Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom.
The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude.
In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege.
Moreover - a point not raised in the article - in expensive cities the only way a fresh graduate can survive without salary is if their parents subsidize them. Who can afford to do so ? Rich families. So it's a form of discrimination.
A company has no excuse for not paying at least minimum wage. If you can't afford the employees you need you shouldn't be in business, period. Any company that uses unpaid internships is morally bankrupt and should be boycotted.
There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered.
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom".
If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship.
When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers.
As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing.
Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless.
After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent.
The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.
There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.
It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.
The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.
I did raise the point about discrimination at the end but it's easy to miss in the wall of text. I fully agree with Intern Aware http://www.internaware.org/ on the issue of discrimination
The point of a sword tended to be involved in the process, money being less of a thing in the middle ages.
Anyway, your analogy will seem more believable we start to see the children of interns forced to work for the companies that their parent work for, interns being paid with tickets only redeemable at the company store, having to ask permission to marry, only being allowed to marry other employees, not being allowed to move off the company campus, etc... lots of a way to go on the road to serfdom.
Your ignoring the use of collage students as interns. At many schools it's possible to get collage credit for internships. Also many companies use interns as a recruiting tool they might not get any net value from interns but they get to evaluate recruits for longer periods of time, which is not worth paying 7.25$ an hour for ~3 months. Anyway, legally you are required to pay interns that create net value for your company.
When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most.
The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience.
As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.
It's easy to get an internship today. Douchebag companies who will not pay me at least a minimum wage can have someone completely clueless who knows nothing.
You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring.
In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.
You may have been better off as an intern, but I could see the argument that if nobody's willing to work for free companies will have to pay a decent wage - a degree of collective bargaining by students and recent graduates who are unwilling to sell their summers for almost no money.
What's wrong with paying at least the minimum wage to interns?
I presume you can't claim unemployment benefit if working as an intern, so who is funding an interns living expenses?
Unpaid work should be reserved for charitable organisations.
Thanks for the reply. In the two examples I linked there was no mention of training. People were required to already have the skills required to do the work.
Perhaps it is different for design, but taking on an intern for a software shop is almost always a greater burden than benefit.
I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are going to contribute. The cold hard fact is that you are still junior, very junior, no matter how much a hotshot you think you are. So the time they put into you makes it a pretty even trade for it not to be paid.
Though come to think of it, both internships I went to were paid. But the point stands.
To put it simpler terms, ask any company whether they find new college graduates effective and worth the overhead for the first few months they work. I doubt many would say yes, and those are people more qualified than those seeking internships.
I did a six month (paid) internship when I was in uni and after two weeks of "training", we were pair programming with the fulltime employees. By month three, I was working on core services that are still in use by the company now.
So, interns are definitely not always a burden, but I certainly do understand that they often would be, but to be honest, you get what you pay for - if it had been an unpaid internship, I'd have had very little incentive to really put much effort into it. I mean, months of unpaid work would be demoralizing and I'd probably quickly have ended up producing little of value.. Luckily it never came to that and I ended up going back to work at the company for another 1.75 years, before I left to try out the world of freelancing and startups.
For the record, that company hires between two and five interns every year. They find it effective enough to keep doing it. They treat it as much as a hiring thing as a cheap labor thing and they find having (paid) interns to be pretty effective.
Not saying I was any good or my employer was any good, but at my first internship I wrote software in my free time that ended up saving the company tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That overhead you're speaking of is present with bringing anyone onto a project, not just interns.
I actually went to a school that required every student in my program to do a minimum of 1 year of paid internships (split into 3 and 6 month blocks). Judging by how abundant and competitive the companies looking for interns were I'd say they found it very much worth the overhead.
In general, a shop that wanted to make very much money off of interns would have to have them work on new code(any sizable code base is going to take a while to get up to speed on), and/or hire only excellent students (though in this case they wouldn't have the option of not paying, good programmers never have to work cheap).
In my city, it was customary for the university to place students in four-month work terms during the summer for them to get experience. One manager of a software company told me that they basically only took students from these as community service as in the best case they would break even.
At my organization, we used to have unpaid internships for college students, but they would receive college credit. We thought that was still kinda B.S., so we found some money and created paid internships.
Back in the day, when I started my career, to get my foot in the door, I worked at a temp agency. "Word processing" was all the rage and they needed people who knew how to use Microsoft Word. After a couple of months the boss noticed I knew how to spell "glaciolacustrine" correctly, so he asked if I had a degree. A couple months later I was hired. All the time I was getting paid $10/hr.
That's the way firms should be finding and cultivating young talent: paid internships, temp services, and recruiting. Unpaid internships are indeed bullshit.
I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. My startup helps college students find entry level jobs and internships, so I'm constantly aware of what the latest trends are.
One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like this, but the fact that career experts who are supposed to help interns are offering these really blows my mind). These are people who don't have the ability to offer many of the benefits that do come with an unpaid internship such as making connections, learning what it's like to work in a real office, having a recognizable name on your resume, etc.
Another trend that scares me is that we're seeing more and more internships auctioned off in charity auctions. Rich parents actually pay for their kids to get some experience.
Unfortunately, interns aren't going to be the ones to stop this trend. Unpaid interns do benefit from their internships. They mostly accept it as something that they have to do, and they know that if they refuse to take an unpaid internship, there are thousands of other students who will snap up the opportunity.
Change is either going to have to come from employers or the government. I strongly believe that offering paid internships is more favorable to employers because they get better quality interns who are more motivated, and the employer has a stronger incentive to use the intern's time well.
There's actually an excellent and fair standard for determining when an unpaid internship should be allowed; however, I've never heard of an employer's being prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act for having unpaid interns. And if the law were to start to be enforced, I'm not sure the outcome would benefit students in the short-term. There would be a lot fewer opportunities as many employers would get rid of their internship programs. This would result in even more competition for what paid opportunities were left.
I really hate unpaid internships, but I still haven't figured out what it's going to take to make them a thing of the past. They've become an essential part of the transition from education to employment, and messing around with that in a time when really talented grads are struggling to land jobs probably isn't a good idea. We may have to wait until the economy really heats up again.
There would be a lot fewer opportunities as many employers would get rid of their internship programs. This would result in even more competition for what paid opportunities were left.
If there are only a few internships available in a given field, having an internship would no longer be a de facto requirement for starting a career in that field (unless the handful of new employees who got the handful internships are all the new blood that's needed, in which case the unpaid internship system is just another way to string people along).
I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S.
Ireland has been hit by a strong recession. Unemployment is high (~15%), and particularly high amount young people. Many are emigrating to find other work. The media is full of stories about how there are no jobs.
Which is a shame because there is a massive skill shortage if you know programming/sysadmining in Ireland. Companies spend months trying to find employees.
There will always be people looking to take advantage. I had a potential employer call me in for three multiple hour "interviews" during which time they grilled me on how I would handle problem X and design system Y. I was fairly naive because in hindsight it's obvious to me that they didn't want an employee just a free consultation. Smart hack on their part though, and I learned something too.
For the right job I'll offer a trial period. Usually a one-two month stint followed up by a buy or fly decision. Play it right and you have a lot of leverage. They just finished training you and you're showing a lot of promise out of the gate. In the managers head they are dreading the idea of having to go through the interview process all over again. The key is not to go looking for people offering unpaid work, but to find people who want to pay and make the buy decision easier.
When negotiating keep in mind that you have nothing to lose. If the job is unpaid you gain by leaving. The other side of the table has a lot more at stake. They lose someone they've spent a lot of time/money training, and they have to start over at square one with someone new. Don't underestimate how hard it is to find good people. Frankly if they aren't going to pay you then chances are you aren't that good, or the managers are fools for not trying to keep good people. In either case what would you gain by staying?
When Germany entered an economic slump after the Euro-introduction in 2002, companies loathed hiring on permanent positions. As a result, people who came out of college were hired on internships. An entire generation of young students were taken advantage of in this way, dubbed "Generation Praktikum" by the media (literally "generation internship"). It's sad to see the same happening in Ireland / the US now.
Unfortunately, interns aren't going to be the ones to stop this trend. Unpaid interns do benefit from their internships. They mostly accept it as something that they have to do, and they know that if they refuse to take an unpaid internship, there are thousands of other students who will snap up the opportunity.
I don't think this will always be the case. As more people work on things that scale, the importance of quality will become more obvious, and employers will be more motivated to find the best. On the intern side, as it becomes more obvious to people how vulnerable large firms are to disruption by agile startups, the knowledge of how to price, value, and market oneself will become more widespread, and fewer grads will be taken unawares.
I think part of the problem in Ireland is the government are now touting internships as a solution to our unemployment/economic problems. In some case, they might work out where there's real training and some level of compensation. It's probably good if you can take someone with _no_ experience in a field, let them still receive their social welfare perhaps with a bonus, and after a limited period they graduate on to a real job. Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen and many companies are basically looking for free labour.
What's even more galling, from my perspective, is the government is taking money out of the pensions of private citizens to pay for this "jobs initiative".
If you're not paid, you're not valued. Nothing you produce will ever be good enough. Nobody will make time for you, because they have more valuable things to spend their time on. No money is lost if you're struggling to do your assignments; no money is lost if you don't learn anything.
A company should be invested into their interns and the best way to be invested is by paying them a wage and expecting decent work in return.
As this is Ireland I've got to assume there is also an element of trying to reduce the numbers who are technically unemployed and so make things look better. It sounds very familiar to the community employment schemes etc. from the '80s where people basically worked for their unemployment benefit so as to gain work experience / help the community. I can even remember being turned down at an interview for one of these way back when and feeling pretty bad.
In the end some people will gain something & some people will be exploited but it wont make much difference to the economy other than to help drive down wages.
I'm not sure if you can be on the unemployment register and still work in an internship. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the government isn't looking too deeply into the situation because it keeps the dole numbers down.
Companies tend to save money at all costs, even at the expense of decency and Doing The Right Thing™. It's the same reason a lot of them have clauses in their contracts forbidding people from discussing their wages, even though it is in the employees' interests to do so.
I figured something out when thinking about this one day - where you're going is how you'll get there. If your goal is to make money, your goal is greed and your path will be a greedy one. If your goal is to make a positive contribution to those around you and get one back in return, then you will still make money but won't step on peoples' toes in the process.
It's not a problem for IT students. I could choose from many offers in my city. At our forums we laugh from low paid offers and I haven't seen unpaid one. I ended up going to different country and earn 1,1k euro with no real experience at all and I extended it during crisis (it was few years ago) so I guess I was useful.
If you really can't find anything it's better to make nice portfolio projects for yourself at home or work on some opensource project. It's similar experience but feels much better than working as slave for some awful company that can't even afford small wage.
My experience is that a number of larger companies is paying rather well for internships of people 1 or 2 years from graduation. I had a great half a year in southern france on the cost of one of them (small flat, benefits and a final performance bonus included).
They see it as gambling money: if they find a good guy, they will try to hold on him. Otherwise, even a 1k wage doesn't really cost them much.
Also: Good interns usually are not available for hire after their studies, so its money well invested.
The place I'm currently contracting in (mentioned in article) has their summer intern programme in full swing.
Not only are the guys getting decent pay but they are building a useful in-house app while getting trained up in technologies like OS X, Linux, Git, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB etc.
Perhaps this thread has gone too long, but the comments are overwhelmingly against doing work for free.
TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands.
My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time.
Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run.
One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON.
If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against.
If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.
But interns aren't producing anything (if they are, it's not an internship). The idea is they are learning. If they are producing things the company then uses to sell, they should get paid. But I've seen interns that literally follow around, take notes, ask questions.
So, why should someone be paid for not contributing to the bottom line?
This past year I followed a web development course. I'm now supposed to work 3 months for free. I don't mind it because I've been jobless for a long time before. The problem is, I just can't find an employer (in France). I get the interviews, but my interviewer always assumes that I'm supposed to know everything by heart, have nothing more to learn, and more importantly, they want to see a portfolio of sites I've done before other than the one I've done in class. Basically, they don't want an intern, they want a real, super-fast worker for free. So I'm going to fail at my diploma because nobody wants me to work for free for them. To make it worse, I'm the best student of my class. Those who can't code found an internship. Are we supposed to lie and bluff to be allowed to be exploited?
0 is just one number along a range of numbers - it's not particularly special. In some cultures, it's considered normal to exchange not just free labor to get your foot in the door, but to actually pay cash to do so.
Wow. We hire almost every intern that works for us, unless they suck. Internships are also normally done pre-graduation from college. It is not a job, it is in exchange for college credit. We hire the day they graduate.
But it is also up to the intern to decide whether or not our internship is right for them. A overgeneralized diatribe like the one posted is aiming to get people to not intern at all, whereas the appropriate act would be to critically evaluate your options, and make an informed decision about each specific company.
In my school, we call them "co-op jobs". If you sign up for co-op, you get college credit for them, but either way you get paid. And of course if you're any good, your co-op employers will want to hang onto you after you graduate. I didn't bother signing up for co-op because co-op or no, it's impossible to complete all the other graduation requirements and not have enough credits. So the credits you get from a co-op job are useless. Students pay money to the school to be part of the co-op program, and that's not unusual. Here, it's $400 for a once a week class that teaches you how to make a resume plus an additional ~$100 fee if you find a job, even if you didn't use the school's connections to find it. If your internship results in college credit, its likely that students are actually losing money by working for you. I think that's absurd.
Personally I got a lot of value out of my unpaid internships (Kate Spade & Sports Illustrated). Though I understand the reasons against it, I got to a) work with a great team, b) make some great business contacts for future job referrals, and c) get experience that looked great on my resume.
That said, I completely understand that my experience was the exception rather than the rule. Plus, both companies I interned at most likely could have afforded to pay me too.
In Germany I often see unpaid interns, but actually not in a bad situation. There are 2 situations in Germany when an unpaid internship will happen: One is, when the students working as interns are still going to their schools and maybe are first or second semesters. So actually they don't really create value, but they cost time, energy, working hours of coworkers, electricity, rent and so on. The company basically already pays a load to have this intern sitting there and a high chance to get no value back in return. I think in this situation it is quite fair, not to pay wages.
The second situation is, when students try to get a job, which a lot of people want to have, like at Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers and so on. In this situation the brand alone will help them out later to get better jobs or even give them a chance for a full time job in this company that others can't get. It's a little like doing a start-up. You put in a lot for the small chance to get a unnatural big payoff.
In both situations I can't disapprove of unpaid internships. I hope with sharing these experiences, other readers might get a more objective point of view. It is not all bad about unpaid internships!
[+] [-] zeemonkee|14 years ago|reply
The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude.
In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege.
Moreover - a point not raised in the article - in expensive cities the only way a fresh graduate can survive without salary is if their parents subsidize them. Who can afford to do so ? Rich families. So it's a form of discrimination.
A company has no excuse for not paying at least minimum wage. If you can't afford the employees you need you shouldn't be in business, period. Any company that uses unpaid internships is morally bankrupt and should be boycotted.
[+] [-] cturner|14 years ago|reply
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom".
If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship.
When I was young I worked in a computer assembly shop for basically no money. In the course of this work I plugged a power cable into a motherboard and fried it. I probably rubbed customers up the wrong way, and certainly did dumb things. My labour was worth less than nothing, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to be allowed near the place or customers.
As I became valuable I struck a private agreement with the owner and spent a summer working full-time, for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing.
Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job. Note that in the case of the oil company work, I already had most of a computer science degree, and so was more qualified than the average kind of person who lives on minimum wage and still near-worthless.
After spending some time working to build up my skills, I'm now happy with my career. I wouldn't be here except for working in situations where I was earning less than minimum wage, often with people giving my low money on the offchance I might not be incompetent.
The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.
There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.
It's a ridiculous solution that hurts the people it claims to represent. There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.
The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.
[+] [-] jcromartie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irishstu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j1o1h1n|14 years ago|reply
Anyway, your analogy will seem more believable we start to see the children of interns forced to work for the companies that their parent work for, interns being paid with tickets only redeemable at the company store, having to ask permission to marry, only being allowed to marry other employees, not being allowed to move off the company campus, etc... lots of a way to go on the road to serfdom.
[+] [-] Retric|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smokeyj|14 years ago|reply
Intern: skills + experience = $0
College: no skills + no experience = student loan
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most.
The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience.
As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.
[+] [-] nagnatron|14 years ago|reply
You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring.
In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.
[+] [-] JoachimSchipper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deadmansshoes|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irishstu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicpottier|14 years ago|reply
I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are going to contribute. The cold hard fact is that you are still junior, very junior, no matter how much a hotshot you think you are. So the time they put into you makes it a pretty even trade for it not to be paid.
Though come to think of it, both internships I went to were paid. But the point stands.
To put it simpler terms, ask any company whether they find new college graduates effective and worth the overhead for the first few months they work. I doubt many would say yes, and those are people more qualified than those seeking internships.
[+] [-] dkersten|14 years ago|reply
So, interns are definitely not always a burden, but I certainly do understand that they often would be, but to be honest, you get what you pay for - if it had been an unpaid internship, I'd have had very little incentive to really put much effort into it. I mean, months of unpaid work would be demoralizing and I'd probably quickly have ended up producing little of value.. Luckily it never came to that and I ended up going back to work at the company for another 1.75 years, before I left to try out the world of freelancing and startups.
For the record, that company hires between two and five interns every year. They find it effective enough to keep doing it. They treat it as much as a hiring thing as a cheap labor thing and they find having (paid) interns to be pretty effective.
[+] [-] cdr|14 years ago|reply
Plus, if you're hiring good interns, they will absolutely benefit you if you let them. Sometimes hugely.
An intern made Joel Spolsky several million dollars: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...
Not saying I was any good or my employer was any good, but at my first internship I wrote software in my free time that ended up saving the company tens of thousands of dollars a month.
[+] [-] lojack|14 years ago|reply
I actually went to a school that required every student in my program to do a minimum of 1 year of paid internships (split into 3 and 6 month blocks). Judging by how abundant and competitive the companies looking for interns were I'd say they found it very much worth the overhead.
[+] [-] widget|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] officemonkey|14 years ago|reply
Back in the day, when I started my career, to get my foot in the door, I worked at a temp agency. "Word processing" was all the rage and they needed people who knew how to use Microsoft Word. After a couple of months the boss noticed I knew how to spell "glaciolacustrine" correctly, so he asked if I had a degree. A couple months later I was hired. All the time I was getting paid $10/hr.
That's the way firms should be finding and cultivating young talent: paid internships, temp services, and recruiting. Unpaid internships are indeed bullshit.
[+] [-] WillyF|14 years ago|reply
One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like this, but the fact that career experts who are supposed to help interns are offering these really blows my mind). These are people who don't have the ability to offer many of the benefits that do come with an unpaid internship such as making connections, learning what it's like to work in a real office, having a recognizable name on your resume, etc.
Another trend that scares me is that we're seeing more and more internships auctioned off in charity auctions. Rich parents actually pay for their kids to get some experience.
Unfortunately, interns aren't going to be the ones to stop this trend. Unpaid interns do benefit from their internships. They mostly accept it as something that they have to do, and they know that if they refuse to take an unpaid internship, there are thousands of other students who will snap up the opportunity.
Change is either going to have to come from employers or the government. I strongly believe that offering paid internships is more favorable to employers because they get better quality interns who are more motivated, and the employer has a stronger incentive to use the intern's time well.
Here in the U.S. there are already laws against unpaid internships. I wrote an article on it here: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/blog/are-unpaid-internshi...
There's actually an excellent and fair standard for determining when an unpaid internship should be allowed; however, I've never heard of an employer's being prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act for having unpaid interns. And if the law were to start to be enforced, I'm not sure the outcome would benefit students in the short-term. There would be a lot fewer opportunities as many employers would get rid of their internship programs. This would result in even more competition for what paid opportunities were left.
I really hate unpaid internships, but I still haven't figured out what it's going to take to make them a thing of the past. They've become an essential part of the transition from education to employment, and messing around with that in a time when really talented grads are struggling to land jobs probably isn't a good idea. We may have to wait until the economy really heats up again.
[+] [-] argv_empty|14 years ago|reply
If there are only a few internships available in a given field, having an internship would no longer be a de facto requirement for starting a career in that field (unless the handful of new employees who got the handful internships are all the new blood that's needed, in which case the unpaid internship system is just another way to string people along).
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
Ireland has been hit by a strong recession. Unemployment is high (~15%), and particularly high amount young people. Many are emigrating to find other work. The media is full of stories about how there are no jobs.
Which is a shame because there is a massive skill shortage if you know programming/sysadmining in Ireland. Companies spend months trying to find employees.
[+] [-] johngalt|14 years ago|reply
For the right job I'll offer a trial period. Usually a one-two month stint followed up by a buy or fly decision. Play it right and you have a lot of leverage. They just finished training you and you're showing a lot of promise out of the gate. In the managers head they are dreading the idea of having to go through the interview process all over again. The key is not to go looking for people offering unpaid work, but to find people who want to pay and make the buy decision easier.
When negotiating keep in mind that you have nothing to lose. If the job is unpaid you gain by leaving. The other side of the table has a lot more at stake. They lose someone they've spent a lot of time/money training, and they have to start over at square one with someone new. Don't underestimate how hard it is to find good people. Frankly if they aren't going to pay you then chances are you aren't that good, or the managers are fools for not trying to keep good people. In either case what would you gain by staying?
[+] [-] blumentopf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidOrTaken|14 years ago|reply
I don't think this will always be the case. As more people work on things that scale, the importance of quality will become more obvious, and employers will be more motivated to find the best. On the intern side, as it becomes more obvious to people how vulnerable large firms are to disruption by agile startups, the knowledge of how to price, value, and market oneself will become more widespread, and fewer grads will be taken unawares.
[+] [-] hopeless|14 years ago|reply
What's even more galling, from my perspective, is the government is taking money out of the pensions of private citizens to pay for this "jobs initiative".
[+] [-] byronronron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Confusion|14 years ago|reply
A company should be invested into their interns and the best way to be invested is by paying them a wage and expecting decent work in return.
[+] [-] hugh3|14 years ago|reply
But even we pay our summer interns.
[+] [-] dmoo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irishstu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Produce|14 years ago|reply
I figured something out when thinking about this one day - where you're going is how you'll get there. If your goal is to make money, your goal is greed and your path will be a greedy one. If your goal is to make a positive contribution to those around you and get one back in return, then you will still make money but won't step on peoples' toes in the process.
[+] [-] GvS|14 years ago|reply
If you really can't find anything it's better to make nice portfolio projects for yourself at home or work on some opensource project. It's similar experience but feels much better than working as slave for some awful company that can't even afford small wage.
[+] [-] Argorak|14 years ago|reply
They see it as gambling money: if they find a good guy, they will try to hold on him. Otherwise, even a 1k wage doesn't really cost them much.
Also: Good interns usually are not available for hire after their studies, so its money well invested.
[+] [-] noarchy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwilkin|14 years ago|reply
Not only are the guys getting decent pay but they are building a useful in-house app while getting trained up in technologies like OS X, Linux, Git, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB etc.
Win-win!
[+] [-] chrisclark1729|14 years ago|reply
TL;DR - It’s an interns fault for taking crap free work, in essence putting their future in someone else’s hands.
My experience: 3 years ago I was an accountant and thought about killing myself nearly every day. It used to take me 10 - 15 minutes to get out of my car every morning just to walk inside. I was able to use free work to transition from a boring career to one I enjoy in an incredibly short amount of time.
Rather than go back to school only to finish in debt and start at the bottom I was able to trade valuable work that I could do (finance/accounting) for experience in work that I wanted to do (development/data analysis). I would always suggest short projects so as not to overwhelm either party, but this turned out to be very favorable in the long run. One major caveat is that these were not company created internships. I wasn’t in the business of letting a company compile all of their shitty work only to pass it off on someone to do for free. THAT IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CALLED BULLSHIT ON.
If a job seeker shows just a little initiative they can force free work to have a training component that is defined in advance and one from which they will benefit. Too many workers put their future in someone else’s hands by assuming the company has some training program mapped out for them. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the types of employees who continue the cycle of useless and exploitative internships that you rail against.
If you are doing work for free, YOU are on the hook. You hold most of the cards because there is nothing forcing you to continue working.
[+] [-] epo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|14 years ago|reply
So, why should someone be paid for not contributing to the bottom line?
[+] [-] gorog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nagnatron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
I am not convinced it's a net win for society.
[+] [-] rb2k_|14 years ago|reply
My outside view is that a lot of Americans pay thousands of dollars to go to university.
Universities are, for a lot of people, just a means for learning a discipline and giving them more/better possibilities in a future job search.
While most internships aren't as "prestigious" as a university degree, they probably don't cost as much either.
In the end, both of them will have allowed you to make some new contacts, learn trade-specific things and add a new slot on your résumé.
p.s. this certainly doesn't go for all professions/internships. But the general direction seems about right.
[+] [-] synnik|14 years ago|reply
But it is also up to the intern to decide whether or not our internship is right for them. A overgeneralized diatribe like the one posted is aiming to get people to not intern at all, whereas the appropriate act would be to critically evaluate your options, and make an informed decision about each specific company.
[+] [-] mitcheme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kosei|14 years ago|reply
That said, I completely understand that my experience was the exception rather than the rule. Plus, both companies I interned at most likely could have afforded to pay me too.
[+] [-] erikb|14 years ago|reply
The second situation is, when students try to get a job, which a lot of people want to have, like at Google, Price Waterhouse Coopers and so on. In this situation the brand alone will help them out later to get better jobs or even give them a chance for a full time job in this company that others can't get. It's a little like doing a start-up. You put in a lot for the small chance to get a unnatural big payoff.
In both situations I can't disapprove of unpaid internships. I hope with sharing these experiences, other readers might get a more objective point of view. It is not all bad about unpaid internships!