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Students Pay Services to Obtain Internships

10 points by ALee 17y ago

steamynachos 17y ago
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-internships http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-intern...
- abalashov 17y ago
  Hahaha! Nice.
elai 17y ago
Nice thing about compsci is that almost all the internships are paid.
- shaddi 17y ago
  Right on. I go to a large state school that a huge number liberal arts students. I've never met any students in the sciences (esp. not computer science) who have held unpaid internships (unless you count research for credit), but I know several students in the liberal arts who are doing internships completely unpaid. I even knew one who was living in London for the summer out of his (or maybe his parents') own pocket! I can't fathom the idea. Maybe when you have to /pay someone else/ to let you work you should take the hint that the market doesn't value the labor you are doing. But hey, we are talking about liberal arts majors here! (I kid, I kid...)
- clistctrl 17y ago
  Mine was unpaid. It was the hardest 4 months of my life too :) I would get up go to school, drive 15 miles to my internship, then drive 20 miles to work (in thick rush-hour construction traffic), get home play LAN games with my friends then sleep and repeat.
derefr 17y ago
I don't understand this phenomenon. What company wouldn't take someone who was willing to work for free? Strictly economically, working for $0 should mean that you can choose any company on the planet to work for, as they all have something [marginal] to gain, and nothing to lose (on the provisio that they can't rely on you, because that would potentially cost them money should you fail to be reliable. They'd have to treat you as a truly "redundant" subsystem to their machine, giving you tasks that they've already assigned others to complete in the hope that you'll do them better/faster/whatever-er.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- likpok 17y ago
  It costs time to come up with a project, for training, a coach, etc. In general, internships are a good idea (they give both sides a trial run), but some companies may not want to spend the resources on them.
abalashov 17y ago
It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns (unpaid or paid), not more. Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a large organisation - requires considerable management resources. As well, their limited tenure (a summer, say) gives them very limited value as a useful, specialised IT employee's ramp-up period to break even can be longer than that. Still, there are lots of smaller companies that use interns to build entire products over summers; I think the one that's most well-known here is probably Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. And I've run into several web-oriented companies that do the same here in Atlanta. I would think they'd be foaming at the mouth for a chance to get unpaid, or very low-paid slave labour with a rather high skills to cost ratio. Now, of course, I have little reference frame for the usefulness of interns outside of the IT profession. But, surely there has to be a correlate to this opportunity in other directions of commercial endeavour as well?

10 points by ALee 17y ago

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-internships http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-intern...

abalashov 17y ago
Hahaha! Nice.

elai 17y ago

Nice thing about compsci is that almost all the internships are paid.

shaddi 17y ago
Right on. I go to a large state school that a huge number liberal arts students. I've never met any students in the sciences (esp. not computer science) who have held unpaid internships (unless you count research for credit), but I know several students in the liberal arts who are doing internships completely unpaid. I even knew one who was living in London for the summer out of his (or maybe his parents') own pocket! I can't fathom the idea. Maybe when you have to /pay someone else/ to let you work you should take the hint that the market doesn't value the labor you are doing. But hey, we are talking about liberal arts majors here! (I kid, I kid...)
clistctrl 17y ago
Mine was unpaid. It was the hardest 4 months of my life too :) I would get up go to school, drive 15 miles to my internship, then drive 20 miles to work (in thick rush-hour construction traffic), get home play LAN games with my friends then sleep and repeat.

derefr 17y ago

I don't understand this phenomenon. What company wouldn't take someone who was willing to work for free? Strictly economically, working for $0 should mean that you can choose any company on the planet to work for, as they all have something [marginal] to gain, and nothing to lose (on the provisio that they can't rely on you, because that would potentially cost them money should you fail to be reliable. They'd have to treat you as a truly "redundant" subsystem to their machine, giving you tasks that they've already assigned others to complete in the hope that you'll do them better/faster/whatever-er.)

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
likpok 17y ago
It costs time to come up with a project, for training, a coach, etc. In general, internships are a good idea (they give both sides a trial run), but some companies may not want to spend the resources on them.

abalashov 17y ago

It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns (unpaid or paid), not more. Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a large organisation - requires considerable management resources. As well, their limited tenure (a summer, say) gives them very limited value as a useful, specialised IT employee's ramp-up period to break even can be longer than that. Still, there are lots of smaller companies that use interns to build entire products over summers; I think the one that's most well-known here is probably Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. And I've run into several web-oriented companies that do the same here in Atlanta. I would think they'd be foaming at the mouth for a chance to get unpaid, or very low-paid slave labour with a rather high skills to cost ratio. Now, of course, I have little reference frame for the usefulness of interns outside of the IT profession. But, surely there has to be a correlate to this opportunity in other directions of commercial endeavour as well?