I'll assume you're talking about highly-paid SWE internships. Let's look at each agent's perspective: - interns (pro) benefit from having the internship on the

I'll assume you're talking about highly-paid SWE internships. Let's look at each agent's perspective: - interns (pro) benefit from having the internship on the resume - interns (pro) benefit from the experience of being at a tech company - interns (pro) benefit from the networking with employees and fellow interns - interns (pro) benefit from the huge salary - overall, interns MASSIVELY benefit. - - companies (con) monetary cost. But $50k is not a lot for a company really. - companies (pro) benefit from cheaper hiring pipeline. Training talent is much cheaper than poaching from elsewhere. That $50k upfront cost is much cheaper than paying $300k recurring for a senior engineer. - overall, companies benefit a lot from interns, and that's why every companies does internships. - - teams (con) the effort. You have to mentor interns, assess them, come up with a project that's cool but not mission-critical. - teams (con) the mentoring costs. The mentor will probably take up 20% of 2 engineers time. This is very problematic if a deadline is coming up and everyone is needed. - teams (pro) forces them to improve onboarding documentation. - teams (pro) interns joining as full-time. Anecdotally, I've seen it pretty often that interns end up joining the same team they interned at. The team will be ecstatic to gain another engineer that is already ramped up and works well in the team. - overall, unclear if teams win or lose. But you can definitely tell that if the team doesn't prepare, doesn't give assignments to their interns, etc., that they consider them a liability.