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The other "No Pay, No Work" early career lesson is: Internships are a rip-off. It's OK to accept lower compensation at the beginning, and it is always OK to do
by weinzierl 2y ago
The other "No Pay, No Work" early career lesson is: Internships are a rip-off.
It's OK to accept lower compensation at the beginning, and it is always OK to do charity work if you want to help, but unpaid internships are never to your advantage in my opinion.
- dmoy 2y agoDepends on the field. Yea generally a bad idea. In tech, absolutely don't take an unpaid internship. In some fields (at least in locales where it's still legal, not California), it's a filter for rich kids who can afford to go unpaid. So yea, probably don't take an unpaid internship if you're not already a rich kid and don't have a family member telling you it's a good idea.
- rcbdev 2y agoI've never heard of unpaid internships my whole life outside of the one big NGO that's globally infamous for it. Where are you from that this is such a phenomenon?
- weinzierl 2y agoGermany, but I believe it is less about location and more about time. Maybe it is a thing of the past but for some time it was almost a requirement to do an unpaid internship before you (maybe) got a job offer for certain industries. In Germany it was like that for BMW and Siemens.
- scrollaway 2y agoIn some countries, it’s illegal to pay interns in certain situations. For example in Belgium, university interns may not be paid due to university restrictions.
- Orygin 2y agoAnd IIRC, it's illegal in the EU and Belgium has been paying fines every year because they don't want to change the status quo. Better for the country to pay fines (from our tax money) than companies paying a salary to their interns...