6 ms·

Unpaid internships in San Francisco

42 points by CosmicShadow 13y ago

druska 13y ago
To be fair, a lot of these companies may not have the funding to hire paid employees. It is also often more of a burden on the technical manager to manage the interns in the first place. It really is good experience for the intern, and if they actually had experience in the first place then they likely won't be applying to unpaid internships.
- vkou 13y ago
  Unpaid internships are a gross circumvention of minimum wage laws. Either the interns are there to learn (In which case, they should not be working on anything that provides the employer with value) - or they are employees. If your business can't afford to pay its employees, you should probably not be in business.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Not to mention that they select in favour of those who can afford to live in a high cost of living area without an income.
  - doktrin 13y ago
    > Either the interns are there to learn (In which case, they should not be working on anything that provides the employer with value) I feel pretty strongly about the exploitation of free labor, but I'm not sure I agree with this point. Tasks from which a potential intern may learn the most are quite likely to be tasks which create value for the employer. I'm not even sure what work an intern could possibly do that did not generate value for a team, other than literally digging a ditch and re-filling it. > If your business can't afford to pay its employees, you should probably not be in business. Money isn't the only way to pay employees. A learning experience can be just as valuable (if not more so) than some financial compensation. This is highly situational, and can easily be used as justification to get cheap unpaid labor, but nonetheless remains true.
    - gyardley 13y ago
      Tasks from which a potential intern may learn the most are quite likely to be tasks which create value for the employer. Sounds plausible to me, along with your point about learning experience, but the comment you're responding to is just reflecting American federal labor law. According to the feds, paid internships can only be for the benefit of the intern, not the employer - if you're gaining from it, you're breaking the law.
      - doktrin 13y ago
        Fair point. I wasn't aware of this, and have since read the relevant DOL fact sheet [1]. [1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
  - jdreaver 13y ago
    Why is circumventing minimum wage laws a bad thing? If you don't have the skills to be paid $9/hr (or whatever it is nowadays), then unpaid internships are awesome, because they help you get there. How about this idea: let people offer unpaid internships, and let potential employees willingly decide for themselves, based on their own circumstances and free will, whether or not to take them. I don't see any harm in two human's voluntary reaching an internship agreement if they both benefit from it.
    - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
      My problem is more with employers who demand that potential employees "pay their dues" before being allowed into an industry. It favors privileged people who can be supported by some other person while they're working for free. Also, requiring interns to work 40 hour work weeks for nothing is downright sadistic. At least have the decency to allow your interns to work a second job.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      Because those who might benefit most from unpaid internships are often those from disadvantaged groups and the lower classes seeking social mobility. But doing an unpaid internship necessarily demands an external source of money to cover living expenses. So there are many people who would in theory be happy to do an unpaid internship but are unable to do so practically.
      - jdreaver 13y ago
        > So there are many people who would in theory be happy to do an unpaid internship but are unable to do so practically. Indeed. However, there are yet others who would benefit and can do so practically. The fact that they exist and positions get filled means people are getting experience and making ends meet. By forcing the minimum wage on these internships, they don't reappear with a higher wage, most of them simply disappear. The opportunity is totally lost.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  I don't understand the logic behind "we have paid employees, and we need someone to produce something profitable, but we can't afford to pay them." If that is the case, you simply are not a business.
yogo 13y ago
I don't support these internships but "There's a sucker born every minute." Edit: I think this might have come off wrong: I was saying that's the mindset of these employers. They put these jobs/internships out there because they know someone will take the bait. I am don't condone this behavior.
yoster 13y ago
Unpaid internships are bullshit. If they want you to work a 40 hour workweek, then they need to fucking pay minimum wage at a minimum.
- shardling 13y ago
  They're also generally quite illegal for exactly that reason. There's a list of requirements you need to meet to not pay an intern, and it's actually pretty stringent. The problem is most interns feel they're not in a position to actually do anything about this. :( Most could probably sue for back wages if they didn't fear reprisal. NYTimes did an article on this a bit ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pag... On a similar note I've seen the same thing with servers: employers will pay below minimum wage even for hours that tips don't make up the difference, or dock pay for customers that run out. Both of those are against the law (at least in my state) but employees fear that they'll be fired if they speak up. (The flip side is that they generally don't report cash tips on their taxes.)
kmfrk 13y ago
ProPublica is doing a Kickstarter now specifically to do a report on the intern economy: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/propublica/investigating-the-intern-economy http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/propublica/investigating....
iuguy 13y ago
We decided to test an internship programme at Mandalorian and we found someone that we really wanted to take on as an intern, but I felt that there were two things we needed to do: 1. Pay them a graduate starting salary for the duration of their internship. 2. Make sure we had the time to invest in helping them grow before going back to university rather than just giving them shit jobs or using them as cheap labour. Unfortunately number 2 was derailed by the fact that we took a full time graduate on and felt that this combined with illness meant we couldn't guarantee the mentoring that we wanted to provide. We felt that we couldn't do right by the intern we wanted, so we postponed the programme. We set up a hack week for next month in order for our geographically disparate team to get some time together and some proper training. In addition to bringing the team we invited both the intern we had to cancel and the student we wanted to intern with us for next year (as we found him this year but he was a year early). Our plan is to spend a week breaking stuff and training each other up on core pentesting areas. The students get to come along and join in on that as well as take part in ad-hoc hacking sessions. Both students took us up on it and we're covering their costs. Our not quite intern will probably be offered a job around graduation time, the other lad will almost certainly be our paid intern next year. There's a right way and a wrong way to do internships. If you can't do it the right way I believe you shouldn't do it at all. By all means offer them opportunities if they're genuine, but don't dress them up as internships. Just be straight with them. The students attending hack week will go back to Abertay Uni to do their ethical hacking degree projects having spent the week living with a pentest team and hacking all the things, something none of the other students will have done. While they haven't been paid they won't pay a penny for the week. I will reluctantly let them chip in for beer if they insist, but everything else is on us. It just wouldn't be right any other way.
aresant 13y ago
There's been a lot of debate over the past several years as to whether or not unpaid internships are even legal. The clearest outline is from the FSLA, and the criteria is outlined below: "If all of the factors [below] are met, then the worker is a “trainee”, an employment relationship does not exist under the FLSA, and the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to the worker: 1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction; 2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees; 3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation; 4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded; 5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and 6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. " EG if an internship meets those criteria, you don't need to be paid. (1) http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pdf http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pd...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - shardling 13y ago
    And it would have somehow been worse if they'd paid you? Not everyone has the luxury to work an unpaid internship, so if they're necessary (or even just helpful) to get into a field that's actually a pretty huge problem.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
      - DrJokepu 13y ago
        Is it possible that there was someone else who was more talented, competent or dedicated than you and deserved that internship even more than you but simply couldn't afford working for free? I'm not making a value judgement here, I'm just pointing out the fact that free internships are not necessarily compatible with meritocracy.
phamilton 13y ago
While unpaid internships are sad, I would be really interested in seeing how many of these positions would not exist otherwise. I'm sure some of them exploit interns to save a few bucks, but I can guarantee there are other situations where the company would just go without for the summer if they couldn't do unpaid internships. An unpaid internship is better than doing nothing. It might even be better than working at McDonalds.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  People keep throwing McDonald's around as if it's some kind of horrible, dead-end place to work. The truth is that McDonald's will not only pay you, but will teach you a ton about customer service, food safety, work ethic, and team building. Does it really make sense to work for free getting coffee for devs and scheduling conferences when you could be making money and gaining experience by working on your own side project? Hell, work part time at Mickey D's and you're still better off.
jamesjguthrie 13y ago
They're illegal in the UK now unless performed as part of an official college/university placement. As a small business owner I'm not yet in the position to employ others yet I have work that could provide decent training/work experience for somebody. I feel like an internship programme at my company would be mutually beneficial for us and the intern. Alas, for now, I'll be working alone. Edit: This country has almost NO skilled workforce. I could help out if they would only let me.
cuttooth 13y ago
If you are making someone a profit in any context you deserve a paycheck, simply put.
mdip 13y ago
I write software. The work I do is difficult for "most people" (outside of this community, perhaps). If you're any good at it you have any number of well paid opportunities. If you're a recent graduate who's very green and looking for experience, you'll still find any number of paid opportunities. At the previous company I worked for, I had managed quite a few paid interns. I love managing, but I've always turned down serious management positions out of fear that I'd fall behind from a technical standpoint. I have never turned down an opportunity to manage an intern and my company took the relationship seriously. Interns negotiated salary just like any other employee, however, they were treated as a short-term contract so as a manager I was not able to see salary specifics. Despite that, I've been confided in and they were doing quite. Minimum wage was nowhere to be found. Purely for CS grads looking to land a career in software development (and I'm not in The Valley where things are arguably quite different): Don't take an unpaid internship. If the place is incredible and you really, really want to work there, ask yourself why they're not willing to pay you. My former company hired some of the greenest interns* from colleges you've likely never heard of. They were paid and they were all very good after a couple of months of apprenticeship. They also never worked a minute over 40 hours (by design, they were paid hourly as my former company had a fear of overtime). I haven't had this opportunity at my current employer, but if offered a "free intern" to manage, I'd turn that option down. Anyone willing to take a job where I work (an aside: good job, good company, but not the sort of thing that a recent grad would consider exciting enough to skip the paycheck) is probably going to cost me more than just doing the "intern work" myself. * I don't mean this condescendingly. We all start somewhere. I've have the privilege of managing incredibly intelligent people being an "intern manager" and every experience, thus far, has been rewarding for both of us. I keep in touch with them (some are likely reading this) and they all, currently, have well paying jobs as professional developers.
timack 13y ago
Coming from a country with minimum wage laws I don't understand how you survive when doing an unpaid internship. Do you just have to live at home and sponge off your parents while you are interning? Or do you just have to get deeper into debt while you are interning? How long does it take before you start getting paid?

42 points by CosmicShadow 13y ago

To be fair, a lot of these companies may not have the funding to hire paid employees. It is also often more of a burden on the technical manager to manage the interns in the first place. It really is good experience for the intern, and if they actually had experience in the first place then they likely won't be applying to unpaid internships.

vkou 13y ago
Unpaid internships are a gross circumvention of minimum wage laws. Either the interns are there to learn (In which case, they should not be working on anything that provides the employer with value) - or they are employees. If your business can't afford to pay its employees, you should probably not be in business.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Not to mention that they select in favour of those who can afford to live in a high cost of living area without an income.
- doktrin 13y ago
  > Either the interns are there to learn (In which case, they should not be working on anything that provides the employer with value) I feel pretty strongly about the exploitation of free labor, but I'm not sure I agree with this point. Tasks from which a potential intern may learn the most are quite likely to be tasks which create value for the employer. I'm not even sure what work an intern could possibly do that did not generate value for a team, other than literally digging a ditch and re-filling it. > If your business can't afford to pay its employees, you should probably not be in business. Money isn't the only way to pay employees. A learning experience can be just as valuable (if not more so) than some financial compensation. This is highly situational, and can easily be used as justification to get cheap unpaid labor, but nonetheless remains true.
  - gyardley 13y ago
    Tasks from which a potential intern may learn the most are quite likely to be tasks which create value for the employer. Sounds plausible to me, along with your point about learning experience, but the comment you're responding to is just reflecting American federal labor law. According to the feds, paid internships can only be for the benefit of the intern, not the employer - if you're gaining from it, you're breaking the law.
    - doktrin 13y ago
      Fair point. I wasn't aware of this, and have since read the relevant DOL fact sheet [1]. [1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
- jdreaver 13y ago
  Why is circumventing minimum wage laws a bad thing? If you don't have the skills to be paid $9/hr (or whatever it is nowadays), then unpaid internships are awesome, because they help you get there. How about this idea: let people offer unpaid internships, and let potential employees willingly decide for themselves, based on their own circumstances and free will, whether or not to take them. I don't see any harm in two human's voluntary reaching an internship agreement if they both benefit from it.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    My problem is more with employers who demand that potential employees "pay their dues" before being allowed into an industry. It favors privileged people who can be supported by some other person while they're working for free. Also, requiring interns to work 40 hour work weeks for nothing is downright sadistic. At least have the decency to allow your interns to work a second job.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Because those who might benefit most from unpaid internships are often those from disadvantaged groups and the lower classes seeking social mobility. But doing an unpaid internship necessarily demands an external source of money to cover living expenses. So there are many people who would in theory be happy to do an unpaid internship but are unable to do so practically.
    - jdreaver 13y ago
      > So there are many people who would in theory be happy to do an unpaid internship but are unable to do so practically. Indeed. However, there are yet others who would benefit and can do so practically. The fact that they exist and positions get filled means people are getting experience and making ends meet. By forcing the minimum wage on these internships, they don't reappear with a higher wage, most of them simply disappear. The opportunity is totally lost.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
ryguytilidie 13y ago
I don't understand the logic behind "we have paid employees, and we need someone to produce something profitable, but we can't afford to pay them." If that is the case, you simply are not a business.

yogo 13y ago

I don't support these internships but "There's a sucker born every minute." Edit: I think this might have come off wrong: I was saying that's the mindset of these employers. They put these jobs/internships out there because they know someone will take the bait. I am don't condone this behavior.

yoster 13y ago

Unpaid internships are bullshit. If they want you to work a 40 hour workweek, then they need to fucking pay minimum wage at a minimum.

shardling 13y ago
They're also generally quite illegal for exactly that reason. There's a list of requirements you need to meet to not pay an intern, and it's actually pretty stringent. The problem is most interns feel they're not in a position to actually do anything about this. :( Most could probably sue for back wages if they didn't fear reprisal. NYTimes did an article on this a bit ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?pag... On a similar note I've seen the same thing with servers: employers will pay below minimum wage even for hours that tips don't make up the difference, or dock pay for customers that run out. Both of those are against the law (at least in my state) but employees fear that they'll be fired if they speak up. (The flip side is that they generally don't report cash tips on their taxes.)

kmfrk 13y ago

ProPublica is doing a Kickstarter now specifically to do a report on the intern economy: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/propublica/investigating-the-intern-economy http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/propublica/investigating....

iuguy 13y ago

We decided to test an internship programme at Mandalorian and we found someone that we really wanted to take on as an intern, but I felt that there were two things we needed to do: 1. Pay them a graduate starting salary for the duration of their internship. 2. Make sure we had the time to invest in helping them grow before going back to university rather than just giving them shit jobs or using them as cheap labour. Unfortunately number 2 was derailed by the fact that we took a full time graduate on and felt that this combined with illness meant we couldn't guarantee the mentoring that we wanted to provide. We felt that we couldn't do right by the intern we wanted, so we postponed the programme. We set up a hack week for next month in order for our geographically disparate team to get some time together and some proper training. In addition to bringing the team we invited both the intern we had to cancel and the student we wanted to intern with us for next year (as we found him this year but he was a year early). Our plan is to spend a week breaking stuff and training each other up on core pentesting areas. The students get to come along and join in on that as well as take part in ad-hoc hacking sessions. Both students took us up on it and we're covering their costs. Our not quite intern will probably be offered a job around graduation time, the other lad will almost certainly be our paid intern next year. There's a right way and a wrong way to do internships. If you can't do it the right way I believe you shouldn't do it at all. By all means offer them opportunities if they're genuine, but don't dress them up as internships. Just be straight with them. The students attending hack week will go back to Abertay Uni to do their ethical hacking degree projects having spent the week living with a pentest team and hacking all the things, something none of the other students will have done. While they haven't been paid they won't pay a penny for the week. I will reluctantly let them chip in for beer if they insist, but everything else is on us. It just wouldn't be right any other way.

aresant 13y ago

There's been a lot of debate over the past several years as to whether or not unpaid internships are even legal. The clearest outline is from the FSLA, and the criteria is outlined below: "If all of the factors [below] are met, then the worker is a “trainee”, an employment relationship does not exist under the FLSA, and the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to the worker: 1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction; 2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees; 3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation; 4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded; 5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and 6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. " EG if an internship meets those criteria, you don't need to be paid. (1) http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pdf http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pd...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- shardling 13y ago
  And it would have somehow been worse if they'd paid you? Not everyone has the luxury to work an unpaid internship, so if they're necessary (or even just helpful) to get into a field that's actually a pretty huge problem.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - DrJokepu 13y ago
      Is it possible that there was someone else who was more talented, competent or dedicated than you and deserved that internship even more than you but simply couldn't afford working for free? I'm not making a value judgement here, I'm just pointing out the fact that free internships are not necessarily compatible with meritocracy.

phamilton 13y ago

While unpaid internships are sad, I would be really interested in seeing how many of these positions would not exist otherwise. I'm sure some of them exploit interns to save a few bucks, but I can guarantee there are other situations where the company would just go without for the summer if they couldn't do unpaid internships. An unpaid internship is better than doing nothing. It might even be better than working at McDonalds.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
People keep throwing McDonald's around as if it's some kind of horrible, dead-end place to work. The truth is that McDonald's will not only pay you, but will teach you a ton about customer service, food safety, work ethic, and team building. Does it really make sense to work for free getting coffee for devs and scheduling conferences when you could be making money and gaining experience by working on your own side project? Hell, work part time at Mickey D's and you're still better off.

jamesjguthrie 13y ago

They're illegal in the UK now unless performed as part of an official college/university placement. As a small business owner I'm not yet in the position to employ others yet I have work that could provide decent training/work experience for somebody. I feel like an internship programme at my company would be mutually beneficial for us and the intern. Alas, for now, I'll be working alone. Edit: This country has almost NO skilled workforce. I could help out if they would only let me.

cuttooth 13y ago

If you are making someone a profit in any context you deserve a paycheck, simply put.

mdip 13y ago

I write software. The work I do is difficult for "most people" (outside of this community, perhaps). If you're any good at it you have any number of well paid opportunities. If you're a recent graduate who's very green and looking for experience, you'll still find any number of paid opportunities. At the previous company I worked for, I had managed quite a few paid interns. I love managing, but I've always turned down serious management positions out of fear that I'd fall behind from a technical standpoint. I have never turned down an opportunity to manage an intern and my company took the relationship seriously. Interns negotiated salary just like any other employee, however, they were treated as a short-term contract so as a manager I was not able to see salary specifics. Despite that, I've been confided in and they were doing quite. Minimum wage was nowhere to be found. Purely for CS grads looking to land a career in software development (and I'm not in The Valley where things are arguably quite different): Don't take an unpaid internship. If the place is incredible and you really, really want to work there, ask yourself why they're not willing to pay you. My former company hired some of the greenest interns* from colleges you've likely never heard of. They were paid and they were all very good after a couple of months of apprenticeship. They also never worked a minute over 40 hours (by design, they were paid hourly as my former company had a fear of overtime). I haven't had this opportunity at my current employer, but if offered a "free intern" to manage, I'd turn that option down. Anyone willing to take a job where I work (an aside: good job, good company, but not the sort of thing that a recent grad would consider exciting enough to skip the paycheck) is probably going to cost me more than just doing the "intern work" myself. * I don't mean this condescendingly. We all start somewhere. I've have the privilege of managing incredibly intelligent people being an "intern manager" and every experience, thus far, has been rewarding for both of us. I keep in touch with them (some are likely reading this) and they all, currently, have well paying jobs as professional developers.

timack 13y ago

Coming from a country with minimum wage laws I don't understand how you survive when doing an unpaid internship. Do you just have to live at home and sponge off your parents while you are interning? Or do you just have to get deeper into debt while you are interning? How long does it take before you start getting paid?