhizome 16y ago
            Oh, I missed that part of course. My mistake, and my apologies for the aspersion.
      • scott_s 16y ago
        I think the confusion was that others assumed you meant an unpaid internship. I'm not sure why. In our field, I assume an internship is paid unless explicitly told otherwise.
        • sliverstorm 16y ago
          It seemed, at least to me, like he was going to great pains to avoid talk of monetary compensation, which implies not paid.
  • krschultz 16y ago
    A lot of people take intern to mean "unpaid" intern. I was a paid intern for 4 years during college and made a lot of money doing it, but it was still an internship. I hate unpaid internships. I wouldn't want to work for anyone for free. I also hate that companies that could pay for interns don't simply because they can get away with filling their intern slots with kids who will work for free. I hate that the disparity between what companies give unpaid interns and paid interns dillutes the value of gaining a paid internship. And most of all I hate that unpaid internships are only available to those with parents footing all of their bills so they can afford to not get paid for the whole summer. But you mentioned below that your interns are getting paid so I think he is attacking you for something you aren't doing.
  • Locke1689 16y ago
    Software development internships can pay very well. You can check glassdoor.com and see that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, et. al pay at least $5k/month.
    • shrikant 16y ago
      I believe giant Indian software engineering shops like Infosys, Wipro et al. pay that much (may be a little more now, like $6k) for an entry-level full-time employee. (I worked in a similar place in a past life)
• endtime 16y ago
  It sounds very much like a consensual arrangement to me.