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As a hiring manager, this program seemed pretty sketchy from a legal perspective. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that interns need to be paid for th

As a hiring manager, this program seemed pretty sketchy from a legal perspective. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that interns need to be paid for their work if they're working on projects that have some commercial interest attached. Austen DMed me about this on twitter a while back (presumably in search of pilot organizations to work with Fellows), and my response was this: > I am reasonably sure that’s not legal if they’re working on “real” client work since at that point, the company would be the primary beneficiary of that person labor. The DoL fact sheet doesn’t make it entirely clear (https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdfs71.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdf...), but HLR’s article about Glatt v Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc summarizes it well (https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/02/glatt-v-fox-searchlight-pictures-inc/ https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/02/glatt-v-fox-searchlight...). I know there are some Lambda folks around in this thread. Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk.

agd 6y ago
I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK you would have to be legally paid for this work.
- damnencryption 6y ago
  It's illegal in NY, at least. I don't know about other states.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Illegal in all states. This arrangement fails several of the prongs of the Fair Labor Standards Act's "primary beneficiary test", particularly the "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > he "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job. "A hope of X" and "entitlement to X" are not the same thing. I tend to agree that this is likely illegal, but it seems to have been very carefully crafted to have at least a superficially-plausible argument for compatibility with the primary beneficiary test. I don't think it was done in ignorance of the law, but a careful and deliberate attempt to hack around it.
      - ptd 6y ago
        Isn't this the new playbook for startups? Break the law but acquire enough resources to change the law. Then lobby like there is no tomorrow in an attempt to change the laws again to stifle your competition?
damnencryption 6y ago
> I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile I can't think of any reasonable person who will accept 4 weeks of unpaid work and be treated as a trial product on top of that.
- cweagans 6y ago
  Sorry, just to be clear: I like the idea of pairing new devs with experienced devs in an apprenticeship-like role, especially since the software industry tends to lean pretty heavily toward the weird "You need experience for this entry-level job" thing (especially for stable jobs with larger organizations). I'm not so convinced of a 4 week internship trial thing when it's structured like this though.
  - MivLives 6y ago
    They basically are using this as the final exam of the school, in place of working on a project with peers.
    - brentoken 6y ago
      That would mean the final exam is optional - and most students will not take it (at least until the fellows program gains more traction to take on more students). This is _not_ the final exam. Your comment is uninformed.
  - pak9rabid 6y ago
    Yeah, it sounds like you're just going to end up wasting the senior engineer's time hand-holding the intern for 4 weeks while they learn an existing codebase, and then they go off on their merry little way. The concept is interesting, but 4 weeks just really isn't enough time to get a new-hire up to speed to be very helpful with software in most corporate settings.
    - jessmartin 6y ago
      Try it and see ;-)
jessmartin 6y ago
One quick point: Fellows is first and foremost designed for our students. We started by looking at our Labs program, which was 8 weeks long, and thinking about how we could make it better. Labs is a simulation, and a good one!, but will always be simulated. The incredible value for students of Fellows it that it's a "real world learning experience." We now think the 1-2 punch is Labs + Fellows. > Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk. Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor." In general, we do not encourage students to take unpaid internships. And if a student has the opportunity to take a paid position elsewhere, we recommend they do that. As I mentioned in another response, our North Star for this program is an unparalleled learning experience for Lambda graduates. There are a few steps we've taken to ensure that it is a valuable learning opportunity for students: 1. We heavily qualify the companies we allow to host Lambda Fellows and require that they have a dedicated mentor in place, a meaningful project for the student to work on, a functioning team for the student to be a part of, and hold them accountable to provide and foster a positive learning environment. Companies who fail to meet these expectations, at any point, have had their Fellows removed. 2. As part of the qualification process for companies, we require that they have an open role for a junior developer that would be a qualified placement that the Lambda Fellow can apply for at the end of the Fellowship. 3. We remove the interview process for the students participating as Fellows and deploy them straight to the host company. You're exactly right: the law basically asks "who is the primary beneficiary of that person's labor?" This was designed from the ground up as part of the educational journey of Lambda, and we've designed Fellows such that the student is the primary beneficiary of each step of that journey.
- lumost 6y ago
  I don't think this answered the OP's question. I get that you're arguing that the student is the primary beneficiary of the free labor they are giving to the company - but I'd be suspicious that a court would allow this interpretation. At worst this allows for negative cost labor where an employee pays/borrows money in order to provide value to an employer. To the direct question - do you provide appropriate indemnity clauses protecting employers should the legality of the arrangement be called into question?
sfvisser 6y ago
In the Netherlands unpaid internships are fine, as long as the main goal is the learning experience. Why would this be illegal if both parties benefit? Exploitation doesn’t strike me as super likely here, as it’s rather easy to get out and it’s easy to fire abusive employers.
- jessmartin 6y ago
  That's encouraging to hear that the Netherlands has an allowance for unpaid work when the goal is the learning experience. It's really clear to us at Lambda that the best way to _learn_ to do a thing is to do the _real_ thing, but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience, which is kinda self-defeating.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience No, they don't. They make it difficult to not pay people at least the minimum wage for doing real work, whether or not they are students.
    - brentoken 6y ago
      > No, they don't. I would encourage you to look into this more - specifically respecting that there is a massive difference between _real world_ experience and the experience a school can _simulate_. I could refer to literally hundreds of cases where US Labor Laws inhibited students learning experiences in this regard.
- lilactown 6y ago
  There is already a history of unpaid internships being abused in the USA, as they became the only way for people to enter an industry - entry-level labor became completely saturated by unpaid internships. This causes a whole host of problems. One is that it acts as a filter for people who can afford to spend 1-2 years being an unpaid intern. For a high status industry, this prevents swathes of people who don't have the support networks to afford being unpaid. The other is that, once this becomes an industry standard, entry level labor being so cheap incentivizes bad labor practices. Why hire a senior level talent when we can hire someone to manage 6 unpaid interns? Why promote this person when we can pay them literally nothing?
drjeats 6y ago
If your company has the bandwidth to create, manage, and mentor not-real-client-work, surely you have the resources to pay interns.
908B64B197 6y ago
This screams desperation. Just looking at the "testimonies" on the page we read: "She knew how to work with React and Git right away, which is more than I can say for most students coming out of University." Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period? I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
- cweagans 6y ago
  > Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path. > Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period? *week And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. > I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students. Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know. Of course, that breaks down if you _pretend_ to be an expert at the thing that you're teaching. It takes some humility, I guess. > It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this. AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience. Having hired multiple new grads, my biggest problem was that they'd go down the rabbit hole of computing theory rather than focusing on solving the problem at hand in a practical way. IMO, applied software engineering education is pretty lacking across the board and bootcamps are a good place to experiment with new approaches. Even if Lambda and other bootcamps aren't necessarily the perfect solution, they're an attempt at a new solution to a hard problem.

agd 6y ago

I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK you would have to be legally paid for this work.

damnencryption 6y ago
It's illegal in NY, at least. I don't know about other states.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Illegal in all states. This arrangement fails several of the prongs of the Fair Labor Standards Act's "primary beneficiary test", particularly the "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > he "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job. "A hope of X" and "entitlement to X" are not the same thing. I tend to agree that this is likely illegal, but it seems to have been very carefully crafted to have at least a superficially-plausible argument for compatibility with the primary beneficiary test. I don't think it was done in ignorance of the law, but a careful and deliberate attempt to hack around it.
    - ptd 6y ago
      Isn't this the new playbook for startups? Break the law but acquire enough resources to change the law. Then lobby like there is no tomorrow in an attempt to change the laws again to stifle your competition?

damnencryption 6y ago

> I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile I can't think of any reasonable person who will accept 4 weeks of unpaid work and be treated as a trial product on top of that.

cweagans 6y ago
Sorry, just to be clear: I like the idea of pairing new devs with experienced devs in an apprenticeship-like role, especially since the software industry tends to lean pretty heavily toward the weird "You need experience for this entry-level job" thing (especially for stable jobs with larger organizations). I'm not so convinced of a 4 week internship trial thing when it's structured like this though.
- MivLives 6y ago
  They basically are using this as the final exam of the school, in place of working on a project with peers.
  - brentoken 6y ago
    That would mean the final exam is optional - and most students will not take it (at least until the fellows program gains more traction to take on more students). This is _not_ the final exam. Your comment is uninformed.
- pak9rabid 6y ago
  Yeah, it sounds like you're just going to end up wasting the senior engineer's time hand-holding the intern for 4 weeks while they learn an existing codebase, and then they go off on their merry little way. The concept is interesting, but 4 weeks just really isn't enough time to get a new-hire up to speed to be very helpful with software in most corporate settings.
  - jessmartin 6y ago
    Try it and see ;-)

jessmartin 6y ago

One quick point: Fellows is first and foremost designed for our students. We started by looking at our Labs program, which was 8 weeks long, and thinking about how we could make it better. Labs is a simulation, and a good one!, but will always be simulated. The incredible value for students of Fellows it that it's a "real world learning experience." We now think the 1-2 punch is Labs + Fellows. > Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk. Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor." In general, we do not encourage students to take unpaid internships. And if a student has the opportunity to take a paid position elsewhere, we recommend they do that. As I mentioned in another response, our North Star for this program is an unparalleled learning experience for Lambda graduates. There are a few steps we've taken to ensure that it is a valuable learning opportunity for students: 1. We heavily qualify the companies we allow to host Lambda Fellows and require that they have a dedicated mentor in place, a meaningful project for the student to work on, a functioning team for the student to be a part of, and hold them accountable to provide and foster a positive learning environment. Companies who fail to meet these expectations, at any point, have had their Fellows removed. 2. As part of the qualification process for companies, we require that they have an open role for a junior developer that would be a qualified placement that the Lambda Fellow can apply for at the end of the Fellowship. 3. We remove the interview process for the students participating as Fellows and deploy them straight to the host company. You're exactly right: the law basically asks "who is the primary beneficiary of that person's labor?" This was designed from the ground up as part of the educational journey of Lambda, and we've designed Fellows such that the student is the primary beneficiary of each step of that journey.

lumost 6y ago
I don't think this answered the OP's question. I get that you're arguing that the student is the primary beneficiary of the free labor they are giving to the company - but I'd be suspicious that a court would allow this interpretation. At worst this allows for negative cost labor where an employee pays/borrows money in order to provide value to an employer. To the direct question - do you provide appropriate indemnity clauses protecting employers should the legality of the arrangement be called into question?

sfvisser 6y ago

In the Netherlands unpaid internships are fine, as long as the main goal is the learning experience. Why would this be illegal if both parties benefit? Exploitation doesn’t strike me as super likely here, as it’s rather easy to get out and it’s easy to fire abusive employers.

jessmartin 6y ago
That's encouraging to hear that the Netherlands has an allowance for unpaid work when the goal is the learning experience. It's really clear to us at Lambda that the best way to _learn_ to do a thing is to do the _real_ thing, but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience, which is kinda self-defeating.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience No, they don't. They make it difficult to not pay people at least the minimum wage for doing real work, whether or not they are students.
  - brentoken 6y ago
    > No, they don't. I would encourage you to look into this more - specifically respecting that there is a massive difference between _real world_ experience and the experience a school can _simulate_. I could refer to literally hundreds of cases where US Labor Laws inhibited students learning experiences in this regard.
lilactown 6y ago
There is already a history of unpaid internships being abused in the USA, as they became the only way for people to enter an industry - entry-level labor became completely saturated by unpaid internships. This causes a whole host of problems. One is that it acts as a filter for people who can afford to spend 1-2 years being an unpaid intern. For a high status industry, this prevents swathes of people who don't have the support networks to afford being unpaid. The other is that, once this becomes an industry standard, entry level labor being so cheap incentivizes bad labor practices. Why hire a senior level talent when we can hire someone to manage 6 unpaid interns? Why promote this person when we can pay them literally nothing?

drjeats 6y ago

If your company has the bandwidth to create, manage, and mentor not-real-client-work, surely you have the resources to pay interns.

908B64B197 6y ago

This screams desperation. Just looking at the "testimonies" on the page we read: "She knew how to work with React and Git right away, which is more than I can say for most students coming out of University." Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period? I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

cweagans 6y ago
> Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast. Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path. > Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period? *week And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. > I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students. Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know. Of course, that breaks down if you _pretend_ to be an expert at the thing that you're teaching. It takes some humility, I guess. > It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this. AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience. Having hired multiple new grads, my biggest problem was that they'd go down the rabbit hole of computing theory rather than focusing on solving the problem at hand in a practical way. IMO, applied software engineering education is pretty lacking across the board and bootcamps are a good place to experiment with new approaches. Even if Lambda and other bootcamps aren't necessarily the perfect solution, they're an attempt at a new solution to a hard problem.