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I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I
by dbul 17y ago
I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I am aware that I could easily earn money or I'd probably be better off contributing to an open source project.
But consider the hypothetical in another industry. Someone gets a shot at an unpaid internship, they do really well, the company they are associated with gives them a recommendation, and immediately after the internship they get an offer for a position in that industry. Or: Someone does not get an internship, it is a competitive industry, the person ends up working an $8 / hr job for the next some odd years until they get an opening in the industry. It would seem the benefit to the unpaid intern could be greater than the benefit to the company.
Of course, there is the scenario where the person becomes an entrepreneur.
- apotheon 17y agoCoding is a much different situation in many cases, specifically because of the availability of open source projects -- which serves the same purpose as an internship opportunity sometimes. Alas, there's no such thing as "open source development" in many industries. Even for programmers, though, open source development doesn't do everything an internship can do. In fact, some people have a really difficult time getting started contributing to an open source project without some experience working closely with other coders to learn something about collaborative workflow and code review (for instance). The exception to that is cases where someone lucks into having a local mentor to help get them over the bar to entry for open source contributions -- knowledge of how to review others' code, figure out how to improve on it, and produce patches for submission to the project.