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The US continues to support unpaid work in a pretty major way. I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit

by munk-a 6y ago

The US continues to support unpaid work in a pretty major way. I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. They've been illegal up here in Canada for a while and it hasn't really caused any economic disasters. It'd be a good change to advocate for down there as well. And, honestly, internships aren't free for companies unless there is literally nothing of value being given to the intern, adding a low salary to these positions to make them affordable to people without independent savings or rich parents would just be more equitable while not significantly impacting employers. Internships are, in the best light, just a really good recruiting tool.

Black101 6y ago
make your money work for you, don't do internships for $0... even the YC plan is not that good... you get a few thousands to loose a big part of your company? Sometime it makes me want to start a YC alternative ;)
duxup 6y ago
>I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. When I worked with interns they were all paid... but every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, and we spent WAY more than an afternoon of work with them. Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity. Now that's fine because when I did work with them the intent was to give these folks an opportunity / experience. But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people for free. Interns in my experience (outside of maybe a unicorn out there) are not something you can expect to get much of anything out of. I can't imagine coming out of the intern experiences I've had thinking that I'm going to get anything like worthwhile free labor from them.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  > But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people for free. Interns in experience (outside of maybe a unicorn out there) are not productive ... We use internships as a pipeline to hire. We pay them for their time, they get real world experience. We both get quality time together to see if long term this is a good fit. Those who start full time ramp up much faster and are generally successful in their career.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I had a paid internship that was essentially this and enjoyed it greatly. I wasn't paid particularly well but my workload was a project that I probably took about ten times as long to do as I would today. During the run of the internship I was brought into discussions on design and worked under someone who managed to put up with a flood of questions that I sent at them. I was hired at the end of my internship and switched over to regular work and grew as an independent employee to handle more serious workloads. My internship was an investment that the company paid into me (and other folks) and by the time I left the company I feel like I more than paid that back. It's essentially just a probationary period at the start of employment but with much less expectation to retain the employee and less commitment from the potential employee to stay on.
    - notyourwork 6y ago
      My current company looks at internships as a way to promote working here. We want interns to be successful, learn and enjoy their time. It's a larger investment than hiring off the street but the reward for those who get full time return offers pays for itself ten times over.
- zeta0134 6y ago
  From the company's point of view, it seems like an internship really ought to be more of a culture fit check than anything else. It's like an extended technical interview in a way: "try on our team for size, see how it fits. Do you like the work? Do we see potential in your skills / productivity?" That sort of thing. Heck, even for experienced engineers there's a spinup time on any large technical endeavor that is sometimes measured in months. How long is a typical internship anyway?
  - interviewer0000 6y ago
    12 weeks in the US. In the realm of software you'll make anywhere from 20 to 50 an hour.
    - applecrazy 6y ago
      Some internships go higher, but those tend to be in the trading/quant software of things. (see https://www.levels.fyi/internships/ https://www.levels.fyi/internships/)
      - DiggyJohnson 6y ago
        Respectfully, what is the value of pointing outliers at the top end of the intern of scale?
        applecrazy 6y ago
        Not much. I just wanted to point out how insane intern salaries can get. As a computer science student, us students idealize those internships because the benefits and longer hours means more money to pay off student loans.
- aplummer 6y ago
  You generally will get dibs (competing with other internships) on getting to hire them full time. That’s often cheap recruitment.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  It doesn't matter how much faster a full employee could complete a task. They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. If the company can't figure out how to derive value from that labor, that's its own fault. Moreover, if companies weren't getting value out of internships, they wouldn't continue hiring interns.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    I've hired a few (paid) interns in my company. They all produced useful things. But they cost so much of my time that I no longer want to hire any.
  - RHSeeger 6y ago
    > They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. If they were at college completing courses, they'd be giving up their labor towards that. If you consider an internship an educational opportunity, then the argument that they should be paid holds no water (since they don't get paid for college work, instead they pay for the experience). Obviously, not all internships are _really_ educational opportunities, but I would expect most of them to be to at least some extent. To argue that all of them are just "the intern doing work for the employer, and the only difference is the amount of work compared to a full employee" is naive at best, and possibly disingenuous.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Your college analogy doesn't make sense. Students are the "customers" of the college, not the workers. Or, to put it another way, they're paying for their professors' labor.
      - RHSeeger 6y ago
        My point was that, just because they're doing work as an intern, that doesn't mean they are doing work they should necessarily get paid for. Both college and an internship are situations where - the junior individual (intern, student) is doing work - the junior individual expects to learn during the experience - the senior entity (college, company) is expected to put effort into making sure the junior has learning opportunities - the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee Now, how similar/dis-similar they are depends heavily on how much the internship focuses on the learning experience and how much the intern adds to the company. But to say that the intern is definitely contributing more than they are gain is factually incorrect. And > They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. The thing is, "accordingly" is open to interpretation and, in some cases where the intern is getting a lot more than they give, it's reasonable to argue that it is "not at all".
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  If you expect to get immediate value you are doing it wrong. The point is to build relationships with a good school and get a pipeline of applicants that will eventually become great engineers. I recall someone whining he couldn't find good junior engineers. I suggested he go to his local (pretty good) CS school. He then started to whine that they all were already interning at good companies and were transitioning to full time and there was no way for him to break-in!
  - johnsoft 6y ago
    Someone complaining they can find senior engineers, but not junior engineers? I would gladly trade places with them!
- raverbashing 6y ago
  It depends on the level of the intern (and your ability to select productive ones), some are more junior than others (not sure how it works in the US exactly) Yes, most of the time they have negative productivity, but as an intern I had some demanding projects where our work was part of the final (revenue earning) product. But that's how it goes. Pay people for their time.
- cerved 6y ago
  It's called onboarding. For six months I worked as an intern, getting paid less than my rent. If didn't have parents that could've supported me, I would've been unemployed. I don't work for free. You presumably don't. Pay your interns and pay them a livable salary.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I guess that depends on the industry the intern is being used. In photography, an intern typically does a lot of the manual labor like loading/unloading gear from the truck, setting up ligts,stands,tripods,etc. As the intern continues to do this work, they should be able to start learning when/where/why certain gear is being used and where to put initial settings. There is no "week to do something I could do in an afternoon" situation. It all has to be done right then and there. This allows the photographer to spend more time working with the subject/talent/producers/client/etc. After being an intern for long enough, that intern should be able to go off and be a decent assistant if not photographer on their own right.
- twunde 6y ago
  Most engineering internships at this point are paid and most people on HN are working for companies that do paid internships. Unpaid internships tend to be more prevalent in the arts and at small companies. Anecdotally I distinctly remember people doing design for free as interns, with very little oversight or training. Back in the day Craigslist would have a number of these types of "internships" although I think these are no longer common due to both better enforcement of laws and more importantly the rise of the gig economy creating competition
- emodendroket 6y ago
  In many cases, even though it's technically illegal, interns end up just doing menial work that does little to further their skills.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  No HR person would allow unpaid intern positions in 2021. It's very clearly illegal in the United States. When I mentor college students, the only times we hear about unpaid internships are: 1) Unfunded wannabe startups or small family businesses who don't understand what they need, but they assume they can convince some naive kid to do it for free. No one with actual skills or prospects takes these jobs. Job boards remove these posts if they're moderated. 2) Students who struggle to get a normal internship, so their dad/uncle/cousin/neighbor lets them do an unpaid "internship" off the books at their company to get something to put on their resume. They don't really do much work, but now they can put a line on their resume and claim some work experience for the next interview.
  - mitchdoogle 6y ago
    Has this changed recently? When I was in school, seemed like most internship opportunities I found were unpaid. There was some deal where it would count as college credit. Now don't try to tell me college credit counts as being paid
    - virtue3 6y ago
      The only way to have unpaid interns is if they are receiving college credits I believe. > Unpaid internships are legal if the intern is the "primary beneficiary" of the arrangement. This is determined by the seven-point Primary Beneficiary Test. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internships-legal.html https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internshi...
    - coderintherye 6y ago
      Yes, things changed in 2010, this is the best summary I could find of it: https://www.commlawcenter.com/2018/01/confused-paying-interns-rules-just-changed.html https://www.commlawcenter.com/2018/01/confused-paying-intern... That said, the interpretation changed some in 2015 and again n 2018. Here is the Department of Labor's "test" on whether or not you can provide unpaid internships: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns... That's federal, but some states have stricter laws.
- skipants 6y ago
  This has to be the fault of the organization. _Every_ intern!? I've worked at places where the onboarding was generally terrible and I'd still say 80% of the co-op interns we hired were value-positive. Although, when I do reflect on it, I suppose there was a lot we did right: - always willing to help newcomers - answering their questions - knowing when not to answer questions and let them learn through failure instead - reassuring them through mistakes (and just being positive overall) - checking in on them once in awhile But none of these things take any sort of preparation. It's all just cultural. > Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity. Well, you could be correct. I've definitely seen the situation where developers have a reputation that I know first-hand through their work isn't merited. It could also be that maybe your standards are just a little too high for what you expect people right out of (or still in) college.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Even very senior developers are usually a negative value on a company for at least three weeks. There's usually a week for environment setup with any local tools being configured for the user and it's only after that that the best devs can hit the ground running and actually start comprehending the system, but that comprehension should come at consulting peers (if the new guy isn't asking any questions it's because they aren't doing any work) and by 1.5 weeks I expect someone to actually start adding value - with the net loss being paid out by week three. But that's for a Senior or Principle dev - for intermediary devs I wouldn't expect positive gain for the company for a good two months and junior devs tend to be more expensive with that training phase lasting for something like six weeks. Interns are a loss for companies - but please don't stop hiring them, you'll get some great employees out of the process and you're also investing in developing better communication and mentorship skills for your long term employees. As someone working at a company that was teensy tiny when I started this latter point is quite important - I actively invest in my skills to keep up with the curve and make sure I'm still providing as much value as is reasonable for my position. If I had been locked away to dev code in isolation when I was hired I'd be super rusty at a lot of skills that provide my employer real value.
    - skipants 6y ago
- smichel17 6y ago
  There's two ways to look at this. One is, "Is hiring an intern a net profit?" The other is, "Is the intern's work, minus the cost of mentorship, a net profit?" When I was in college, I did a paid internship at a health insurance company, wherein I audited, documented, and updated requirements for a large SQL script that pulled data from hospitals and used it to calculate reimbursement for Medicare/Medicaid claims (RAPS). Basically, you have to map hospital billing codes to federal ones. The script was written several years prior by my mentor, and the risk adjustment department had no visibility into how the codes were mapped -- and if it was wrong, we could be fined up to ~$10M (depending on severity), or be missing out on ~$1M in revenue. (It turned out my mentor had done a pretty good job and we only needed minor adjustments, although we also updated the architecture so the risk adjustment folks could define the mapping themselves going forward.) So in short, I can definitively state that 1) it would have cost the company less for my mentor to do the work directly. 2) The several thousands of dollars that the company spent between my salary and my mentor's was definitely worth the millions in mitigated risk/liability. 3) My mentor enjoyed teaching me much more than he would have enjoyed doing the work himself. And I'd like to think that I ended up doing a slightly more thorough job than my mentor might have done -- his long tenure at the company and accumulated knowledge of these sorts of scripts being job security of some sort ;) Anyway, the point here is that internships don't have to be a zero sum game. They can cost more than paying your existing employees to do the same work, and still be valuable.
- lhorie 6y ago
  I've had very positive experience with interns. We'd recruit from U Waterloo, gradually get them up to speed on real meaningful work, and a few months later when they graduated, we'd instantly have fully trained connections who were more than happy to accept a full time position from us. We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  When I worked with interns they were all paid... but every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, and we spent WAY more than an afternoon of work with them. I managed interns for years in my role as a UI development manager. The main reason to hire interns was as part of our hiring pipeline. It basically served as an extended interview. Any actual work they produced was a bonus. We were also able to keep interns on through the academic year (part-time), which made the time commitment even more worthwhile. The lack of productivity wasn't because they were interns - it was because they were new to the job. This did require flexibility around their school schedule, so instilling good communication habits early was necessary.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. I've only had interns at one job, and I had a similar complaint. My boss told me that's exactly what's supposed to happen. He explained that they're not free labor. I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn. I guess in some ways he was right. Many of the most valuable lessons I've learned at work have come through mistakes I've made. And probably a bunch when I was an intern all those years ago.
  - duxup 6y ago
    That's pretty much how I look at it. Working with them is just being a good part of the community.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    > I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn. I had intended to say this myself. Computer programmers rarely train themselves. Very few of anything train themselves. Autodidacts who can become masters of <insert field here> are extremely rare, and even those that have that capability can still pick up a lot of information from someone with decades of experience. Our species seems to learn best through being taught by those with more experience than us.
- ska 6y ago
  > In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, Somewhat like nearly every entry level engineer. You are right that "free labor" is a inept way to think about internships, but it's also true that its one of those things where returns are somewhat dependent on investment. A good internship program can get a lot of useful things done and also be useful to the interns. There is certainly variability, but typical interns can be productive withing the scope of their term. Great ones will outproduce some of your full timers. Biggest win is if you do it right you can make some great hires.
- dkersten 6y ago
  > But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people When I was in Uni, I did a 6 month paid internship. A year and a half later I joined the company and stayed for two years. When I left, there was still code that I wrote during my internship running in production. I'm sure the other staff could have done it faster and better than I did, but it was clearly good enough to keep 3.5 years after my internship ended.
- elteto 6y ago
  If it took them weeks to do an afternoon’s worth of work then you either had a hiring quality problem, terrible mentoring and guidance, or both. Don’t blame it on the interns.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  I've had interns in both professional and an academic settings. I don't think I've every really run into a situation where a - good - intern wasn't at least as productive as their salary.
- mdoms 6y ago
  That's not the point. You pay them because they're working. That's how things work in civilised countries.
- Bukhmanizer 6y ago
  It all depends on the position and industry. In science a ton of menial data entry work is done by unpaid interns. Don’t get me started on my friends who work in fashion. Even in CS, we should strive to protect exploited workers in other industries.
notyourwork 6y ago
I don't know anyone during my time as a student that took an unpaid internship. How common is this? All the internships and jobs my classmates and friends were getting involved an exchange of money for goods/services. Who is taking an unpaid internship and why? edit: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for not having been exposed to this. If you're willing to take an unpaid internship it's your own fault.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  Are you in the US? Also, are you in engineering/tech? Tech internships tend to pay surprisingly well, but many other fields in the US don't pay anything for internships and it's a notable exception when they do.
- KittenInABox 6y ago
  I know this is common in politics, activism, and certain law positions. I also know volunteer positions are expected of pre-medical students now.
- ping_pong 6y ago
  In Washington DC and Hollywood, I think it's pretty common. I haven't heard of this at all in Silicon Valley though. In fact interns are pretty well paid, $7500/month at my previous company.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    Speaking of DC aren’t all government internships unpaid?
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      Yes, but I hear if you're attractive then the Commander in Chief will make it worthwhile.
    - sybercecurity 6y ago
      Not all. Some provide a stipend and/or housing allowance. Depends on the program and the agency running it. Congress now pays their interns too, though I don't know if this extends to campaign interns: https://cha.house.gov/member-services/house-paid-internship-program https://cha.house.gov/member-services/house-paid-internship-...
lurkerasdfh8 6y ago
holywood is based on it too. I gues netflix will merge the worst of both worlds. The actors guild union actually demand you work as a almost-no-pay extra/support for several productions before you are even admitted to the union. not to mention the informal but prevalent culture of "assistants" where people stabilished in the industry takes in people they treat as literal vassals doing errands.
- dylan604 6y ago
  >The actors guild union actually demand Not sure this is true. Can you point to where in the bylaws this is stated?
  - lurkerasdfh8 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild#Becoming_a_member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild#Becoming_a...
    - dylan604 6y ago
      None of what you link shows anything about SAG demanding actors to do unpaid work. The second option specifically states that you must provide vouchers and then ulimately proof of paid work on three separate occasions as a background actor. The first option is a no-brainer in that you're getting paid as a lead. The 3rd option of being a member in good standing with another union also has nothing to do with doing unpaid work.
      - lurkerasdfh8 6y ago
        in practice, this all means: to be able to apply, you have to have worked 3+ times as non union. Which is usually unpaid or paid extremely low. This is even worse on the side-unions, such as costume, etc.
        munk-a 6y ago
da_big_ghey 6y ago
unpaid intern are absolutely good. many i have known are starting this way, before they have plenty skills for to gain full pay internship. ban are stupid, stop your try to interfere with economy via government.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  If they're not getting paid, it's not really part of the economy, is it?
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    money not only represent of value. credebility of work with experience have value also.
- slaymaker1907 6y ago
  This causes a lot of problems with gatekeeping in certain fields because a lot of people can't afford to go without income for months. Why do you support autocratic corporations as opposed to the publicly accountable government? Do you also support allowing companies to use child labor if companies find it to be profitable?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  If McDonald's can afford to hire low-skill people for minimum wage across the US, so can companies for under-skilled interns. Not paying someone for work isn't cool unless it's a volunteer position. Businesses shouldn't be getting volunteer labor. Non-profits and, maybe, governments are the only ones that should be getting volunteer interns.
  - gtk40 6y ago
    McDonald's lobbied to pay minors, as new hires, less than minimum wage, which is still allowed. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/32-minimum-wage-youth https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/32-minimum-wage... Perhaps a parallel to internships.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Internships are, in the best light, just a really good recruiting tool. They're also good manager training.
- dylan604 6y ago
  They're also a good stick your toe in the water for the employee to see if they really want to work there.
anm89 6y ago
I agreed that legislating this is the best route here. It's hard to blame netflix for trying to get free labor when they know they are going to get away with it every time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  From the article, this does not appear to actually be Netflix. Netflix is the studio. This the production company producing the show that will run on Netflix. (Studios are mostly about green-lighting shows/films and, obviously, overseeing their investments. But they're mostly not actually producing the shows themselves.)
  - anm89 6y ago
    The point of which company specifically did this is fairly irrelevant here in regards to my parent comment. Replace Netflix with whoever or whatever it was.
skeeter2020 6y ago
>> They've been illegal up here in Canada for a while and it hasn't really caused any economic disasters This really isn't true. First the word "internship" is not codified in any law. Second employment law is typically provincial unless it's a federally regulated industry so the rules are different everywhere. Finally, most jurisidctions allow them if they're the "hands-on" part of an educational program, which IME qualifies 90%+ of the interships I've seen.
- m00x 6y ago
  A source for your statement: https://www.lawnow.org/the-law-of-unpaid-internships-in-canada/ https://www.lawnow.org/the-law-of-unpaid-internships-in-cana... Most provinces don't allow unpaid internships, but some provinces have very loose exceptions to this rule. At least, the unpaid internships have limits around work hours.
emodendroket 6y ago
Classic broadside against unpaid internships: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/internment-camp https://thebaffler.com/salvos/internment-camp
slenk 6y ago
I had to straight up refuse some internships in college as they wanted at least 20 hours / week without pay... Come on, when am I supposed to make the money required to live?
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> They've been illegal up here in Canada for a while and it hasn't really caused any economic disasters. It'd be a good change to advocate for down there as well. Unpaid internships are illegal in the United States, and the regulation isn't new. The loophole is if the intern is the primary beneficiary of the internship rather than the company. Some internships are structured more like classes where the students shadow people around their jobs but aren't given assignments. Even these are often paid. I haven't actually seen a real job at a real company (not a wannabe startup or some guy looking for a free Wordpress site or something) advertised as an unpaid internship in years. The only exception I've seen lately is when family or acquaintances give kids a fake pseudo-internship so they can have something to put on their resume.
alistairSH 6y ago
While not illegal in the US, they are limited.[1] In theory, they should be tied to a student's academic plan, an be of more benefit to the intern than the host company. 1 - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...
mkolodny 6y ago
Unpaid internships are only legal in California if: > 1. The intern’s duties will be similar to training provided by an educational institution. > 2. The position exists for the intern’s benefit. > 3. The intern’s work does not displace the work of regular employees, and his or her work must be supervised. [0] The US has a minimum wage. That begs the question: is hiring unpaid photographers for a Netflix show even legal in the US? [0] https://www.californialaborlawattorney.com/practice-areas/wage-and-overtime-claims/unpaid-internships/ https://www.californialaborlawattorney.com/practice-areas/wa...
bityard 6y ago
> I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. Literally _everyone_ who says this doesn't understand what an unpaid internship is, including you. An unpaid intern is essentially an entry-level newhire who never leaves the onboarding and training phase. (Unless they are subsequently hired.) They are there to learn something about the job, the company, and the people there. Most importantly CANNOT perform work that meaningfully contributes to the company's goals. Because this is HN, here's an example of how it would look in a software company. Let's say Timmy is in college and wants to see what a real dev shop looks like, so he applies for (and is accepted) for an unpaid internship at FoobarDev. Here are some of the things Timmy could be asked to do: * Learn the programming language(s) in use at the company * Set up a personal development environment according to the company's tech stack. * Implement a toy feature that will never ship with the product. * Fix a minor tooling or build bug that might be an annoyance but never seriously impacted developers or the product. * Chat with developers, managers, and others in the company about their background and experience. Here are some things that Timmy could NOT be asked to do: * Implement a new product feature. * Tackle a bug from the backlog. * Clean the office * File paperwork * Make a coffee-run for the full-time hires Companies who abuse unpaid internships are _violating_ their agreements with education institutions and are probably breaking labor law. The idea with an unpaid internship is that the intern gets a peek inside the Real World at no risk. Don't underestimate the value of this... Getting ones bearings in a field puts you well ahead of your peers and the networking is absolutely invaluable. (Linked-In is not even close to a substitute for actually meeting people.)
- minikites 6y ago
  >Companies who abuse unpaid internships are _violating_ their agreements with education institutions and are probably breaking labor law. Do you think the abuse of unpaid interns doesn't happen because it's against the law? And for the educational institutions, they need the companies more than the companies need them, so why would they cause a fuss?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  > Literally _everyone_ who says this doesn't understand what an unpaid internship is, including you. This looks like a massive conflation of “is” and “is supposed to be.” I’m pretty sure tons of unpaid interns are either doing real work for the company or menial tasks that would otherwise be compensated (like getting coffee for people). The latter is a constantly-recurring plot element in depictions of modern workplaces. You later claim that these cases are illegal. Even if that’s the case, it’s pretty clear that: A) this is ubiquitous, B) interns generally don’t have any recourse other than just not doing the internship, and C) people in this conversation aren’t actually confused about what internships are.
EricE 6y ago
So exposure has zero value to everyone? Across the board?
sequoia 6y ago
This case is very different than an internship, Netflix producers appear to be soliciting a working professional photographer.
darth_avocado 6y ago
Unpaid internships, probation etc. historically were created because you'd have completely unskilled labor that wanted a job, and for the company it would take resources to train the person on the job. Which made sense a century ago for the industries of the time. However, in the modern age, companies require a certain amount of skill for even the most entry level job and the colleges kind of take over some of the responsibilities of training the unskilled labor. At this point, unpaid internships no longer are about companies sinking cost into people without reaping benefits.
tshaddox 6y ago
I always thought that unpaid internships were less about the company being cheap and saving money, and more about the people in power at the company maintaining a socioeconomic status quo. Generally only people with wealth or a reliable “plan B” can take unpaid internships.
bigbillheck 6y ago
> The US continues to support unpaid work in a pretty major way. One of the founding pillars of the United States was the support of "unpaid work in a pretty major way".
- bhupy 6y ago
  That was...not a founding pillar of the United States. It's fairly well documented that the Founding Fathers were pretty much all opposed to slavery, but saw it as a huge political shit sandwich that would jeopardize Federalization. The United States is one of the only unions on the planet in which every single member state (without exception) voluntarily ratified and agreed to join. Had the Founding Fathers pushed for abolition, the South would never have joined the Union, and slavery may not have been abolished in the 1860s. In order to ensure Federalization, the Founders simply ignored the question of slavery to get the slave-states to join the Union, and in fact built systems in place to incentivize the abolition of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a good example of this: the South outnumbered the North (when counting the slaves), and the South wanted slaves to be counted as one whole person in the census so that they would have outsized representation in the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. This was obviously unfair since those slaves were unfree and basically would have given rich slaveholders multiple votes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a proposal by the abolitionist North to 1) neuter the power of the South at the Federal level, and 2) worded in such a way ("non-free persons") that if a Southern slave state wanted more House seats at the Federal level, all they had to do was abolish slavery. A really good way to understand how the Founders felt about slavery is to look at how those that literally advocated for starting a new nation based fundamentally on the institution of slavery (the Confederates) felt about the Founding Fathers. The Cornerstone Speech was an address given by the Vice President of the CSA just before the Civil War began, and includes commentary around how they felt about the “old Constitution” and its framers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone The relevant bit: “The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.””
irrational 6y ago
I would like to see some statistics on how many interneships are actually unpaid. Does it vary by industry? In the before times, when we worked on campus and had interns, ours were paid the same as full time employees and had paid for housing and benefits.
- Y-bar 6y ago
  A couple of years ago numbers were in the 500k to 1M per year: https://greenlining.org/blog-category/2020/unpaid-internships/ https://greenlining.org/blog-category/2020/unpaid-internship...
  - irrational 6y ago
    Out of how many? I don't know if that is a low or high percentage.
jnsie 6y ago
> I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. I think tipping as a cultural norm is another of the roots. Making it acceptable to move (a large portion of) staff payment from the employer to the customer should never have happened. The toxicity with which people defend tipping culture (in my experience in online forums) is astounding.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I hadn't thought of that but yea I agree entirely. Tipping culture is something that's also really difficult to combat - I feel like it'd require legislation making tipping illegal to actually break the habit since otherwise you're just lowering the waiter's take home. I will continue to both grumble about how bad tipping is while also tipping constantly since I think it's the only reasonable thing to do.
  - jnsie 6y ago
    100%. That's what makes it so insidious, whether by design or happenstance...the burden of both payment and guilt are responsibility are placed on the customer. Tip poorly, or not at all, and the employee doesn't get paid. Makes it impossible to change.
3327 6y ago
This is a bad example of unpaid work. Photography is a viewership and exposure business. The exposure opportunity is priceless here.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by munk-a 6y ago

Black101 6y ago

make your money work for you, don't do internships for $0... even the YC plan is not that good... you get a few thousands to loose a big part of your company? Sometime it makes me want to start a YC alternative ;)

duxup 6y ago

>I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. When I worked with interns they were all paid... but every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, and we spent WAY more than an afternoon of work with them. Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity. Now that's fine because when I did work with them the intent was to give these folks an opportunity / experience. But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people for free. Interns in my experience (outside of maybe a unicorn out there) are not something you can expect to get much of anything out of. I can't imagine coming out of the intern experiences I've had thinking that I'm going to get anything like worthwhile free labor from them.

notyourwork 6y ago
> But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people for free. Interns in experience (outside of maybe a unicorn out there) are not productive ... We use internships as a pipeline to hire. We pay them for their time, they get real world experience. We both get quality time together to see if long term this is a good fit. Those who start full time ramp up much faster and are generally successful in their career.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I had a paid internship that was essentially this and enjoyed it greatly. I wasn't paid particularly well but my workload was a project that I probably took about ten times as long to do as I would today. During the run of the internship I was brought into discussions on design and worked under someone who managed to put up with a flood of questions that I sent at them. I was hired at the end of my internship and switched over to regular work and grew as an independent employee to handle more serious workloads. My internship was an investment that the company paid into me (and other folks) and by the time I left the company I feel like I more than paid that back. It's essentially just a probationary period at the start of employment but with much less expectation to retain the employee and less commitment from the potential employee to stay on.
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    My current company looks at internships as a way to promote working here. We want interns to be successful, learn and enjoy their time. It's a larger investment than hiring off the street but the reward for those who get full time return offers pays for itself ten times over.
zeta0134 6y ago
From the company's point of view, it seems like an internship really ought to be more of a culture fit check than anything else. It's like an extended technical interview in a way: "try on our team for size, see how it fits. Do you like the work? Do we see potential in your skills / productivity?" That sort of thing. Heck, even for experienced engineers there's a spinup time on any large technical endeavor that is sometimes measured in months. How long is a typical internship anyway?
- interviewer0000 6y ago
  12 weeks in the US. In the realm of software you'll make anywhere from 20 to 50 an hour.
  - applecrazy 6y ago
    Some internships go higher, but those tend to be in the trading/quant software of things. (see https://www.levels.fyi/internships/ https://www.levels.fyi/internships/)
    - DiggyJohnson 6y ago
      Respectfully, what is the value of pointing outliers at the top end of the intern of scale?
      - applecrazy 6y ago
        Not much. I just wanted to point out how insane intern salaries can get. As a computer science student, us students idealize those internships because the benefits and longer hours means more money to pay off student loans.
aplummer 6y ago
You generally will get dibs (competing with other internships) on getting to hire them full time. That’s often cheap recruitment.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
It doesn't matter how much faster a full employee could complete a task. They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. If the company can't figure out how to derive value from that labor, that's its own fault. Moreover, if companies weren't getting value out of internships, they wouldn't continue hiring interns.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I've hired a few (paid) interns in my company. They all produced useful things. But they cost so much of my time that I no longer want to hire any.
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  > They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. If they were at college completing courses, they'd be giving up their labor towards that. If you consider an internship an educational opportunity, then the argument that they should be paid holds no water (since they don't get paid for college work, instead they pay for the experience). Obviously, not all internships are _really_ educational opportunities, but I would expect most of them to be to at least some extent. To argue that all of them are just "the intern doing work for the employer, and the only difference is the amount of work compared to a full employee" is naive at best, and possibly disingenuous.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Your college analogy doesn't make sense. Students are the "customers" of the college, not the workers. Or, to put it another way, they're paying for their professors' labor.
    - RHSeeger 6y ago
      My point was that, just because they're doing work as an intern, that doesn't mean they are doing work they should necessarily get paid for. Both college and an internship are situations where - the junior individual (intern, student) is doing work - the junior individual expects to learn during the experience - the senior entity (college, company) is expected to put effort into making sure the junior has learning opportunities - the senior entity can expect the junior person to contribute less productivity to the company than a full employee Now, how similar/dis-similar they are depends heavily on how much the internship focuses on the learning experience and how much the intern adds to the company. But to say that the intern is definitely contributing more than they are gain is factually incorrect. And > They are giving up their labor and should be compensated accordingly. The thing is, "accordingly" is open to interpretation and, in some cases where the intern is getting a lot more than they give, it's reasonable to argue that it is "not at all".
908B64B197 6y ago
If you expect to get immediate value you are doing it wrong. The point is to build relationships with a good school and get a pipeline of applicants that will eventually become great engineers. I recall someone whining he couldn't find good junior engineers. I suggested he go to his local (pretty good) CS school. He then started to whine that they all were already interning at good companies and were transitioning to full time and there was no way for him to break-in!
- johnsoft 6y ago
  Someone complaining they can find senior engineers, but not junior engineers? I would gladly trade places with them!
raverbashing 6y ago
It depends on the level of the intern (and your ability to select productive ones), some are more junior than others (not sure how it works in the US exactly) Yes, most of the time they have negative productivity, but as an intern I had some demanding projects where our work was part of the final (revenue earning) product. But that's how it goes. Pay people for their time.
cerved 6y ago
It's called onboarding. For six months I worked as an intern, getting paid less than my rent. If didn't have parents that could've supported me, I would've been unemployed. I don't work for free. You presumably don't. Pay your interns and pay them a livable salary.
dylan604 6y ago
I guess that depends on the industry the intern is being used. In photography, an intern typically does a lot of the manual labor like loading/unloading gear from the truck, setting up ligts,stands,tripods,etc. As the intern continues to do this work, they should be able to start learning when/where/why certain gear is being used and where to put initial settings. There is no "week to do something I could do in an afternoon" situation. It all has to be done right then and there. This allows the photographer to spend more time working with the subject/talent/producers/client/etc. After being an intern for long enough, that intern should be able to go off and be a decent assistant if not photographer on their own right.
twunde 6y ago
Most engineering internships at this point are paid and most people on HN are working for companies that do paid internships. Unpaid internships tend to be more prevalent in the arts and at small companies. Anecdotally I distinctly remember people doing design for free as interns, with very little oversight or training. Back in the day Craigslist would have a number of these types of "internships" although I think these are no longer common due to both better enforcement of laws and more importantly the rise of the gig economy creating competition
emodendroket 6y ago
In many cases, even though it's technically illegal, interns end up just doing menial work that does little to further their skills.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
No HR person would allow unpaid intern positions in 2021. It's very clearly illegal in the United States. When I mentor college students, the only times we hear about unpaid internships are: 1) Unfunded wannabe startups or small family businesses who don't understand what they need, but they assume they can convince some naive kid to do it for free. No one with actual skills or prospects takes these jobs. Job boards remove these posts if they're moderated. 2) Students who struggle to get a normal internship, so their dad/uncle/cousin/neighbor lets them do an unpaid "internship" off the books at their company to get something to put on their resume. They don't really do much work, but now they can put a line on their resume and claim some work experience for the next interview.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  Has this changed recently? When I was in school, seemed like most internship opportunities I found were unpaid. There was some deal where it would count as college credit. Now don't try to tell me college credit counts as being paid
  - virtue3 6y ago
    The only way to have unpaid interns is if they are receiving college credits I believe. > Unpaid internships are legal if the intern is the "primary beneficiary" of the arrangement. This is determined by the seven-point Primary Beneficiary Test. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internships-legal.html https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15161-are-unpaid-internshi...
  - coderintherye 6y ago
    Yes, things changed in 2010, this is the best summary I could find of it: https://www.commlawcenter.com/2018/01/confused-paying-interns-rules-just-changed.html https://www.commlawcenter.com/2018/01/confused-paying-intern... That said, the interpretation changed some in 2015 and again n 2018. Here is the Department of Labor's "test" on whether or not you can provide unpaid internships: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns... That's federal, but some states have stricter laws.
skipants 6y ago
This has to be the fault of the organization. _Every_ intern!? I've worked at places where the onboarding was generally terrible and I'd still say 80% of the co-op interns we hired were value-positive. Although, when I do reflect on it, I suppose there was a lot we did right: - always willing to help newcomers - answering their questions - knowing when not to answer questions and let them learn through failure instead - reassuring them through mistakes (and just being positive overall) - checking in on them once in awhile But none of these things take any sort of preparation. It's all just cultural. > Amazingly many seemed to have a very high opinion of their productivity. Well, you could be correct. I've definitely seen the situation where developers have a reputation that I know first-hand through their work isn't merited. It could also be that maybe your standards are just a little too high for what you expect people right out of (or still in) college.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Even very senior developers are usually a negative value on a company for at least three weeks. There's usually a week for environment setup with any local tools being configured for the user and it's only after that that the best devs can hit the ground running and actually start comprehending the system, but that comprehension should come at consulting peers (if the new guy isn't asking any questions it's because they aren't doing any work) and by 1.5 weeks I expect someone to actually start adding value - with the net loss being paid out by week three. But that's for a Senior or Principle dev - for intermediary devs I wouldn't expect positive gain for the company for a good two months and junior devs tend to be more expensive with that training phase lasting for something like six weeks. Interns are a loss for companies - but please don't stop hiring them, you'll get some great employees out of the process and you're also investing in developing better communication and mentorship skills for your long term employees. As someone working at a company that was teensy tiny when I started this latter point is quite important - I actively invest in my skills to keep up with the curve and make sure I'm still providing as much value as is reasonable for my position. If I had been locked away to dev code in isolation when I was hired I'd be super rusty at a lot of skills that provide my employer real value.
  - skipants 6y ago
smichel17 6y ago
There's two ways to look at this. One is, "Is hiring an intern a net profit?" The other is, "Is the intern's work, minus the cost of mentorship, a net profit?" When I was in college, I did a paid internship at a health insurance company, wherein I audited, documented, and updated requirements for a large SQL script that pulled data from hospitals and used it to calculate reimbursement for Medicare/Medicaid claims (RAPS). Basically, you have to map hospital billing codes to federal ones. The script was written several years prior by my mentor, and the risk adjustment department had no visibility into how the codes were mapped -- and if it was wrong, we could be fined up to ~$10M (depending on severity), or be missing out on ~$1M in revenue. (It turned out my mentor had done a pretty good job and we only needed minor adjustments, although we also updated the architecture so the risk adjustment folks could define the mapping themselves going forward.) So in short, I can definitively state that 1) it would have cost the company less for my mentor to do the work directly. 2) The several thousands of dollars that the company spent between my salary and my mentor's was definitely worth the millions in mitigated risk/liability. 3) My mentor enjoyed teaching me much more than he would have enjoyed doing the work himself. And I'd like to think that I ended up doing a slightly more thorough job than my mentor might have done -- his long tenure at the company and accumulated knowledge of these sorts of scripts being job security of some sort ;) Anyway, the point here is that internships don't have to be a zero sum game. They can cost more than paying your existing employees to do the same work, and still be valuable.
lhorie 6y ago
I've had very positive experience with interns. We'd recruit from U Waterloo, gradually get them up to speed on real meaningful work, and a few months later when they graduated, we'd instantly have fully trained connections who were more than happy to accept a full time position from us. We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.
alistairSH 6y ago
When I worked with interns they were all paid... but every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, and we spent WAY more than an afternoon of work with them. I managed interns for years in my role as a UI development manager. The main reason to hire interns was as part of our hiring pipeline. It basically served as an extended interview. Any actual work they produced was a bonus. We were also able to keep interns on through the academic year (part-time), which made the time commitment even more worthwhile. The lack of productivity wasn't because they were interns - it was because they were new to the job. This did require flexibility around their school schedule, so instilling good communication habits early was necessary.
reaperducer 6y ago
every one was more time and expense to work with than any value they provided. I've only had interns at one job, and I had a similar complaint. My boss told me that's exactly what's supposed to happen. He explained that they're not free labor. I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn. I guess in some ways he was right. Many of the most valuable lessons I've learned at work have come through mistakes I've made. And probably a bunch when I was an intern all those years ago.
- duxup 6y ago
  That's pretty much how I look at it. Working with them is just being a good part of the community.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > I'm supposed to be training the next generation of $my_profession, and if they're not getting in the way, I'm not letting them do enough to learn. I had intended to say this myself. Computer programmers rarely train themselves. Very few of anything train themselves. Autodidacts who can become masters of <insert field here> are extremely rare, and even those that have that capability can still pick up a lot of information from someone with decades of experience. Our species seems to learn best through being taught by those with more experience than us.
ska 6y ago
> In weeks they accomplished what I could do in an afternoon, Somewhat like nearly every entry level engineer. You are right that "free labor" is a inept way to think about internships, but it's also true that its one of those things where returns are somewhat dependent on investment. A good internship program can get a lot of useful things done and also be useful to the interns. There is certainly variability, but typical interns can be productive withing the scope of their term. Great ones will outproduce some of your full timers. Biggest win is if you do it right you can make some great hires.
dkersten 6y ago
> But I don't know about this idea that interns are somehow a gateway to getting value out of people When I was in Uni, I did a 6 month paid internship. A year and a half later I joined the company and stayed for two years. When I left, there was still code that I wrote during my internship running in production. I'm sure the other staff could have done it faster and better than I did, but it was clearly good enough to keep 3.5 years after my internship ended.
elteto 6y ago
If it took them weeks to do an afternoon’s worth of work then you either had a hiring quality problem, terrible mentoring and guidance, or both. Don’t blame it on the interns.
zhdc1 6y ago
I've had interns in both professional and an academic settings. I don't think I've every really run into a situation where a - good - intern wasn't at least as productive as their salary.
mdoms 6y ago
That's not the point. You pay them because they're working. That's how things work in civilised countries.
Bukhmanizer 6y ago
It all depends on the position and industry. In science a ton of menial data entry work is done by unpaid interns. Don’t get me started on my friends who work in fashion. Even in CS, we should strive to protect exploited workers in other industries.

notyourwork 6y ago

I don't know anyone during my time as a student that took an unpaid internship. How common is this? All the internships and jobs my classmates and friends were getting involved an exchange of money for goods/services. Who is taking an unpaid internship and why? edit: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for not having been exposed to this. If you're willing to take an unpaid internship it's your own fault.

Judgmentality 6y ago
Are you in the US? Also, are you in engineering/tech? Tech internships tend to pay surprisingly well, but many other fields in the US don't pay anything for internships and it's a notable exception when they do.
KittenInABox 6y ago
I know this is common in politics, activism, and certain law positions. I also know volunteer positions are expected of pre-medical students now.
ping_pong 6y ago
In Washington DC and Hollywood, I think it's pretty common. I haven't heard of this at all in Silicon Valley though. In fact interns are pretty well paid, $7500/month at my previous company.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Speaking of DC aren’t all government internships unpaid?
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Yes, but I hear if you're attractive then the Commander in Chief will make it worthwhile.
  - sybercecurity 6y ago
    Not all. Some provide a stipend and/or housing allowance. Depends on the program and the agency running it. Congress now pays their interns too, though I don't know if this extends to campaign interns: https://cha.house.gov/member-services/house-paid-internship-program https://cha.house.gov/member-services/house-paid-internship-...

lurkerasdfh8 6y ago

holywood is based on it too. I gues netflix will merge the worst of both worlds. The actors guild union actually demand you work as a almost-no-pay extra/support for several productions before you are even admitted to the union. not to mention the informal but prevalent culture of "assistants" where people stabilished in the industry takes in people they treat as literal vassals doing errands.

dylan604 6y ago
>The actors guild union actually demand Not sure this is true. Can you point to where in the bylaws this is stated?
- lurkerasdfh8 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild#Becoming_a_member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild#Becoming_a...
  - dylan604 6y ago
    None of what you link shows anything about SAG demanding actors to do unpaid work. The second option specifically states that you must provide vouchers and then ulimately proof of paid work on three separate occasions as a background actor. The first option is a no-brainer in that you're getting paid as a lead. The 3rd option of being a member in good standing with another union also has nothing to do with doing unpaid work.
    - lurkerasdfh8 6y ago
      in practice, this all means: to be able to apply, you have to have worked 3+ times as non union. Which is usually unpaid or paid extremely low. This is even worse on the side-unions, such as costume, etc.
      - munk-a 6y ago

da_big_ghey 6y ago

unpaid intern are absolutely good. many i have known are starting this way, before they have plenty skills for to gain full pay internship. ban are stupid, stop your try to interfere with economy via government.

fallingknife 6y ago
If they're not getting paid, it's not really part of the economy, is it?
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  money not only represent of value. credebility of work with experience have value also.
slaymaker1907 6y ago
This causes a lot of problems with gatekeeping in certain fields because a lot of people can't afford to go without income for months. Why do you support autocratic corporations as opposed to the publicly accountable government? Do you also support allowing companies to use child labor if companies find it to be profitable?
Jtsummers 6y ago
If McDonald's can afford to hire low-skill people for minimum wage across the US, so can companies for under-skilled interns. Not paying someone for work isn't cool unless it's a volunteer position. Businesses shouldn't be getting volunteer labor. Non-profits and, maybe, governments are the only ones that should be getting volunteer interns.
- gtk40 6y ago
  McDonald's lobbied to pay minors, as new hires, less than minimum wage, which is still allowed. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/32-minimum-wage-youth https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/32-minimum-wage... Perhaps a parallel to internships.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> Internships are, in the best light, just a really good recruiting tool. They're also good manager training.

dylan604 6y ago
They're also a good stick your toe in the water for the employee to see if they really want to work there.

anm89 6y ago

I agreed that legislating this is the best route here. It's hard to blame netflix for trying to get free labor when they know they are going to get away with it every time.

ghaff 6y ago
From the article, this does not appear to actually be Netflix. Netflix is the studio. This the production company producing the show that will run on Netflix. (Studios are mostly about green-lighting shows/films and, obviously, overseeing their investments. But they're mostly not actually producing the shows themselves.)
- anm89 6y ago
  The point of which company specifically did this is fairly irrelevant here in regards to my parent comment. Replace Netflix with whoever or whatever it was.

skeeter2020 6y ago

>> They've been illegal up here in Canada for a while and it hasn't really caused any economic disasters This really isn't true. First the word "internship" is not codified in any law. Second employment law is typically provincial unless it's a federally regulated industry so the rules are different everywhere. Finally, most jurisidctions allow them if they're the "hands-on" part of an educational program, which IME qualifies 90%+ of the interships I've seen.

m00x 6y ago
A source for your statement: https://www.lawnow.org/the-law-of-unpaid-internships-in-canada/ https://www.lawnow.org/the-law-of-unpaid-internships-in-cana... Most provinces don't allow unpaid internships, but some provinces have very loose exceptions to this rule. At least, the unpaid internships have limits around work hours.

emodendroket 6y ago

Classic broadside against unpaid internships: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/internment-camp https://thebaffler.com/salvos/internment-camp

slenk 6y ago

I had to straight up refuse some internships in college as they wanted at least 20 hours / week without pay... Come on, when am I supposed to make the money required to live?

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> They've been illegal up here in Canada for a while and it hasn't really caused any economic disasters. It'd be a good change to advocate for down there as well. Unpaid internships are illegal in the United States, and the regulation isn't new. The loophole is if the intern is the primary beneficiary of the internship rather than the company. Some internships are structured more like classes where the students shadow people around their jobs but aren't given assignments. Even these are often paid. I haven't actually seen a real job at a real company (not a wannabe startup or some guy looking for a free Wordpress site or something) advertised as an unpaid internship in years. The only exception I've seen lately is when family or acquaintances give kids a fake pseudo-internship so they can have something to put on their resume.

alistairSH 6y ago

While not illegal in the US, they are limited.[1] In theory, they should be tied to a student's academic plan, an be of more benefit to the intern than the host company. 1 - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-internships https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

mkolodny 6y ago

Unpaid internships are only legal in California if: > 1. The intern’s duties will be similar to training provided by an educational institution. > 2. The position exists for the intern’s benefit. > 3. The intern’s work does not displace the work of regular employees, and his or her work must be supervised. [0] The US has a minimum wage. That begs the question: is hiring unpaid photographers for a Netflix show even legal in the US? [0] https://www.californialaborlawattorney.com/practice-areas/wage-and-overtime-claims/unpaid-internships/ https://www.californialaborlawattorney.com/practice-areas/wa...

bityard 6y ago

> I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. Literally _everyone_ who says this doesn't understand what an unpaid internship is, including you. An unpaid intern is essentially an entry-level newhire who never leaves the onboarding and training phase. (Unless they are subsequently hired.) They are there to learn something about the job, the company, and the people there. Most importantly CANNOT perform work that meaningfully contributes to the company's goals. Because this is HN, here's an example of how it would look in a software company. Let's say Timmy is in college and wants to see what a real dev shop looks like, so he applies for (and is accepted) for an unpaid internship at FoobarDev. Here are some of the things Timmy could be asked to do: * Learn the programming language(s) in use at the company * Set up a personal development environment according to the company's tech stack. * Implement a toy feature that will never ship with the product. * Fix a minor tooling or build bug that might be an annoyance but never seriously impacted developers or the product. * Chat with developers, managers, and others in the company about their background and experience. Here are some things that Timmy could NOT be asked to do: * Implement a new product feature. * Tackle a bug from the backlog. * Clean the office * File paperwork * Make a coffee-run for the full-time hires Companies who abuse unpaid internships are _violating_ their agreements with education institutions and are probably breaking labor law. The idea with an unpaid internship is that the intern gets a peek inside the Real World at no risk. Don't underestimate the value of this... Getting ones bearings in a field puts you well ahead of your peers and the networking is absolutely invaluable. (Linked-In is not even close to a substitute for actually meeting people.)

minikites 6y ago
>Companies who abuse unpaid internships are _violating_ their agreements with education institutions and are probably breaking labor law. Do you think the abuse of unpaid interns doesn't happen because it's against the law? And for the educational institutions, they need the companies more than the companies need them, so why would they cause a fuss?
tshaddox 6y ago
> Literally _everyone_ who says this doesn't understand what an unpaid internship is, including you. This looks like a massive conflation of “is” and “is supposed to be.” I’m pretty sure tons of unpaid interns are either doing real work for the company or menial tasks that would otherwise be compensated (like getting coffee for people). The latter is a constantly-recurring plot element in depictions of modern workplaces. You later claim that these cases are illegal. Even if that’s the case, it’s pretty clear that: A) this is ubiquitous, B) interns generally don’t have any recourse other than just not doing the internship, and C) people in this conversation aren’t actually confused about what internships are.

EricE 6y ago

So exposure has zero value to everyone? Across the board?

sequoia 6y ago

This case is very different than an internship, Netflix producers appear to be soliciting a working professional photographer.

darth_avocado 6y ago

Unpaid internships, probation etc. historically were created because you'd have completely unskilled labor that wanted a job, and for the company it would take resources to train the person on the job. Which made sense a century ago for the industries of the time. However, in the modern age, companies require a certain amount of skill for even the most entry level job and the colleges kind of take over some of the responsibilities of training the unskilled labor. At this point, unpaid internships no longer are about companies sinking cost into people without reaping benefits.

tshaddox 6y ago

I always thought that unpaid internships were less about the company being cheap and saving money, and more about the people in power at the company maintaining a socioeconomic status quo. Generally only people with wealth or a reliable “plan B” can take unpaid internships.

bigbillheck 6y ago

> The US continues to support unpaid work in a pretty major way. One of the founding pillars of the United States was the support of "unpaid work in a pretty major way".

bhupy 6y ago
That was...not a founding pillar of the United States. It's fairly well documented that the Founding Fathers were pretty much all opposed to slavery, but saw it as a huge political shit sandwich that would jeopardize Federalization. The United States is one of the only unions on the planet in which every single member state (without exception) voluntarily ratified and agreed to join. Had the Founding Fathers pushed for abolition, the South would never have joined the Union, and slavery may not have been abolished in the 1860s. In order to ensure Federalization, the Founders simply ignored the question of slavery to get the slave-states to join the Union, and in fact built systems in place to incentivize the abolition of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a good example of this: the South outnumbered the North (when counting the slaves), and the South wanted slaves to be counted as one whole person in the census so that they would have outsized representation in the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. This was obviously unfair since those slaves were unfree and basically would have given rich slaveholders multiple votes. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a proposal by the abolitionist North to 1) neuter the power of the South at the Federal level, and 2) worded in such a way ("non-free persons") that if a Southern slave state wanted more House seats at the Federal level, all they had to do was abolish slavery. A really good way to understand how the Founders felt about slavery is to look at how those that literally advocated for starting a new nation based fundamentally on the institution of slavery (the Confederates) felt about the Founding Fathers. The Cornerstone Speech was an address given by the Vice President of the CSA just before the Civil War began, and includes commentary around how they felt about the “old Constitution” and its framers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Cornerstone The relevant bit: “The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.””

irrational 6y ago

I would like to see some statistics on how many interneships are actually unpaid. Does it vary by industry? In the before times, when we worked on campus and had interns, ours were paid the same as full time employees and had paid for housing and benefits.

Y-bar 6y ago
A couple of years ago numbers were in the 500k to 1M per year: https://greenlining.org/blog-category/2020/unpaid-internships/ https://greenlining.org/blog-category/2020/unpaid-internship...
- irrational 6y ago
  Out of how many? I don't know if that is a low or high percentage.

jnsie 6y ago

> I think unpaid internships being socially acceptable is one of the roots of this insidious habit. I think tipping as a cultural norm is another of the roots. Making it acceptable to move (a large portion of) staff payment from the employer to the customer should never have happened. The toxicity with which people defend tipping culture (in my experience in online forums) is astounding.

munk-a 6y ago
I hadn't thought of that but yea I agree entirely. Tipping culture is something that's also really difficult to combat - I feel like it'd require legislation making tipping illegal to actually break the habit since otherwise you're just lowering the waiter's take home. I will continue to both grumble about how bad tipping is while also tipping constantly since I think it's the only reasonable thing to do.
- jnsie 6y ago
  100%. That's what makes it so insidious, whether by design or happenstance...the burden of both payment and guilt are responsibility are placed on the customer. Tip poorly, or not at all, and the employee doesn't get paid. Makes it impossible to change.

3327 6y ago

This is a bad example of unpaid work. Photography is a viewership and exposure business. The exposure opportunity is priceless here.

dang 6y ago

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html