13 ms·

Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

380 points by EamonLeonard 15y ago

wccrawford 15y ago
And as usual, I disagree. When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most. The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience. As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.
- deadmansshoes 15y ago
  What's wrong with paying at least the minimum wage to interns? I presume you can't claim unemployment benefit if working as an intern, so who is funding an interns living expenses? Unpaid work should be reserved for charitable organisations.
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    You pay wages to employees. (IE People who produce efficient output.) You pay experience to interns. (IE People who take time from efficient employees and produce little output.)
    - zeemonkee 15y ago
      Complete and utter bullshit. When I started work I produced little output, because I was a newbie and knew nothing. I was paid just a little over minimum wage - but I still produced, even if it was crappy code and routine tasks nobody else wanted to do. Companies used to do this all the time - you start at the bottom, fresh out of school, and you have to learn. But you are still f*ing paid.
      - frobozz 15y ago
        Agreed, and not just for complete noobs. If (as an experienced hire) you start a job somewhere enterprisey, the amount of bureaucracy and induction procedure you experience in your first week can mean that you won't be a productive employee for at least a week, if not two. You'll probably still be taking time from experienced employees for months. You still get paid. In such a place, the first week of employment of an experienced hire is exactly the same as it is for an intern.
        nicpottier 15y ago
        These aren't comparable. One is an investment in the person that pays off over time, the other isn't. Yes, an employee takes just as long to get up to speed as an intern, but hopefully that investment is paid off by years of work afterwards. For a two or three month internship, you might spend half their time in getting them up to speed. And for that, you get the same amount of work (best case), then they are gone. Yes, internships can be a great way of recruiting, probably the reason most companies do them at all, but saying that the upramp is comparable to normal FTEs is ignoring the fact that they aren't long term.
        frobozz 15y ago
        The only reason they aren't comparable is because the intern is an intern. Not because the intern is a neophyte. My point (possibly not particularly well made) was not that you should take on inexperienced pretend employees, treat them like real employees for three months, then get rid of them; but that you should take on inexperienced real employees and treat them like real employees. Three months is a pretty normal probationary period for a real employee, so you can just as easily get rid of one if it doesn't work out; as you can an intern.
    - jvandenbroeck 15y ago
      If you're not able to produce valuable output then there might be something wrong with your schooling. If you have studied already 3-4 years computer science than you can do something useful.
    - rmc 15y ago
      You pay experience to interns Very dependent on the type of internship. I saw one (unpaid) internship offering to give people experience working in a convience store. They basically wanted a normal employee to work as a cashier, but didn't want to pay them.
      - rmc 15y ago
        For the record here's a screen grab of the "Get experience tidying a shop": http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/05/17/no-salary/ http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/05/17/no-salary/
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago
  You may have been better off as an intern, but I could see the argument that if nobody's willing to work for free companies will have to pay a decent wage - a degree of collective bargaining by students and recent graduates who are unwilling to sell their summers for almost no money.
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    Interns don't produce much output. They're inexperienced. What would take a professional a day to finish might take an intern 2 weeks, and take time from others to boot. In that situation, the intern should be working for free (for the experience) and the company should consider any actual output to be compensation for the time spent having to help the intern along. As the post's author noted, the 2 job descriptions he linked to do not fit the above criteria. Any company that expects actual productivity from an intern is in the wrong.
    - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
      I'm not a software developer (researcher), but are there really no tasks simple enough for interns in your average software company? When I worked as a sysadmin for a couple of months, the two (paid) intern programmers seemed to do most of the work on some (small) contracts. They definitely had some things to learn, but they got it done (with some help) and were absolutely net positive. Maybe we just had unusually good interns, though (this was in the Netherlands).
      - wccrawford 15y ago
        Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience and we're back to paying them for work done. Complicated tasks need guidance and take time. But they're great for experience. It's not even that they're really hard tasks, but that there are so many little details to software develop that everyone treats like common sense, but it's not... Until you have experience.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
- irishstu 15y ago
  Thanks for the reply. In the two examples I linked there was no mention of training. People were required to already have the skills required to do the work.
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    I agree that those 2 examples are in the wrong. Especially the first one. Experience should never be a requirement for an internship, and a '1 day trial' is absolutely ridiculous for an internship.
    - irishstu 15y ago
      Unfortunatly the examples are the rule and not the exception here from the jobs I have seen advertised. Internships (in Ireland) are pretty much seen as "work for me for nothing" rather than any kind of learning experience.
- nagnatron 15y ago
  It's easy to get an internship today. Douchebag companies who will not pay me at least a minimum wage can have someone completely clueless who knows nothing. You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring. In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.
Produce 15y ago
Companies tend to save money at all costs, even at the expense of decency and Doing The Right Thing™. It's the same reason a lot of them have clauses in their contracts forbidding people from discussing their wages, even though it is in the employees' interests to do so. I figured something out when thinking about this one day - where you're going is how you'll get there. If your goal is to make money, your goal is greed and your path will be a greedy one. If your goal is to make a positive contribution to those around you and get one back in return, then you will still make money but won't step on peoples' toes in the process.
nicpottier 15y ago
Perhaps it is different for design, but taking on an intern for a software shop is almost always a greater burden than benefit. I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are going to contribute. The cold hard fact is that you are still junior, very junior, no matter how much a hotshot you think you are. So the time they put into you makes it a pretty even trade for it not to be paid. Though come to think of it, both internships I went to were paid. But the point stands. To put it simpler terms, ask any company whether they find new college graduates effective and worth the overhead for the first few months they work. I doubt many would say yes, and those are people more qualified than those seeking internships.
- dkersten 15y ago
  I did a six month (paid) internship when I was in uni and after two weeks of "training", we were pair programming with the fulltime employees. By month three, I was working on core services that are still in use by the company now. So, interns are definitely not always a burden, but I certainly do understand that they often would be, but to be honest, you get what you pay for - if it had been an unpaid internship, I'd have had very little incentive to really put much effort into it. I mean, months of unpaid work would be demoralizing and I'd probably quickly have ended up producing little of value.. Luckily it never came to that and I ended up going back to work at the company for another 1.75 years, before I left to try out the world of freelancing and startups. For the record, that company hires between two and five interns every year. They find it effective enough to keep doing it. They treat it as much as a hiring thing as a cheap labor thing and they find having (paid) interns to be pretty effective.
  - nicpottier 15y ago
    Six months is definitely different, I would agree that in that time you can become effective. In a way you are agreeing though, as you said, it took two months for you to be working on core services, so there is a significant ramp up time. If we are talking about a summer internship then it is questionable whether you will really add more value than extract. This is irrespective of ability level and just the reality of getting to know an organizations processes, codebase, etc.. In any case, I'm not quite sure what the article's beef is. If there was no market for unpaid internships, then there wouldn't be any. Clearly some interns are finding it worth their while enough to go work for free. Do totally agree that it is an absolutely awesome funnel for candidates though, and worth drawing those candidates in via pay or other fringe benefits.
davidw 15y ago
0 is just one number along a range of numbers - it's not particularly special. In some cultures, it's considered normal to exchange not just free labor to get your foot in the door, but to actually pay cash to do so. I am not convinced it's a net win for society.
zeemonkee 15y ago
Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom. The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude. In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege. Moreover - a point not raised in the article - in expensive cities the only way a fresh graduate can survive without salary is if their parents subsidize them. Who can afford to do so ? Rich families. So it's a form of discrimination. A company has no excuse for not paying at least minimum wage. If you can't afford the employees you need you shouldn't be in business, period. Any company that uses unpaid internships is morally bankrupt and should be boycotted.
- irishstu 15y ago
  I did raise the point about discrimination at the end but it's easy to miss in the wall of text. I fully agree with Intern Aware http://www.internaware.org/ http://www.internaware.org/ on the issue of discrimination
  - zeemonkee 15y ago
    Sorry, thanks for pointing it out. Good article that raises the issues with this appalling practice.
- Retric 15y ago
  Your ignoring the use of collage students as interns. At many schools it's possible to get collage credit for internships. Also many companies use interns as a recruiting tool they might not get any net value from interns but they get to evaluate recruits for longer periods of time, which is not worth paying 7.25$ an hour for ~3 months. Anyway, legally you are required to pay interns that create net value for your company.
- cturner 15y ago
  There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship. When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers. As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing. Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless. After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent. The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage. There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed. It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges. The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.
kosei 15y ago
Personally I got a lot of value out of my unpaid internships (Kate Spade & Sports Illustrated). Though I understand the reasons against it, I got to a) work with a great team, b) make some great business contacts for future job referrals, and c) get experience that looked great on my resume. That said, I completely understand that my experience was the exception rather than the rule. Plus, both companies I interned at most likely could have afforded to pay me too.
scottseaward 15y ago
The CV still rules when it comes to getting past HR departments and into interview. The HR departments (and employment agencies) I've worked with look directly at the Work Experience section of a CV and then tick off a bunch of boxes for the job they're trying to fill. Unpaid internships are one way to fill a CV with relevant experience. Find a way to bridge that gap and you don't need to do an unpaid internship. I went through 3 months of unpaid work with an ugly little company for exactly this reason, and it paid off, but those were the most trying 3 months of my professional career.
maeon3 15y ago
If you become an unpaid intern, then you better be learning 10 new things per day that you couldn't have learnd any other way. I can see where interning where be beneficial for both individual, company and society. However in the vast majority of cases the intern is just getting ripped off.
dadads 15y ago
I have to disagree with calling unpaid internships a rip-off. As a student, I see this as a way of getting something on the resume to break the catch-22 situation of having zero experience.
- Argorak 15y ago
  As a student who worked during most of his studies: a low-paying job gives you as much experience and is definitely preferable. With most of my bosses, I had the following deal: "I have no experience, so every task lasts as long as I think I need. You pay a low wage, so if you hit one of the points where I am actually experienced: you make a good cut. If you assign me to tasks where I have to learn everything: you make a bad cut." It worked great, if you know the line where you shouldn't force those terms. Its a business and working for free is harmful to everyone who wants to make a living from it.
stevenwilkin 15y ago
The place I'm currently contracting in (mentioned in article) has their summer intern programme in full swing. Not only are the guys getting decent pay but they are building a useful in-house app while getting trained up in technologies like OS X, Linux, Git, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB etc. Win-win!
hvass 15y ago
The only reason for me to do an unpaid internship would be to do it a 'brand-name' company. You do see the best practices, meet an amazing team and it might lead to an eventual job with the company. For an unknown company - not a chance.
- zeemonkee 15y ago
  A "brand-name" company that can't even afford to pay you minimum wage is not worthy of that brand.
- EliRivers 15y ago
  Brand name companies like Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns...
- dangrossman 15y ago
  'Brand name' companies don't play games with employment law and the IRS. They pay their interns.
rb2k_ 15y ago
While I think it's horrible if companies don't pay interns, I can see how the "you're learning things!" angle could seem more reasonable in the US. My outside view is that a lot of Americans pay thousands of dollars to go to university. Universities are, for a lot of people, just a means for learning a discipline and giving them more/better possibilities in a future job search. While most internships aren't as "prestigious" as a university degree, they probably don't cost as much either. In the end, both of them will have allowed you to make some new contacts, learn trade-specific things and add a new slot on your résumé. p.s. this certainly doesn't go for all professions/internships. But the general direction seems about right.
officemonkey 15y ago
At my organization, we used to have unpaid internships for college students, but they would receive college credit. We thought that was still kinda B.S., so we found some money and created paid internships. Back in the day, when I started my career, to get my foot in the door, I worked at a temp agency. "Word processing" was all the rage and they needed people who knew how to use Microsoft Word. After a couple of months the boss noticed I knew how to spell "glaciolacustrine" correctly, so he asked if I had a degree. A couple months later I was hired. All the time I was getting paid $10/hr. That's the way firms should be finding and cultivating young talent: paid internships, temp services, and recruiting. Unpaid internships are indeed bullshit.
GvS 15y ago
It's not a problem for IT students. I could choose from many offers in my city. At our forums we laugh from low paid offers and I haven't seen unpaid one. I ended up going to different country and earn 1,1k euro with no real experience at all and I extended it during crisis (it was few years ago) so I guess I was useful. If you really can't find anything it's better to make nice portfolio projects for yourself at home or work on some opensource project. It's similar experience but feels much better than working as slave for some awful company that can't even afford small wage.
- Argorak 15y ago
  My experience is that a number of larger companies is paying rather well for internships of people 1 or 2 years from graduation. I had a great half a year in southern france on the cost of one of them (small flat, benefits and a final performance bonus included). They see it as gambling money: if they find a good guy, they will try to hold on him. Otherwise, even a 1k wage doesn't really cost them much. Also: Good interns usually are not available for hire after their studies, so its money well invested.
perl 15y ago
If someone tells me I wont be paid..but still i want to take up that work ? why blame But if someone fresh grad is duped into believing doing unpaid work will get him something else then its bad.
WillyF 15y ago
I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. My startup helps college students find entry level jobs and internships, so I'm constantly aware of what the latest trends are. One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like this, but the fact that career experts who are supposed to help interns are offering these really blows my mind). These are people who don't have the ability to offer many of the benefits that do come with an unpaid internship such as making connections, learning what it's like to work in a real office, having a recognizable name on your resume, etc. Another trend that scares me is that we're seeing more and more internships auctioned off in charity auctions. Rich parents actually pay for their kids to get some experience. Unfortunately, interns aren't going to be the ones to stop this trend. Unpaid interns do benefit from their internships. They mostly accept it as something that they have to do, and they know that if they refuse to take an unpaid internship, there are thousands of other students who will snap up the opportunity. Change is either going to have to come from employers or the government. I strongly believe that offering paid internships is more favorable to employers because they get better quality interns who are more motivated, and the employer has a stronger incentive to use the intern's time well. Here in the U.S. there are already laws against unpaid internships. I wrote an article on it here: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/ http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi... There's actually an excellent and fair standard for determining when an unpaid internship should be allowed; however, I've never heard of an employer's being prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act for having unpaid interns. And if the law were to start to be enforced, I'm not sure the outcome would benefit students in the short-term. There would be a lot fewer opportunities as many employers would get rid of their internship programs. This would result in even more competition for what paid opportunities were left. I really hate unpaid internships, but I still haven't figured out what it's going to take to make them a thing of the past. They've become an essential part of the transition from education to employment, and messing around with that in a time when really talented grads are struggling to land jobs probably isn't a good idea. We may have to wait until the economy really heats up again.
- blumentopf 15y ago
amirmc 15y ago
I've had friends who wanted to get into journalism and publishing and the only way they could do it was by working for free for several months. Not even 'internships', just free work. Eventually, there were vacancies and they were the obvious hires. I'm not suggesting this was fair but it was a pretty clear case of supply outstripping demand, which meant that employers could afford to let the system develop this way.
ThomPete 15y ago
If products can be free so can interns. Look at it as a freemium model.
- omouse 15y ago
  People are not products.
  - rick888 15y ago
    technically, you are when you are looking for a job. You need to market and sell yourself to the highest bidder.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Unlike your web app, your employment practices are subject to federal and state laws, and to the tax code. Give someone work an employee would normally do, and which isn't educational, and you must pay them. Fail to pay them and the IRS will be after you for payroll taxes and severe penalties.
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
Totally true; I did an unpaid internship for a startup and didn't learn a thing(actually they where doing a verrrry bad software engineering job). The advantage was that I didn't really had to work much & I got grades for the internship @unif. But I wouldn't do it again. I felt under valuated, I can make really complex s/w architectures, solve complex, challenging problems & I was doing work that I could've done as a 14 year old during the internship..
dmoo 15y ago
As this is Ireland I've got to assume there is also an element of trying to reduce the numbers who are technically unemployed and so make things look better. It sounds very familiar to the community employment schemes etc. from the '80s where people basically worked for their unemployment benefit so as to gain work experience / help the community. I can even remember being turned down at an interview for one of these way back when and feeling pretty bad. In the end some people will gain something & some people will be exploited but it wont make much difference to the economy other than to help drive down wages.
- irishstu 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you can be on the unemployment register and still work in an internship. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the government isn't looking too deeply into the situation because it keeps the dole numbers down.
apinstein 15y ago
I can't find the article right now, but there have been studies about and there is evidence for that many people will do something for free, but if offered to be paid a market rate that is low for the same work, will not do it. In fact, they'll be insulted by the low value ascribed to it. Personally I would feel like an a-hole offering someone minimum wage to do intern-level work at our startup. Nor would I want it on my resume that I worked as a web developer for $8/hour. They do not want a market price that low on their skills. They'd rather have a free internship on paper. That said, it does all depend on context. In fact during high school I worked in a bio lab for free for about 50 hours and then asked for a paid internship (which was minimum wage) during the summer. However I was a high-schooler, so this was cool. But I would not have taken (and in fact turned down) low-paying jobs after college. So I can see that context does matter, and I don't think it's fair to rip on all unpaid internships with the same stroke.
- icegreentea 15y ago
  The whole low pay versus free psychology thing is tricky. It also depends on how the pay is structured. If you offer it as a low hourly rate, it'll probably be rejected, as opposed to working for some lumpsum at the end (or split into two). The second is typically more acceptable. Then instead of feeling like their labour is worth minimal wage, they feel like they're being paid for finishing a job. shrug worked on me. 600 dollars for a parttime research thing during school for a term that worked out to $9 an hour, felt way better split into 2x300.
epo 15y ago
30-day free trials are for software. People deserve more respect.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship). The idea is they are learning. If they are producing things the company then uses to sell, they should get paid. But I've seen interns that literally follow around, take notes, ask questions. So, why should someone be paid for not contributing to the bottom line?
  - tkahn6 15y ago
    > But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship). That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm at an internship right now getting paid quite well and I'm contributing to their bottom line (albeit indirectly since I am working on internal tools). I'm also learning quite a lot.
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      Sorry, I should have been explicit (though, I feel I was fairly obvious). unpaid interships aren't producing anything. If you are getting paid, then it's not really relevant to the discussion of "unpaid internships."
      - mattdeboard 15y ago
        Whatever point you thought you were making, you weren't. And even if you were, it certainly wasn't obvious.
        jasonlotito 15y ago
        No. I was correct. Interns producing something of value to the company have to be paid, otherwise it's illegal. If you are getting paid, then the discussion doesn't involve you. Sorry if you don't understand. Your ignorance doesn't make me wrong.
gorog 15y ago
This past year I followed a web development course. I'm now supposed to work 3 months for free. I don't mind it because I've been jobless for a long time before. The problem is, I just can't find an employer (in France). I get the interviews, but my interviewer always assumes that I'm supposed to know everything by heart, have nothing more to learn, and more importantly, they want to see a portfolio of sites I've done before other than the one I've done in class. Basically, they don't want an intern, they want a real, super-fast worker for free. So I'm going to fail at my diploma because nobody wants me to work for free for them. To make it worse, I'm the best student of my class. Those who can't code found an internship. Are we supposed to lie and bluff to be allowed to be exploited?
- nagnatron 15y ago
  Did you try remote work?
afterburner 15y ago
Are CS students not cynical enough? Compared to, say engineers (non-software)? Or is it just the effect of fierce and deep competition? Or perhaps the potential for learning a lot (practical knowledge) in a short time is greater in software dev work than others?
alanorourke 15y ago
While in college i chased a small design studio you have never heard of to take me as an unpaid intern. I learnt loads just watching them run a studio and work with clients. I do not see how they could possibly have justified paying me for the little value i gave back. Still gratefull for the opportunity they gave me.
erikb 15y ago
In Germany I often see unpaid interns, but actually not in a bad situation. There are 2 situations in Germany when an unpaid internship will happen: One is, when the students working as interns are still going to their schools and maybe are first or second semesters. So actually they don't really create value, but they cost time, energy, working hours of coworkers, electricity, rent and so on. The company basically already pays a load to have this intern sitting there and a high chance to get no value back in return. I think in this situation it is quite fair, not to pay wages. The second situation is, when students try to get a job, which a lot of people want to have, like at Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers and so on. In this situation the brand alone will help them out later to get better jobs or even give them a chance for a full time job in this company that others can't get. It's a little like doing a start-up. You put in a lot for the small chance to get a unnatural big payoff. In both situations I can't disapprove of unpaid internships. I hope with sharing these experiences, other readers might get a more objective point of view. It is not all bad about unpaid internships!
jasonlotito 15y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the idea of an internship about learning, not about producing? If your producing for the company something they are selling (or creating net value), don't you have to get paid? I mean, people here are talking about actually working on projects the company is earning money for. That's not an internship. Am I clueless, or are other people just ignorant?
- xsmasher 15y ago
  Are you making a moral argument, or a legal one? If legal, what country? The "idea of an internship" is experience and networking if you're the intern, recruiting if you're a smart company, and free/cheap labor if you're a dumb company.
  - tiddchristopher 15y ago
    It's a matter of legality in the United States. "Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer 'derives no immediate advantage' from the intern’s activities [. . .]" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html
- dangrossman 15y ago
  If you're in the US, you're absolutely right, and other people are ignorant. You can't use unpaid interns like free workers, even for menial work like updating websites or e-mailing prospects... yet several HN regulars have advocated doing exactly that before. It's not legal.
hugh3 15y ago
I work in academia. In academia, we pay crap, especially to the people at the bottom of the totem pole. But even we pay our summer interns.
joe8756438 15y ago
There's a great book that came out recently, Intern Nation, it's the first exposé on this issue that I'm aware of. It is fantastic, totally engaging, covers all of the many aspects of the internship problem and its genesis.
jeffchuber 15y ago
Companies often don't pay interns for 2 reasons: 1. They don't think they can afford to give them responsibility, and with no responsibility = no pay. This is a terrible relationship. (no pay = no responsibility as well) 2. They know that if it's unpaid - it's likely that only people very interested will apply - and this signal is, supposedly, very strong. The 3 MAJOR problems are: 1. The company is sending a signal that says, "we don't trust you", "we don't think you can do valuable work", "and we don't value you enough to pay you" 2. The company gets lower skilled people, because the good ones get the jobs with good experience AND pay 3. Have you EVER tried to get a volunteer to do anything?! It's impossible. Incentives are not aligned.
int3rnaut 15y ago
It's all relative and depends entirely on how much you put into it and how much your employer does the same. I've had friends who've taken unpaid internships and have gotten entirely different experiences out of it.
synnik 15y ago
Wow. We hire almost every intern that works for us, unless they suck. Internships are also normally done pre-graduation from college. It is not a job, it is in exchange for college credit. We hire the day they graduate. But it is also up to the intern to decide whether or not our internship is right for them. A overgeneralized diatribe like the one posted is aiming to get people to not intern at all, whereas the appropriate act would be to critically evaluate your options, and make an informed decision about each specific company.
- mitcheme 15y ago
  In my school, we call them "co-op jobs". If you sign up for co-op, you get college credit for them, but either way you get paid. And of course if you're any good, your co-op employers will want to hang onto you after you graduate. I didn't bother signing up for co-op because co-op or no, it's impossible to complete all the other graduation requirements and not have enough credits. So the credits you get from a co-op job are useless. Students pay money to the school to be part of the co-op program, and that's not unusual. Here, it's $400 for a once a week class that teaches you how to make a resume plus an additional ~$100 fee if you find a job, even if you didn't use the school's connections to find it. If your internship results in college credit, its likely that students are actually losing money by working for you. I think that's absurd.
  - synnik 15y ago
    You also inadvertently prove a more subtle point of internships. Employees who offer the greatest value are ones who are engaged with the company and want to be part of it. If someone doesn't think enough of us to want to go through the trouble of an internship, and think working for us is absurd, then they would not have been a good fit anyway. No loss to us if they don't work with us.
    - mitcheme 15y ago
      Paying money to work for anyone is absurd. I don't care if your company is the best thing since sliced bread. It isn't worth going homeless, nor is it worth taking on tens of thousands extra in loans to (a) support myself while providing you with free labor and (b) cover other expenses I could've paid for out of pocket if I'd been paid fairly, such as tuition. If free internships became standard, it would put students from low-income families at a serious disadvantage. Who needs meritocracy when we can make a caste system? Hopefully, your company will be successful, so you can afford to pay all your kids' expenses and put them through unpaid internships of their own. I want to be able to buy gas and keep my car maintained so I can actually come to work, so I'm not "engaged". If I want to pay enough of my tuition up-front so that when I graduate I can afford to work for small companies doing interesting projects, instead of auctioning myself to the highest bidder to cover my loan payments, then I'm a "bad fit". So be it, I guess.
walexander 15y ago
I had a paid internship but would have gladly done it unpaid if I had to. I interned at a big name place, so YMMV, but I can say that senior year when I was looking for jobs _no one_ cared about what I did in school and _everyone_ cared what I did at that internship. You are not going to work there to do slave labor, you're getting bullet points on your resume, mentorship from senior engineers, as well as taking in the business environment which you've probably never seen before. I hope no college student who can't find another option has decided to stick his nose up at an unpaid internship because of this post.
conjectures 15y ago
The problem is part informational. Grads take internships in the _hope_ it will lead to a job. For most it doesn't. Hope is perennial, so more bums can always be found for seats. Banning them is unlikely in most countries as it's politically unrealistic. Exhorting companies not to do it is unreliable. So not easy to close off intern demand. Tackling the supply side might be a better bet. The answer might be in educating grads to mentally file internships alongside diet pills and pyramid schemes. Providing alternatives also good (but more difficult).
studiofellow 15y ago
Passing judgment on all unpaid internships in all situations is unreasonable. When deciding whether to accept an unpaid internship, common sense is the best guide. I've seen both unpaid and paid interns treated poorly. I've also seen both thrive. I personally had 2 paid internships before I graduated college. One was demeaning and the other an incredible learning experience. If an unpaid opportunity offers a lot and you can afford to take it, why not? How is this different than contributing to open source or doing pro bono for charities? However, if a company doesn't want to pay, I'd suggest more caution. Ask lots of questions, and if you end up just getting people coffee, quit. Interns are working professionals just like anyone else and deserve equal respect.
deleted 15y ago
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noarchy 15y ago
Even Wal Mart will pay you while training you. If a company cannot meet that standard, something is wrong, imo.
Confusion 15y ago
If you're not paid, you're not valued. Nothing you produce will ever be good enough. Nobody will make time for you, because they have more valuable things to spend their time on. No money is lost if you're struggling to do your assignments; no money is lost if you don't learn anything. A company should be invested into their interns and the best way to be invested is by paying them a wage and expecting decent work in return.
phxrsng 15y ago
In the US at least, there are many opportunities for paid internships. All the major tech companies offer them - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Zynga, Boeing, Lockheed, etc - and many of the smaller ones do (though in smaller numbers). At almost all of them, interns are treated as normal engineers and put on teams as basically full time employees with an end date ~3-4 months after they start. They are paid very well (competitive with what a FT employee would make for 3 months). The internship can, and in many cases, does result in a full time or reintern offer. The thing is, you have to be able to cut it and basically interview as someone who they would WANT to hire as a FT after a year or two more experience.
chrisclark1729 15y ago
Perhaps this thread has gone too long, but the comments are overwhelmingly against doing work for free. TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands. My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time. Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run. One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON. If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against. If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.
walkon 15y ago
I'm confused. Who forces people to work for free?
- walkon 15y ago
  When down voting, please explain. If working as an unpaid intern is indeed horrible and so incredibly lacking in non-monetary value, then people will learn there is no reason to voluntarily engage (or continue) in such a relationship.
yellowredblack 15y ago
This is what I learned from a half-day legal seminar in california aimed at startups: In California, unless the work is for course credit at an established institution, an intern must be paid minimum wage. If not, the intern can do the work, and then file with the state, which will then do all the investigation. The intern doesnt need to get a laywer. They get the state's lawyers looking for a hefty fine, back taxes, and the opportunity to audit the hell out of someone. Start-ups are especially vulnerable to this because programmers who would normally be exempt probably aren't making enough and should be paid overtime. The state doesn't care what those programmers want. They want their back taxes.
paolomaffei 15y ago
This guy clearly never had a company. We do not pay our interns and still lose money in the process if we don't hire them after because we have lost too much time not just training but also fixing errors people at their first experience will do. Nevertheless we still invest on internships because that's the only way to snap good talent just out of university. So please, stop the bullshit. Yeah, and downvote away.
bugsy 15y ago
In the US there's two very different sorts of internships. The first is what you describe, scamming desperate people during a economic depression out of free skilled labor that has monetary value to the company. The second is internships at places like magazines, newspapers and politicians offices. These ones are more interesting. Poor people and minorities can't afford to work for a year for free. But the children of the rich can. The internship provides cover to avoid having to hire minorities since hiring takes place from the internship pool.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Poor people and minorities can't afford to work for a year for free Poor people and minorities? So minorities, even if they happen to be individually rich, can't afford to work for a year for free?
  - bugsy 15y ago
    Thanks. To clarify, certain classes of minorities, because of endemic racism, are statistically less financially able to work for free for a year. These are the sorts of types of minorities that certain kinds of firms don't want to hire, but also don't want to be held accountable. Unpaid internships, to which said minorities, and the poor (including white trash) do not apply, act as a filtering mechanism to make sure only the right sorts of blue blooded folks end up getting hired.
georgieporgie 15y ago
I don't know why there aren't more low-level tech jobs for college students. I paid for a couple years of state school by working in a deli. The only jobs I saw that would hire a "college kid" were on campus, and those basically boiled down to having the right connections as soon as you arrived. No longer a freshman and nothing related on your resume? Not interested.
zachcb 15y ago
I'm very desperate to join a startup as an intern or employee. Some of us (me) have been dreaming (literally) about being in a startup that it doesn't matter what we do, as long as we get in one. It's gotten to the point where I would even pay to be in one. What I get out of it is that I will see if a startup is right for me, and at this point that's all I can ask for.
andrewflnr 15y ago
Last summer, I took an unpaid internship at a software company, if it can be called an internship. I was introduced to someone who worked there, and he got it worked out for me. I didn't work on core stuff for the company, so maybe it was less an internship than just hanging out in the offices while I worked on an open-source project relevant to them, specifically github.com/andrewf/pcap2har . I learned a crap-load of stuff there, technical and otherwise. I am enormously better off having taken that opportunity. Would I have been worse off if I had worked on stuff that directly made them money? No. My friend has left to work on his own startup, but I started this week as a paid intern. I hope to keep working part-time when I start school again. I cant speak for other people's experience with less-scrupulous employers, but I have nothing but gratitude for the people who gave me my unpaid internship.
threejay 15y ago
I'm currently in my sixth and final year of pharmacy school which consists entirely of clinical rotations at different practice sites in the area. Not only are these internships completely unpaid, we have to pay ~$30k for the priviledge which equates to almost $1000/week (6 x 6 week rotations). It's a complete scam.

380 points by EamonLeonard 15y ago

And as usual, I disagree. When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most. The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience. As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.

deadmansshoes 15y ago
What's wrong with paying at least the minimum wage to interns? I presume you can't claim unemployment benefit if working as an intern, so who is funding an interns living expenses? Unpaid work should be reserved for charitable organisations.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  You pay wages to employees. (IE People who produce efficient output.) You pay experience to interns. (IE People who take time from efficient employees and produce little output.)
  - zeemonkee 15y ago
    Complete and utter bullshit. When I started work I produced little output, because I was a newbie and knew nothing. I was paid just a little over minimum wage - but I still produced, even if it was crappy code and routine tasks nobody else wanted to do. Companies used to do this all the time - you start at the bottom, fresh out of school, and you have to learn. But you are still f*ing paid.
    - frobozz 15y ago
      Agreed, and not just for complete noobs. If (as an experienced hire) you start a job somewhere enterprisey, the amount of bureaucracy and induction procedure you experience in your first week can mean that you won't be a productive employee for at least a week, if not two. You'll probably still be taking time from experienced employees for months. You still get paid. In such a place, the first week of employment of an experienced hire is exactly the same as it is for an intern.
      - nicpottier 15y ago
        These aren't comparable. One is an investment in the person that pays off over time, the other isn't. Yes, an employee takes just as long to get up to speed as an intern, but hopefully that investment is paid off by years of work afterwards. For a two or three month internship, you might spend half their time in getting them up to speed. And for that, you get the same amount of work (best case), then they are gone. Yes, internships can be a great way of recruiting, probably the reason most companies do them at all, but saying that the upramp is comparable to normal FTEs is ignoring the fact that they aren't long term.
        frobozz 15y ago
        The only reason they aren't comparable is because the intern is an intern. Not because the intern is a neophyte. My point (possibly not particularly well made) was not that you should take on inexperienced pretend employees, treat them like real employees for three months, then get rid of them; but that you should take on inexperienced real employees and treat them like real employees. Three months is a pretty normal probationary period for a real employee, so you can just as easily get rid of one if it doesn't work out; as you can an intern.
  - jvandenbroeck 15y ago
    If you're not able to produce valuable output then there might be something wrong with your schooling. If you have studied already 3-4 years computer science than you can do something useful.
  - rmc 15y ago
    You pay experience to interns Very dependent on the type of internship. I saw one (unpaid) internship offering to give people experience working in a convience store. They basically wanted a normal employee to work as a cashier, but didn't want to pay them.
    - rmc 15y ago
      For the record here's a screen grab of the "Get experience tidying a shop": http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/05/17/no-salary/ http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/05/17/no-salary/
JoachimSchipper 15y ago
You may have been better off as an intern, but I could see the argument that if nobody's willing to work for free companies will have to pay a decent wage - a degree of collective bargaining by students and recent graduates who are unwilling to sell their summers for almost no money.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  Interns don't produce much output. They're inexperienced. What would take a professional a day to finish might take an intern 2 weeks, and take time from others to boot. In that situation, the intern should be working for free (for the experience) and the company should consider any actual output to be compensation for the time spent having to help the intern along. As the post's author noted, the 2 job descriptions he linked to do not fit the above criteria. Any company that expects actual productivity from an intern is in the wrong.
  - JoachimSchipper 15y ago
    I'm not a software developer (researcher), but are there really no tasks simple enough for interns in your average software company? When I worked as a sysadmin for a couple of months, the two (paid) intern programmers seemed to do most of the work on some (small) contracts. They definitely had some things to learn, but they got it done (with some help) and were absolutely net positive. Maybe we just had unusually good interns, though (this was in the Netherlands).
    - wccrawford 15y ago
      Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience and we're back to paying them for work done. Complicated tasks need guidance and take time. But they're great for experience. It's not even that they're really hard tasks, but that there are so many little details to software develop that everyone treats like common sense, but it's not... Until you have experience.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
irishstu 15y ago
Thanks for the reply. In the two examples I linked there was no mention of training. People were required to already have the skills required to do the work.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  I agree that those 2 examples are in the wrong. Especially the first one. Experience should never be a requirement for an internship, and a '1 day trial' is absolutely ridiculous for an internship.
  - irishstu 15y ago
    Unfortunatly the examples are the rule and not the exception here from the jobs I have seen advertised. Internships (in Ireland) are pretty much seen as "work for me for nothing" rather than any kind of learning experience.
nagnatron 15y ago
It's easy to get an internship today. Douchebag companies who will not pay me at least a minimum wage can have someone completely clueless who knows nothing. You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring. In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.

Produce 15y ago

Companies tend to save money at all costs, even at the expense of decency and Doing The Right Thing™. It's the same reason a lot of them have clauses in their contracts forbidding people from discussing their wages, even though it is in the employees' interests to do so. I figured something out when thinking about this one day - where you're going is how you'll get there. If your goal is to make money, your goal is greed and your path will be a greedy one. If your goal is to make a positive contribution to those around you and get one back in return, then you will still make money but won't step on peoples' toes in the process.

nicpottier 15y ago

Perhaps it is different for design, but taking on an intern for a software shop is almost always a greater burden than benefit. I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are going to contribute. The cold hard fact is that you are still junior, very junior, no matter how much a hotshot you think you are. So the time they put into you makes it a pretty even trade for it not to be paid. Though come to think of it, both internships I went to were paid. But the point stands. To put it simpler terms, ask any company whether they find new college graduates effective and worth the overhead for the first few months they work. I doubt many would say yes, and those are people more qualified than those seeking internships.

dkersten 15y ago
I did a six month (paid) internship when I was in uni and after two weeks of "training", we were pair programming with the fulltime employees. By month three, I was working on core services that are still in use by the company now. So, interns are definitely not always a burden, but I certainly do understand that they often would be, but to be honest, you get what you pay for - if it had been an unpaid internship, I'd have had very little incentive to really put much effort into it. I mean, months of unpaid work would be demoralizing and I'd probably quickly have ended up producing little of value.. Luckily it never came to that and I ended up going back to work at the company for another 1.75 years, before I left to try out the world of freelancing and startups. For the record, that company hires between two and five interns every year. They find it effective enough to keep doing it. They treat it as much as a hiring thing as a cheap labor thing and they find having (paid) interns to be pretty effective.
- nicpottier 15y ago
  Six months is definitely different, I would agree that in that time you can become effective. In a way you are agreeing though, as you said, it took two months for you to be working on core services, so there is a significant ramp up time. If we are talking about a summer internship then it is questionable whether you will really add more value than extract. This is irrespective of ability level and just the reality of getting to know an organizations processes, codebase, etc.. In any case, I'm not quite sure what the article's beef is. If there was no market for unpaid internships, then there wouldn't be any. Clearly some interns are finding it worth their while enough to go work for free. Do totally agree that it is an absolutely awesome funnel for candidates though, and worth drawing those candidates in via pay or other fringe benefits.

davidw 15y ago

0 is just one number along a range of numbers - it's not particularly special. In some cultures, it's considered normal to exchange not just free labor to get your foot in the door, but to actually pay cash to do so. I am not convinced it's a net win for society.

zeemonkee 15y ago

Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom. The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude. In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege. Moreover - a point not raised in the article - in expensive cities the only way a fresh graduate can survive without salary is if their parents subsidize them. Who can afford to do so ? Rich families. So it's a form of discrimination. A company has no excuse for not paying at least minimum wage. If you can't afford the employees you need you shouldn't be in business, period. Any company that uses unpaid internships is morally bankrupt and should be boycotted.

irishstu 15y ago
I did raise the point about discrimination at the end but it's easy to miss in the wall of text. I fully agree with Intern Aware http://www.internaware.org/ http://www.internaware.org/ on the issue of discrimination
- zeemonkee 15y ago
  Sorry, thanks for pointing it out. Good article that raises the issues with this appalling practice.
Retric 15y ago
Your ignoring the use of collage students as interns. At many schools it's possible to get collage credit for internships. Also many companies use interns as a recruiting tool they might not get any net value from interns but they get to evaluate recruits for longer periods of time, which is not worth paying 7.25$ an hour for ~3 months. Anyway, legally you are required to pay interns that create net value for your company.
cturner 15y ago
There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship. When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers. As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing. Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless. After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent. The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage. There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed. It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges. The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.

kosei 15y ago

Personally I got a lot of value out of my unpaid internships (Kate Spade & Sports Illustrated). Though I understand the reasons against it, I got to a) work with a great team, b) make some great business contacts for future job referrals, and c) get experience that looked great on my resume. That said, I completely understand that my experience was the exception rather than the rule. Plus, both companies I interned at most likely could have afforded to pay me too.

scottseaward 15y ago

The CV still rules when it comes to getting past HR departments and into interview. The HR departments (and employment agencies) I've worked with look directly at the Work Experience section of a CV and then tick off a bunch of boxes for the job they're trying to fill. Unpaid internships are one way to fill a CV with relevant experience. Find a way to bridge that gap and you don't need to do an unpaid internship. I went through 3 months of unpaid work with an ugly little company for exactly this reason, and it paid off, but those were the most trying 3 months of my professional career.

maeon3 15y ago

If you become an unpaid intern, then you better be learning 10 new things per day that you couldn't have learnd any other way. I can see where interning where be beneficial for both individual, company and society. However in the vast majority of cases the intern is just getting ripped off.

dadads 15y ago

I have to disagree with calling unpaid internships a rip-off. As a student, I see this as a way of getting something on the resume to break the catch-22 situation of having zero experience.

Argorak 15y ago
As a student who worked during most of his studies: a low-paying job gives you as much experience and is definitely preferable. With most of my bosses, I had the following deal: "I have no experience, so every task lasts as long as I think I need. You pay a low wage, so if you hit one of the points where I am actually experienced: you make a good cut. If you assign me to tasks where I have to learn everything: you make a bad cut." It worked great, if you know the line where you shouldn't force those terms. Its a business and working for free is harmful to everyone who wants to make a living from it.

stevenwilkin 15y ago

The place I'm currently contracting in (mentioned in article) has their summer intern programme in full swing. Not only are the guys getting decent pay but they are building a useful in-house app while getting trained up in technologies like OS X, Linux, Git, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB etc. Win-win!

hvass 15y ago

The only reason for me to do an unpaid internship would be to do it a 'brand-name' company. You do see the best practices, meet an amazing team and it might lead to an eventual job with the company. For an unknown company - not a chance.

zeemonkee 15y ago
A "brand-name" company that can't even afford to pay you minimum wage is not worthy of that brand.
EliRivers 15y ago
Brand name companies like Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns...
dangrossman 15y ago
'Brand name' companies don't play games with employment law and the IRS. They pay their interns.

rb2k_ 15y ago

While I think it's horrible if companies don't pay interns, I can see how the "you're learning things!" angle could seem more reasonable in the US. My outside view is that a lot of Americans pay thousands of dollars to go to university. Universities are, for a lot of people, just a means for learning a discipline and giving them more/better possibilities in a future job search. While most internships aren't as "prestigious" as a university degree, they probably don't cost as much either. In the end, both of them will have allowed you to make some new contacts, learn trade-specific things and add a new slot on your résumé. p.s. this certainly doesn't go for all professions/internships. But the general direction seems about right.

officemonkey 15y ago

At my organization, we used to have unpaid internships for college students, but they would receive college credit. We thought that was still kinda B.S., so we found some money and created paid internships. Back in the day, when I started my career, to get my foot in the door, I worked at a temp agency. "Word processing" was all the rage and they needed people who knew how to use Microsoft Word. After a couple of months the boss noticed I knew how to spell "glaciolacustrine" correctly, so he asked if I had a degree. A couple months later I was hired. All the time I was getting paid $10/hr. That's the way firms should be finding and cultivating young talent: paid internships, temp services, and recruiting. Unpaid internships are indeed bullshit.

GvS 15y ago

It's not a problem for IT students. I could choose from many offers in my city. At our forums we laugh from low paid offers and I haven't seen unpaid one. I ended up going to different country and earn 1,1k euro with no real experience at all and I extended it during crisis (it was few years ago) so I guess I was useful. If you really can't find anything it's better to make nice portfolio projects for yourself at home or work on some opensource project. It's similar experience but feels much better than working as slave for some awful company that can't even afford small wage.

Argorak 15y ago
My experience is that a number of larger companies is paying rather well for internships of people 1 or 2 years from graduation. I had a great half a year in southern france on the cost of one of them (small flat, benefits and a final performance bonus included). They see it as gambling money: if they find a good guy, they will try to hold on him. Otherwise, even a 1k wage doesn't really cost them much. Also: Good interns usually are not available for hire after their studies, so its money well invested.

perl 15y ago

If someone tells me I wont be paid..but still i want to take up that work ? why blame But if someone fresh grad is duped into believing doing unpaid work will get him something else then its bad.

WillyF 15y ago

I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. My startup helps college students find entry level jobs and internships, so I'm constantly aware of what the latest trends are. One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like this, but the fact that career experts who are supposed to help interns are offering these really blows my mind). These are people who don't have the ability to offer many of the benefits that do come with an unpaid internship such as making connections, learning what it's like to work in a real office, having a recognizable name on your resume, etc. Another trend that scares me is that we're seeing more and more internships auctioned off in charity auctions. Rich parents actually pay for their kids to get some experience. Unfortunately, interns aren't going to be the ones to stop this trend. Unpaid interns do benefit from their internships. They mostly accept it as something that they have to do, and they know that if they refuse to take an unpaid internship, there are thousands of other students who will snap up the opportunity. Change is either going to have to come from employers or the government. I strongly believe that offering paid internships is more favorable to employers because they get better quality interns who are more motivated, and the employer has a stronger incentive to use the intern's time well. Here in the U.S. there are already laws against unpaid internships. I wrote an article on it here: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internships-illegal/ http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi... There's actually an excellent and fair standard for determining when an unpaid internship should be allowed; however, I've never heard of an employer's being prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act for having unpaid interns. And if the law were to start to be enforced, I'm not sure the outcome would benefit students in the short-term. There would be a lot fewer opportunities as many employers would get rid of their internship programs. This would result in even more competition for what paid opportunities were left. I really hate unpaid internships, but I still haven't figured out what it's going to take to make them a thing of the past. They've become an essential part of the transition from education to employment, and messing around with that in a time when really talented grads are struggling to land jobs probably isn't a good idea. We may have to wait until the economy really heats up again.

blumentopf 15y ago

amirmc 15y ago

I've had friends who wanted to get into journalism and publishing and the only way they could do it was by working for free for several months. Not even 'internships', just free work. Eventually, there were vacancies and they were the obvious hires. I'm not suggesting this was fair but it was a pretty clear case of supply outstripping demand, which meant that employers could afford to let the system develop this way.

ThomPete 15y ago

If products can be free so can interns. Look at it as a freemium model.

omouse 15y ago
People are not products.
- rick888 15y ago
  technically, you are when you are looking for a job. You need to market and sell yourself to the highest bidder.
dangrossman 15y ago
Unlike your web app, your employment practices are subject to federal and state laws, and to the tax code. Give someone work an employee would normally do, and which isn't educational, and you must pay them. Fail to pay them and the IRS will be after you for payroll taxes and severe penalties.

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

Totally true; I did an unpaid internship for a startup and didn't learn a thing(actually they where doing a verrrry bad software engineering job). The advantage was that I didn't really had to work much & I got grades for the internship @unif. But I wouldn't do it again. I felt under valuated, I can make really complex s/w architectures, solve complex, challenging problems & I was doing work that I could've done as a 14 year old during the internship..

dmoo 15y ago

As this is Ireland I've got to assume there is also an element of trying to reduce the numbers who are technically unemployed and so make things look better. It sounds very familiar to the community employment schemes etc. from the '80s where people basically worked for their unemployment benefit so as to gain work experience / help the community. I can even remember being turned down at an interview for one of these way back when and feeling pretty bad. In the end some people will gain something & some people will be exploited but it wont make much difference to the economy other than to help drive down wages.

irishstu 15y ago
I'm not sure if you can be on the unemployment register and still work in an internship. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the government isn't looking too deeply into the situation because it keeps the dole numbers down.

apinstein 15y ago

I can't find the article right now, but there have been studies about and there is evidence for that many people will do something for free, but if offered to be paid a market rate that is low for the same work, will not do it. In fact, they'll be insulted by the low value ascribed to it. Personally I would feel like an a-hole offering someone minimum wage to do intern-level work at our startup. Nor would I want it on my resume that I worked as a web developer for $8/hour. They do not want a market price that low on their skills. They'd rather have a free internship on paper. That said, it does all depend on context. In fact during high school I worked in a bio lab for free for about 50 hours and then asked for a paid internship (which was minimum wage) during the summer. However I was a high-schooler, so this was cool. But I would not have taken (and in fact turned down) low-paying jobs after college. So I can see that context does matter, and I don't think it's fair to rip on all unpaid internships with the same stroke.

icegreentea 15y ago
The whole low pay versus free psychology thing is tricky. It also depends on how the pay is structured. If you offer it as a low hourly rate, it'll probably be rejected, as opposed to working for some lumpsum at the end (or split into two). The second is typically more acceptable. Then instead of feeling like their labour is worth minimal wage, they feel like they're being paid for finishing a job. shrug worked on me. 600 dollars for a parttime research thing during school for a term that worked out to $9 an hour, felt way better split into 2x300.

epo 15y ago

30-day free trials are for software. People deserve more respect.

jasonlotito 15y ago
But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship). The idea is they are learning. If they are producing things the company then uses to sell, they should get paid. But I've seen interns that literally follow around, take notes, ask questions. So, why should someone be paid for not contributing to the bottom line?
- tkahn6 15y ago
  > But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship). That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm at an internship right now getting paid quite well and I'm contributing to their bottom line (albeit indirectly since I am working on internal tools). I'm also learning quite a lot.
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    Sorry, I should have been explicit (though, I feel I was fairly obvious). unpaid interships aren't producing anything. If you are getting paid, then it's not really relevant to the discussion of "unpaid internships."
    - mattdeboard 15y ago
      Whatever point you thought you were making, you weren't. And even if you were, it certainly wasn't obvious.
      - jasonlotito 15y ago
        No. I was correct. Interns producing something of value to the company have to be paid, otherwise it's illegal. If you are getting paid, then the discussion doesn't involve you. Sorry if you don't understand. Your ignorance doesn't make me wrong.

gorog 15y ago

This past year I followed a web development course. I'm now supposed to work 3 months for free. I don't mind it because I've been jobless for a long time before. The problem is, I just can't find an employer (in France). I get the interviews, but my interviewer always assumes that I'm supposed to know everything by heart, have nothing more to learn, and more importantly, they want to see a portfolio of sites I've done before other than the one I've done in class. Basically, they don't want an intern, they want a real, super-fast worker for free. So I'm going to fail at my diploma because nobody wants me to work for free for them. To make it worse, I'm the best student of my class. Those who can't code found an internship. Are we supposed to lie and bluff to be allowed to be exploited?

nagnatron 15y ago
Did you try remote work?

afterburner 15y ago

Are CS students not cynical enough? Compared to, say engineers (non-software)? Or is it just the effect of fierce and deep competition? Or perhaps the potential for learning a lot (practical knowledge) in a short time is greater in software dev work than others?

alanorourke 15y ago

While in college i chased a small design studio you have never heard of to take me as an unpaid intern. I learnt loads just watching them run a studio and work with clients. I do not see how they could possibly have justified paying me for the little value i gave back. Still gratefull for the opportunity they gave me.

erikb 15y ago

In Germany I often see unpaid interns, but actually not in a bad situation. There are 2 situations in Germany when an unpaid internship will happen: One is, when the students working as interns are still going to their schools and maybe are first or second semesters. So actually they don't really create value, but they cost time, energy, working hours of coworkers, electricity, rent and so on. The company basically already pays a load to have this intern sitting there and a high chance to get no value back in return. I think in this situation it is quite fair, not to pay wages. The second situation is, when students try to get a job, which a lot of people want to have, like at Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers and so on. In this situation the brand alone will help them out later to get better jobs or even give them a chance for a full time job in this company that others can't get. It's a little like doing a start-up. You put in a lot for the small chance to get a unnatural big payoff. In both situations I can't disapprove of unpaid internships. I hope with sharing these experiences, other readers might get a more objective point of view. It is not all bad about unpaid internships!

jasonlotito 15y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the idea of an internship about learning, not about producing? If your producing for the company something they are selling (or creating net value), don't you have to get paid? I mean, people here are talking about actually working on projects the company is earning money for. That's not an internship. Am I clueless, or are other people just ignorant?

xsmasher 15y ago
Are you making a moral argument, or a legal one? If legal, what country? The "idea of an internship" is experience and networking if you're the intern, recruiting if you're a smart company, and free/cheap labor if you're a dumb company.
- tiddchristopher 15y ago
  It's a matter of legality in the United States. "Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer 'derives no immediate advantage' from the intern’s activities [. . .]" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html
dangrossman 15y ago
If you're in the US, you're absolutely right, and other people are ignorant. You can't use unpaid interns like free workers, even for menial work like updating websites or e-mailing prospects... yet several HN regulars have advocated doing exactly that before. It's not legal.

hugh3 15y ago

I work in academia. In academia, we pay crap, especially to the people at the bottom of the totem pole. But even we pay our summer interns.

joe8756438 15y ago

There's a great book that came out recently, Intern Nation, it's the first exposé on this issue that I'm aware of. It is fantastic, totally engaging, covers all of the many aspects of the internship problem and its genesis.

jeffchuber 15y ago

Companies often don't pay interns for 2 reasons: 1. They don't think they can afford to give them responsibility, and with no responsibility = no pay. This is a terrible relationship. (no pay = no responsibility as well) 2. They know that if it's unpaid - it's likely that only people very interested will apply - and this signal is, supposedly, very strong. The 3 MAJOR problems are: 1. The company is sending a signal that says, "we don't trust you", "we don't think you can do valuable work", "and we don't value you enough to pay you" 2. The company gets lower skilled people, because the good ones get the jobs with good experience AND pay 3. Have you EVER tried to get a volunteer to do anything?! It's impossible. Incentives are not aligned.

int3rnaut 15y ago

It's all relative and depends entirely on how much you put into it and how much your employer does the same. I've had friends who've taken unpaid internships and have gotten entirely different experiences out of it.

synnik 15y ago

Wow. We hire almost every intern that works for us, unless they suck. Internships are also normally done pre-graduation from college. It is not a job, it is in exchange for college credit. We hire the day they graduate. But it is also up to the intern to decide whether or not our internship is right for them. A overgeneralized diatribe like the one posted is aiming to get people to not intern at all, whereas the appropriate act would be to critically evaluate your options, and make an informed decision about each specific company.

mitcheme 15y ago
In my school, we call them "co-op jobs". If you sign up for co-op, you get college credit for them, but either way you get paid. And of course if you're any good, your co-op employers will want to hang onto you after you graduate. I didn't bother signing up for co-op because co-op or no, it's impossible to complete all the other graduation requirements and not have enough credits. So the credits you get from a co-op job are useless. Students pay money to the school to be part of the co-op program, and that's not unusual. Here, it's $400 for a once a week class that teaches you how to make a resume plus an additional ~$100 fee if you find a job, even if you didn't use the school's connections to find it. If your internship results in college credit, its likely that students are actually losing money by working for you. I think that's absurd.
- synnik 15y ago
  You also inadvertently prove a more subtle point of internships. Employees who offer the greatest value are ones who are engaged with the company and want to be part of it. If someone doesn't think enough of us to want to go through the trouble of an internship, and think working for us is absurd, then they would not have been a good fit anyway. No loss to us if they don't work with us.
  - mitcheme 15y ago
    Paying money to work for anyone is absurd. I don't care if your company is the best thing since sliced bread. It isn't worth going homeless, nor is it worth taking on tens of thousands extra in loans to (a) support myself while providing you with free labor and (b) cover other expenses I could've paid for out of pocket if I'd been paid fairly, such as tuition. If free internships became standard, it would put students from low-income families at a serious disadvantage. Who needs meritocracy when we can make a caste system? Hopefully, your company will be successful, so you can afford to pay all your kids' expenses and put them through unpaid internships of their own. I want to be able to buy gas and keep my car maintained so I can actually come to work, so I'm not "engaged". If I want to pay enough of my tuition up-front so that when I graduate I can afford to work for small companies doing interesting projects, instead of auctioning myself to the highest bidder to cover my loan payments, then I'm a "bad fit". So be it, I guess.

walexander 15y ago

I had a paid internship but would have gladly done it unpaid if I had to. I interned at a big name place, so YMMV, but I can say that senior year when I was looking for jobs _no one_ cared about what I did in school and _everyone_ cared what I did at that internship. You are not going to work there to do slave labor, you're getting bullet points on your resume, mentorship from senior engineers, as well as taking in the business environment which you've probably never seen before. I hope no college student who can't find another option has decided to stick his nose up at an unpaid internship because of this post.

conjectures 15y ago

The problem is part informational. Grads take internships in the _hope_ it will lead to a job. For most it doesn't. Hope is perennial, so more bums can always be found for seats. Banning them is unlikely in most countries as it's politically unrealistic. Exhorting companies not to do it is unreliable. So not easy to close off intern demand. Tackling the supply side might be a better bet. The answer might be in educating grads to mentally file internships alongside diet pills and pyramid schemes. Providing alternatives also good (but more difficult).

studiofellow 15y ago

Passing judgment on all unpaid internships in all situations is unreasonable. When deciding whether to accept an unpaid internship, common sense is the best guide. I've seen both unpaid and paid interns treated poorly. I've also seen both thrive. I personally had 2 paid internships before I graduated college. One was demeaning and the other an incredible learning experience. If an unpaid opportunity offers a lot and you can afford to take it, why not? How is this different than contributing to open source or doing pro bono for charities? However, if a company doesn't want to pay, I'd suggest more caution. Ask lots of questions, and if you end up just getting people coffee, quit. Interns are working professionals just like anyone else and deserve equal respect.

deleted 15y ago

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noarchy 15y ago

Even Wal Mart will pay you while training you. If a company cannot meet that standard, something is wrong, imo.

Confusion 15y ago

If you're not paid, you're not valued. Nothing you produce will ever be good enough. Nobody will make time for you, because they have more valuable things to spend their time on. No money is lost if you're struggling to do your assignments; no money is lost if you don't learn anything. A company should be invested into their interns and the best way to be invested is by paying them a wage and expecting decent work in return.

phxrsng 15y ago

In the US at least, there are many opportunities for paid internships. All the major tech companies offer them - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Zynga, Boeing, Lockheed, etc - and many of the smaller ones do (though in smaller numbers). At almost all of them, interns are treated as normal engineers and put on teams as basically full time employees with an end date ~3-4 months after they start. They are paid very well (competitive with what a FT employee would make for 3 months). The internship can, and in many cases, does result in a full time or reintern offer. The thing is, you have to be able to cut it and basically interview as someone who they would WANT to hire as a FT after a year or two more experience.

chrisclark1729 15y ago

Perhaps this thread has gone too long, but the comments are overwhelmingly against doing work for free. TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands. My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time. Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run. One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON. If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against. If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.

walkon 15y ago

I'm confused. Who forces people to work for free?

walkon 15y ago
When down voting, please explain. If working as an unpaid intern is indeed horrible and so incredibly lacking in non-monetary value, then people will learn there is no reason to voluntarily engage (or continue) in such a relationship.

yellowredblack 15y ago

This is what I learned from a half-day legal seminar in california aimed at startups: In California, unless the work is for course credit at an established institution, an intern must be paid minimum wage. If not, the intern can do the work, and then file with the state, which will then do all the investigation. The intern doesnt need to get a laywer. They get the state's lawyers looking for a hefty fine, back taxes, and the opportunity to audit the hell out of someone. Start-ups are especially vulnerable to this because programmers who would normally be exempt probably aren't making enough and should be paid overtime. The state doesn't care what those programmers want. They want their back taxes.

paolomaffei 15y ago

This guy clearly never had a company. We do not pay our interns and still lose money in the process if we don't hire them after because we have lost too much time not just training but also fixing errors people at their first experience will do. Nevertheless we still invest on internships because that's the only way to snap good talent just out of university. So please, stop the bullshit. Yeah, and downvote away.

bugsy 15y ago

In the US there's two very different sorts of internships. The first is what you describe, scamming desperate people during a economic depression out of free skilled labor that has monetary value to the company. The second is internships at places like magazines, newspapers and politicians offices. These ones are more interesting. Poor people and minorities can't afford to work for a year for free. But the children of the rich can. The internship provides cover to avoid having to hire minorities since hiring takes place from the internship pool.

hugh3 15y ago
Poor people and minorities can't afford to work for a year for free Poor people and minorities? So minorities, even if they happen to be individually rich, can't afford to work for a year for free?
- bugsy 15y ago
  Thanks. To clarify, certain classes of minorities, because of endemic racism, are statistically less financially able to work for free for a year. These are the sorts of types of minorities that certain kinds of firms don't want to hire, but also don't want to be held accountable. Unpaid internships, to which said minorities, and the poor (including white trash) do not apply, act as a filtering mechanism to make sure only the right sorts of blue blooded folks end up getting hired.

georgieporgie 15y ago

I don't know why there aren't more low-level tech jobs for college students. I paid for a couple years of state school by working in a deli. The only jobs I saw that would hire a "college kid" were on campus, and those basically boiled down to having the right connections as soon as you arrived. No longer a freshman and nothing related on your resume? Not interested.

zachcb 15y ago

I'm very desperate to join a startup as an intern or employee. Some of us (me) have been dreaming (literally) about being in a startup that it doesn't matter what we do, as long as we get in one. It's gotten to the point where I would even pay to be in one. What I get out of it is that I will see if a startup is right for me, and at this point that's all I can ask for.

andrewflnr 15y ago

Last summer, I took an unpaid internship at a software company, if it can be called an internship. I was introduced to someone who worked there, and he got it worked out for me. I didn't work on core stuff for the company, so maybe it was less an internship than just hanging out in the offices while I worked on an open-source project relevant to them, specifically github.com/andrewf/pcap2har . I learned a crap-load of stuff there, technical and otherwise. I am enormously better off having taken that opportunity. Would I have been worse off if I had worked on stuff that directly made them money? No. My friend has left to work on his own startup, but I started this week as a paid intern. I hope to keep working part-time when I start school again. I cant speak for other people's experience with less-scrupulous employers, but I have nothing but gratitude for the people who gave me my unpaid internship.

threejay 15y ago

I'm currently in my sixth and final year of pharmacy school which consists entirely of clinical rotations at different practice sites in the area. Not only are these internships completely unpaid, we have to pay ~$30k for the priviledge which equates to almost $1000/week (6 x 6 week rotations). It's a complete scam.