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The Internship That Students Drool Over
selan writes "The Baltimore Sun has a feature on Microsoft's internship program and why it is so popular with college students. Not only are interns paid, but they also receive the same perks as other Microsoft employees. At the end of the summer they are treated to a catered barbecue at Bill Gates's house and have a good shot at a full time job after graduation. You do not know the power of the Dark Side."
RTFA.The article clearly says some interns dont get paid. Dont ask me which loophole of the law they use
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
> At the end of the summer they are treated to a catered barbecue at Bill Gates's house and have a good shot at a full time job after graduation
flipping burgers at the barbecue
I know of very few disgruntled M$ employees. If anything, M$ raises the bar for other employers, at least in the areas where M$ has a physical presence. In this day and age of HB1 sweatshops and the Dilbert Academy of Mangement, we could use a few more employers like this.
But... Their growth rate has always required a steady flow of interns and recruits who become regular employees. We'll see what happens then the growth curve flattens out and they don't need more people. And then we'll see what happens when M$ actually begins to shrink. When you want to attract more people, you give them nice benefits and competitive salaries. When you want to downsize without handing out pink slips, the process runs in reverse. Nowhere is this easier to see than in the dot-com boom and subsequent meltdown.
M$ has already indicated that it's prices will be reduced to compete with open source; that lost revenue has to come from somewhere. The interns will "get it" first, then consultants, then regular employees.
Microsoft's hiring practices seem odd to me. Of the people I know that do, or have, worked there the ones Microsoft actually hired were sort of morons and the smart people all had been brought over from companies M$ bought (like Hotmail).
I'd apply at M$ if they'd let me develop opensource software and use Linux on my development machine. As long as I see them as an evil empire though I couldn't work there. Their loss.
For me my dream job - of jobs I'd do for other people - would probably be Google. I love designing spiders and search engines and stuff like that and I know a couple people that work there and they seem to like it. To bad I don't have a PhD. They seem to snub lonewolf hacker types.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"Unfortunately, the real world is not such a utopia. The real world is what you get when the market economy actually works, as opposed to the computer industry, where it's been warped and twisted into a smoking pile of slag. "
Huh?
I've worked for about half a dozen Fortune 500 companies now, and every single one of them has offered perks similar to those from Microsoft. Tremendous access to technology, high pay, high bonuses, etc. etc.
Not one of these companies were in the computer industry. One was mobile telecom, Three were financial(insurance or banking) and the last is a financial division of a automaker.
"Open source and free software are about sharing the (intellectual) wealth around, making it available to anybody, not concentrating it in one place. It's a people thing."
In other words, Open Source is about destroying wealth... or specifically about preventing those who create the intellectual property from profiting from it.
It bothers me to see this, because I personally think tech people are extremely undervalued today for what value they bring to companies, even though we are relatively highly paid. Part of my perspective comes from working in finance industry where I routinely encounter people making 7 figure salaries for doing nothing more than offering opinions.
These people love open source, because they can take *YOUR* work and use it to make more money. That way they can continue to have their 7 figure salary and not worry about sharing it with you.
I just don't understand why this self-destructive behavior is so appealing to some people.
Hmmm... I guess you must not look like Rachael Leigh Cook.
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