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Calling BS On Unpaid Internships
theodp writes "Getting an intern is so hot right now,' writes Stewart Curry. 'It's also bull**** 99% of the time.' IrishStu also provides his list of Interning's Big Lies: 1. 'You'll get training.' 2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' 3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.' 4. 'It will look great on your CV.' 5. 'You'll make great contacts.' So, who does it really hurt, Stu? 'Here's who it hurts — interns. You have them working for nothing. Here's who it hurts — people who need a wage in order to survive. Here's who it hurts — companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do.' Inside Higher Ed also checks in on The Great Intern Debate."
Has the world gone mad?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
This just happens everywhere, in any country I know, and it will keep happening, that's it. Just don't take those non-jobs.
IRS rules require that an internship be primarily for the education of the intern. So, like Microsoft and contractors you are risking really big problems if you do not comply, including fines and back pay.
Yep, without clear guidelines we only have warm fuzzy 'good intentions". Those don't show on a resume. Nor does an extended indentured servitude. There are possible good perks here, but the practice of it outweighs them. Anyone here have similar experiences with grad school? Med rotations? Let the intern beware...
I interned for three straight summers for a company, was paid very well (started at $13/hr my first summer, ended at $18/hr my last summer), had school covered my last two years with the understanding that I'd come back after I graduated, and had a job lined up before I left to go back to school after my last summer. I've worked for them for 10+ years now since I graduated and still don't see any reason to go anywhere else. I worked on stuff that was interesting to me at the time with good people, in an organization that actually cared for their interns. Maybe I had a different experience that most interns, but I still tell students that interning is good for you. I think it depends more on where you choose to intern.
I can't speak for the medical, financial, or law industries, but if you get offered an unpaid internship in the computer industry, laugh that offer out the door. There are tons of internships in the computer industry that pay real money, so don't work for some company that is trying to rip you off. They will only rip you off more and more, then dump you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Getting an intern is so hot right now,' writes Stewart Curry. 'It's also bull**** 99% of the time.' IrishStu also provides his list of Interning's Big Lies: 1. 'You'll get training.' 2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' 3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.' 4. 'It will look great on your CV.' 5. 'You'll make great contacts.' So, who does it really hurt, Stu? 'Here's who it hurts â" interns. You have them working for nothing. Here's who it hurts â" people who need a wage in order to survive. Here's who it hurts â" companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do.' Inside Higher Ed also checks in on The Great Intern Debate."
In short, it encourages asshattery on the benalf of business. They can do whatever they want, and have it amount to de facto indentured servitude. Never mind that it limits the set of people to those who have outside income.
To handle that and associated problems:
1) Start making temporary work more expensive by making benefit/liability requirements multiply
2) Allow people to bypass requirements after UI runs out, or immediately if ineligible for unemployment.
3) End the idea of unpaid internships, since they're the result of unreal requirements being placed for work
4) Take a page from banks' structuring laws, put them into employment law, and make circumventing regulations nearly impossible.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I've seen cooperative training programs advertised on my university's website. The funny thing it was merely writing user documentation and they didn't care what you were majoring in. It was a paid position (bit over minimal wage). The reason it was good for the company is that they could avoid a lot of taxes, and get fairly intelligent person with knowledge of English and computer skills. (It was in Hungary, Nokia-Siemens Network.)
'Here's an intern, since you seem so very busy lately. They need to develop a useful application in 4 months, get to know corporate procedures, learn that an enterprise environment is different then a PC at home (no you can't reboot this server until the maintenance window is up, and you completed a valid change proposal for that utility), and oh yes, they do not get access to passwords so you take of of that, and just show them the ropes in your free time.'
Interns are mostly a waste of both our time if no adequate resources are allocated, management sees them as cheap labour, and interns come with unrealistic expectations.
Unpaid internship does not look great on a cv; it's looks cheap. The best advice I got from my first job manager was: never work unpaid unless it is for a charity. Working unpaid is showing a lack of respect for your own self. If your work is worth something charge something.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Lot's of tech companies are hiring -- so, it's really the intern's fault for getting conned into working for nothing.
The problem is that by doing unpaid work, you not only hurt yourself but other people (employees, contractors, etc.)
Just say no to unpaid internships. Any semi-reputable company can afford to pay you.
It seems that thanks to the economy, you'll also be competing with older workers for those internships now.
You are blowing serious amounts of money on college, thousands to pay for worthless non-core classes to fill your year - yet you gripe over doing work that is beneficial to your career, gratis?
Take whatever you can get related to your intended career for your summer internships, they will be insanely beneficial when you get into the real world. You getting an A+ in your algorithms class doesn't matter to me at all as someone doing hiring. You having experience, knowing how the real world works is what matters.
Internships, paid or unpaid should be stressed more by school programs, their value is much more than anyone comprehends.
I work at the USPTO. With the Federal Gov now cracking down on updaid internships our agency simply couldn't hire interns and pay them nothing anymore. So no we hire Externs. Change one letter and now their work is Free. http://usptocareers.gov/Pages/WhyWork/Students.aspx
In the cycle that is economics, the lows are where folks do internships and in the early 90s when I was graduating it was not exception for those with average and below average skills and intelligence. Now with the US and world economy in the dumpers all but for the ultra rich and controlling influences its the norm to do internships paid for 7-10 bucks an hour and a bunch of crap for a line to join. Summary, it used to be young and stupid. Now it is questionable about creativity and the establishment at a time where the disinfranchised need to go out and make something wonderful happen that is not BS in and of itself. Evil begets evil, time for the creative and good spirits to take back from the behind-the-desk bastards that leech of society. Internships are crap, go to work for yourself and make it happen, become better if you want to be better.
OP is butthurt because they found out that they weren't getting paid through an internship. You know OP, you can just not apply for an internship and go straight for the real deal if you think you have the skills. Oh wait, are you applying to become a nurse or something? Because if you are, you're required to do it. Good, now feel the butthurt flow through you.
Warn all those stupid interns that sitting at home depressed is better than working for nothing.
http://10CentMail.com - the Amazon SES app.
Someone has to serve the coffee. And make sure they use skim milk!
When I did my unpaid summer internship at Kramerica, I learned a lot! We did some real-world feasibility tests on cutting edge bladder systems for oil tankers.
#DeleteChrome
You will sell yourself short, get crappy office tasks, not real training. It doesn't look good on a CV/resume ... if I read unpaid internship, I read 'MUG'.
There are plenty of proper paid jobs out there, including short term summer jobs.
Living in a European country, I was totally shocked to discover unpaid internships were showing up over here. Why on earth would I work for free ANYWHERE? Who on earth can actually AFFORD to work for free? Oh, yeah, the rich buggers who probably don't need to work anyway, or for whom Daddy will always be able to find easy, well paid work with one of their chums anyway.
Unpaid internships is a) exploitative bull-hockey, b) a mug's game.
Serious question here. Would it make sense for a startup to be looking for unpaid interns to help them get off the ground? I know that some startups tend to offer the first few employees stock instead of a salary (until salaries can be afforded), but would something like that work with interns too? It seems like interns could be very helpful at a startup (or some startups), so what model would work best?
Let's be frank.
IT administration really ought to be considered a blue collar job. You learn a skill (Unix/Windows/Storage/etc), and you ply your trade.
Unfortunately, there is nowhere in the world to go to learn this stuff. College will teach you CS, programming, or engineering, but not administration. You could go to a for-profit college (like DeVry), but that's not going to be as good as experience in getting you a job. It's next to impossible to get an entry level IT job as a junior admin anymore if all you have is talent and no experience. What we really need to do in order to get new admins into the workforce is train them.
Internships are only the modern version of apprenticeships that blue collar unions (and trade guilds before them) have been doing for hundreds of years. Sure, you don't get paid squat, but you earn your stripes. You gain experience which companies will recognize when they're looking for a cheap admin.
What we really need are proper apprenticeships, where there is an agreement between the employer and apprentice where the former provides training -- along with compensation commensurate with obtained skills and effort, over time -- in return for service. This could replace full-time college studies in many cases, with apprentices taking individual classes that would prove valuable as needed.
if you have 100 applicants, all mostly equally qualified, and one says "i'll work for free", you hire him or her
it's a way for the rich to destroy the meritocracy: they have the benefit of not needing money to survive, and they can use this to extend an unfair competitive advantage over equally qualified or even more qualified poorer candidates
free market fundamentalists need to understand that you need government regulating society to counteract the force of gravity that is money. money attracts more money, and this is a force of injustice that NATURALLY develops. without government controls counteracting this, society inevitably stratifies into classes, with the rich having all the money, and the poor leading miserable lives they can't escape
it is not possible to believe in a meritocracy and a free market at the same time. the two concepts are mutually exclusive
it doesn't mean we should be communist societies. it means that pure capitalist societies are just as evil as communist ones
the answer?:
balance, in all things: a capitalist society with socialist safety nets. the only society with true justice and maximized happiness and a rich vibrant middle class
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IRS rules require that an internship be primarily for the education of the intern. So, like Microsoft and contractors you are risking really big problems if you do not comply, including fines and back pay.
It's one or the other. And if you disagree you could find that internship filled with an immigrant rather than a self righteous self important self involved American.
I worked at Intel as an unpaid intern for about 8 months. I didn't get hired afterwards, I didn't really make any great contacts (met some great people though). However, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I might go as far to say it changed my life. It all really depends on what you plan on getting out of it. You should also learn what your responsibilities and duties are going to be before you even start (like any real job). It's your own fault at that point.
While I don't really agree with IrishStu on all of his Interning Big Lies, I'd say the "people who need a wage in order to survive" is the real biggest problem. It creates disproportion opportunity with those who are well-off enough* to move to wherever a job is and pay for rent and food without an income. It would seem this is part of the root of why government is so fucked up: government internship is so commonly done by people who are well-off and it's difficult for an "average Joe" to enter government. This isn't to say "average Joe" would inherently run the government better, but it would clearly seem that there's a conflict of interest and possibly even an biased agenda if one's guardians, who likely paid for your internship, are well-off because of stock, company ownership, etc and your career path is not grounded in the daily wage or yearly salary work under the subordinate whim and possible non-sequitur of a company.
*This doesn't necessarily mean people who are the children of the rich, but it strongly leans that way. In general, internships are the domain of would-be college graduates. While the poor can and do receive adequate loans to pay for college, they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to work on a no-pay internship. Meanwhile, the middle class generally can't get loans and sink most of their money into paying for a good/great college, generally leaving little that could be used towards a no-pay internship. The rich, however, by definition have sufficient funds, so they inherently could support a no-pay internship. Now, the poor or the middle class could potentially save sufficiently prior to college towards an internship (although that means devoting money towards the internship instead of a "better" college), they may take a position as an assistant lecturer if they're in grad school (which does nothing to help undergraduates), or they could wait until after college after saving up money to work in an internship (which beyond delaying one's career by multiple years, might become a hindrance to one's hiring).
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I use unpaid interns... and yes, it does give them training, they do get a great team to work on, and I've hired 2 of the last 3 that I've had. It's great for me because training costs are high enough that I wouldn't hire someone straight out of school who is untested... this is the only way that I will hire a new grad, but if they prove themselves, I WILL hire them at a competitive salary.
Sorry that your experience wasn't that great, so either you didn't get on with someone who was qualified to take you on... or you screwed up.
I work for Mozilla. We have a fantastic internship program. We pick the 60 or so best undergraduate and graduate students in the world every year, and we pay them very well (competitive stipend, free transportation to Mountain View, free housing, free food, free laptop). But you have to be outstanding.
So this is kind of a funny story... my first real job in the Software Development industry was as an unpaid intern for a very small document management company. Very small as in, when I got there, it was just my boss, his son, and I. I was the only Software Engineer, yet also somehow an Intern. I created our document management system from the ruins of a 14 year old source code base that only ran on Windows 3.1, and then made anything they dreamed up over the next 4 years or so.
After a few months they started paying me about 9$/hour, and when I graduated they gave me about 48k/year without benefits. I stuck around, thinking it would go somewhere but it never did. I left and immediately got 50% pay increase and full benefits at the next job I applied for.
It wasn't until that moment that I realized that I had been at a level between "underpaid" and "indentured servant," particularly when I was working as our unpaid intern lead software engineer. I thought you guys might get a kick out of that story.
Most of the pharmacy internships wont let you do much more than file paperwork, stock shelves, and handle minor bookkeeping tasks. A lowly pharmacy technician gets more out of their regular employment in terms of training than the average pharmacy internship. (Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few.) However, those internship, and practicum hours are required to get the doctorate degree.
The only useful internships I saw where with places that did review for patients in long term care facilities, with insurance companies (ironic beyond belief that insurance companies are often doing a better job training future pharmacists than are hospitals, and community pharmacies), and a handful of very small pharmacies where the individual PIC made a decision to do something educational with it. The hospitals don't want the liability issues, but they do want the free "stock boy" help...
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Internships are like poison to a meritocracy based society. Unpaid internships doubly so.
They allow richer parents to use both their money and connections to manoeuvre their children into jobs that have wealth, power or both. This comes at the expense of poorer and middle class children who can not bankroll their children in adulthood or do not move in the right social circles.
A classic example in my country (UK) was a fund raising event for the Conservative party. Internships at top flight financial and legal firms were auctioned off the party donors to raise funds for the party. No, I did not make this up : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356469/Cash-internships-Tory-backers-pay-2k-time-buy-children-work-experience.html (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but credit where it is due, they did break this story).
These sort of actions entrench wealth and power with those who already have them. An internship via connections or unpaid work is a boot in the face of those who can not ride out life on Daddy's coat-tails.
when I was going to school to earn my A&P(2 year tech school) i went on a Co-op where i was paid.
later when I was working on my Engineering degree(4 year B.S.), I was offered an Intern where i'd work for free for the summer.
what does this say for the jog market for 4 years of B.S.?
When I was in college, I had a shitty job at a restaurant. I volunteered at a local software company during my off-hours to get resume experience, ~15 hrs a week. After about 3 months I had to quit because school and work became too intensive. About a month after leaving the unpaid internship (which I landed by just walking in the front door cold turkey and asking if they had anything open), they called be back and asked if I would come code for them (since I already knew the company way and the code base. It got me experience, out of a job I really despised, and now I could not be happier. YMMV. Of course there are places that will step on you, but there is merit to working for free. It shows that you are willing to commit to something out of passion and drive to learn the material and be a contributor, and that your not just in it for the money. Yes I know people are starving rah rah and shame on me for working for free, but common, this blog just comes on a little to strong. Do what you have to do to get a job, and if you feel like you are getting the shaft at your internship, SHOP AROUND. There is no end all be all and absolutes do not exist; I don't think you can paint all unpaid internships in such a negative light.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
"companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do"
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!
(breathes in)
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
I guess I am expection to this case. I worked for an intership for a small company back in 2003. It was unpaid and I gained work experience. After a year they started to pay me hourly for my work and continued loyality. Eventually the pay increased has they hired me as a consultant. I don't work for them anymore as my career started to shift but I am greatful that I did my unpaid intership, the experience was great and it helped me land my current job as it looked great on my resume.
If giving the choice, I would do it again in a second.
when you are a coffee boy or copy boy = slave
Interns are there to learn and not work for free or do grunt work. At least pay the min wage.
some colleges even make you pay to be a work for free Intern.
...is working for a company I look up to. It's less about training and more about fulfilling a dream. The work experience I can put on my resume is great, but it's far more about working for a company I like and potentially getting hired there. I'd never take an intern position at an unknown company.
My wife got a gig as an engineering internship her senior year of college - we graduated on the same day and she had a guaranteed job making about $3000 more than I did when I got my first engineering job out of college 2 months later - wish I had interned !!!
Microsoft intern experience is really awesome. Not trolling, but yeah, most companies just get work done for free. And i get to work on live projects here!
1. 'You'll get training.'
well, out intern is getting a lot of training, both in a highly specialized biotech skill useful in about 4 labs in the US, in general biotech lab stuff, and in seeing how a startup actuallyworks
2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' we have already done this (score is 1 out of 1) our current intern would ccertainly be offered a job if she wasn't a sophomore
3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.'(modesty forbids)
4. 'It will look great on your CV.' modesty aside, I and my boss have pretty decent reps in the biotech area; a letter from us would help
5. 'You'll make great contacts.' certainly true here
as they say, ymmv
That is what it simply is. deceiving youngsters to work for free with promises not guaranteed. its as if hiring someone, and saying 'i may or may not give you your paycheck'. exceptions do not make a rule.
it should be banned and anyone who is doing that should be heavily prosecuted.
Read radical news here
replace them + part of class / school time load with apprenticeship. What about a 1-2 school + 1-2 year apprenticeship for IT / CS?
This just happens everywhere, in any country I know, and it will keep happening, that's it. Just don't take those non-jobs.
Well, you don't know many countries (any? except the US?). I haven't seen internships on the scale of the US in any other country - in most of europe this form of child/slave labour is illegal.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"If you don't want to be a unpaid intern... DON'T BE. Very simple solution." proposition is akin to :
"If you dont want to buy from the 4 mega megacorporations monopolizing cleaning products, DONT."
Or
"If you dont want to get a plan from isps that do not violate network neutrality and tamper with your connection, DONT"
In an environment where some kind of practice is allowed to the extent that it becomes an 'industry standard practice', you cannot choose another option.
In civilized world (doesnt include america) corporations HAVE to pay interns at least minimum wage. Kids too. noone can have others work for him, and get out of it without paying for it. that is the way how it should have been, and it is the way how it is in civilized countries. apparently, it is again not as such, in usa.
why it isnt ? because you people allow, then rationalize and justify malpractice with the idiotic assumption that there will always be 'another choice' - let me wake you up to a fact - when you allow malpractice to become the norm, there is NO other choice.
Read radical news here
My dick only rarely gloats.
Which is odd, because it's absolutely fucking amazing.
...though barely. I made minimum wage, and was promised work after should I work hard enough. Well, not only did it involve not a single line of code, but it was HS diploma monkey work following a checklist that was printed out to make sure the software worked. So I got zero experience in automation testing or practice in coding it. At the end of the internship, despite working hard for them (including nearly full time with Saturday mornings that did affect my grades by a letter grade), I was told there was nothing available. AKA I was a cheap lab monkey they could use during their busy season (the full time lab monkeys got paid $13/hr.)
The end result was that I was graduating school with no job, and most places had just filled their rolls with recent grads. So I went out into the job hunt, and was told by some places that, despite my good understanding of the programs I had written, I didn't have enough experience for them (some even saying "if you had been an intern.") The depressing part was the slacker that had to take five years, and I had to help with projects had a job already. /endrant
Interns are expensive, whether you pay them or not, they aren't that productive and they eat up time from people who are. Interns are also like new employees that you can actually get rid of easily simply by failing to make them an offer. Good interns are good word of mouth to the rest of their school, helping with recruiting.
Paying interns helps negate some of the productivity costs they impose on the team they are on. Paying interns makes it easier to attract interns you will actually want to hire. Paying interns helps the ones you make offers to actually accept the offers. Paying interns helps suppress some of the potential bad word of mouth from those interns you don't decide to make an offer too.
Pay your interns!
Graduate students who do real research should be paid much, much more than they are. It exploits them, and it make it very difficult for MS level research engineers to make a living, because they're competing against almost free labor.
I could be wrong, but I didn't think unpaid interns where legal except in a very few limited cases. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2010/04/is_your_unpaid_internship_lega.html
When you inflate the cost of employing someone to more than the benefit they can bring to the business, they just won't get a job.
Stop trying to get around the law, and the costs won't skyrocket past that point. Note my point on applying the banking concept of structuring to employment law.
You give too much room to bad employers to crowd out good ones.
See, as a simple example, minimum wage laws and 75% teen unemployment.
Minimum wage is something that kills off business asshattery by making it uneconomic, nothing more.
Start forcing businesses to hire more through an legislated "sellers' market", and your 75% goes down sharply.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Perhaps I don't know enough about Slashdot, but shouldn't there be a way to mod/vote stories *off* of the front page?
Yeah... I think you're basically correct. I'm also one of those who decided not to finish college, because I had work opportunities in I.T. available to me without needing to finish first.
The first job I took was essentially an unpaid internship, because I had agreed to help a guy I met at a party get his small computer store off the ground. We didn't really discuss pay at that point. We simply agreed it was a "great business idea" and he was the one who already got the money together for the physical store and its inventory. I was simply offering to step in and do my part to help make it into something profitable for both of us, somehow.
Looking back, it's easy to see how someone would judge that as completely foolish and tell me how he simply "conned me into a bunch of free labor". But it wasn't quite like that. I got to play around with pretty much anything he had in stock, assembling PCs from scratch (at a time when few people really knew a lot about it) and learning a lot about which components were better than others. I fried my share of parts too, learning what to do and not to do with things ... but since I wasn't a paid employee, that wasn't a big issue. When I finally decided it was time to move on (because his business was still struggling and he seemed to lose some of his initial enthusiasm for the whole operation), I found all the hands-on experience and knowledge to be invaluable when I got hired elsewhere as a PC tech.
I'm hosting an intern this summer, and let me tell you, even though he's paid (and paid very well), he's causing a net productivity LOSS to the company, because he can't do much by himself (due to inexperience and laziness), so I have to handhold him through every single little thing instead of doing my own work. On the positive side, the company won't make a mistake of eventually hiring him when his internship is over because I'll be advising against it. It is only hitting me now how much I undersold myself when I was just out of school. Compared to what you see from most fresh graduates now, I was a demigod of software engineering. Another thing is, I feel much more secure in my job. Someone will have to solve the hard problems, and it sure as heck won't be these fresh grads who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Sounds like interns are perfect material for spying on companies.
Just pay them something. How can they refuse when they are so poor and desperate?
Right out of college I went to intern at a multimedia company. They had a big team of programmers, and a big team of graphic designers. I was so excited! I was going to learn so much!
They stuck me in a room scanning crap all day long. That was it. Sit there and scan stuff. I didn't interact with anybody, I didn't learn squat. Needless to say, I quit.
A year later I applied to work at the same company as a programmer. It was a pretty good job. I learned a lot -- as an employee.
Interning is a scam.
Sounds like interns are perfect for spying on companies.
Just pay them something. How can they refuse when they are so poor and desperate?
Why do we need "government" as the regulator of all of this? You act as though the pull of money has no effect on those in government?!
That's the real problem today... Government is always viewed and "sold" to people as the referee or watchdog that ensures "evil big business" doesn't stomp all over the "little guy" -- when in reality? Government colludes with big business constantly, because it helps BOTH the business-owners and those in political office benefit at the expense of the "little guy".
Your premise is completely flawed anyway. If I have 100 applicants and only one says 'I'll work for free!", I'm going to SERIOUSLY question that person's motives. Why is he/she willing to work for free? Is there something more to their story I'm not yet aware of, like a long criminal history, perhaps? Realistically, as a business-owner seeking new hires, I'm on a mission to make the decision that winds up being the best for my business in the long haul. Even IF I found a truly good employee who offered to work for nothing? I'd have serious concerns about them suddenly leaving without notice, or just starting to slack off and refuse to do what's requested at some point. If they aren't getting paid, they're just a "loose canon" in the company that I can't do much about. ("What are you going to do to me if you don't like the way I handle things? Dock my pay?!")
IMHO, we'd all be better off if government provided little to nothing in the way of "safety nets". I'm not saying safety nets shouldn't exist, mind you! I'm just saying we'd be better off letting charities and the places we work voluntarily provide such things - vs. the power structure we have now, where politicians (who can vote on their own pay raises, no less!) get to forcibly take percentages out of everyone's paychecks and forcibly add taxes on top of the goods or services we try to buy, all to pool together in funds they're largely unaccountable for, so THEY can dole them back out with social programs they run.
Most unpaid internships are downright illegal.
Well I guess it's not really a lie per say but just ignorance from either lack of real world experience, or really narrow real world experience. I say this because I've only heard about unpaid internships from an academic level. I heard many advisers praise them, but in the real world they seem to be a joke. Anyway if you're doing a job for a company you should always be getting paid. I'm sure there's plenty of bad manager's that see unpaid internships a way for cheap labor, but chances are most of what you're going to learn in this position is going to hurt your career rather than help it. In most fields training new people is very resource intensive, and pay is sorta insignificant compared the resources being used. Now some people ask for help on personal projects, and those often tend to be unpaid. These unlike internships are much better for your career. Why? It's because personal projects are often not financially motivated. I know life hacker had a pretty good article on working for free, and how it can not only be beneficial to those looking to gain experience, but also to those currently out of work in certain fields. The bad part about working on personal projects is depending on who's in charge they can set unobtainable goals, and end up fizzing out instead of actually accomplishing anything.
I am studying engineering in the UK and the internship i did last summer was a paid one. There are unpaid ones, but mostly, they are for people who are low-grade and no place that gives a salary wants them, it seems.
...there's no impediment to people wasting your time. Just Don't Do It.
"Oh sorry, we only hire people who interned for us. You can come work for free for a year and we'll talk about it then. No? Alright. Hey Congress, we can't find any workers! Open up some more visa spots for us!"
It's a uniquely American thing to defend a corrupt and wrong system as the fault of the victim. Probably why the US is going backwards as a world power so quickly.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
As a recent engineering graduate, I've worked for three different nonprofit research labs over the summers; I went from getting paid a 4k stipend (for 10 full-time weeks) to $18/hr to $25/hr. My costs have fluctuated from time to time, but in general I had enough left over each summer to support my groceries and entertainment the following semester+. Those of my classmates who did similar things over the summers, did likewise; the thought of an unpaid internship seemed foreign and idiodic to us.
Maybe it depends on what industry you are trying to get into, and the prestige of the university you have backing you, but I certainly was never for want of a paid summer job come April each year.
Ross Perlin's book presents a fairly comprehensive look at these issues, including illegality, nepotism, classism, etc.
http://www.amazon.com/Intern-Nation-Nothing-Little-Economy/dp/1844676862
Unpaid internship may not be as "good" as a real job on a cv or resume, but it's better than the hole in your resume that unemployment represents. You hear that from employment consultants, from managers, from professors and from parents.
And so the mentality becomes: if you're lucky enough to be able to afford to work for free, consider yourself lucky and do it. You're "lucky" because the economy is so bad and everyone's unemployed, but look! You're productive! Everything is solved.
And everyone who can't, tough on them; they can wash trash cans all day for $7 an hour. Serves them right for being poor.
I agree that unpaid internships are unreasonable. In my institutional (web) section, we take a full-time student intern each summer, paid at our standard student demonstrator rate — about the same as grad students would get for teaching classes. The people we get are business IT students: bright, eager, and fast learners — but they need to be, as their course leaves them underprepared for the realities of organisation-scale web work. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, WordPress, MS-Office, and VBscript are all very pretty, but we need an understanding of industrial CMSs, LAMP, Javascript, XML, JQuery, CSS, shell scripting, and more, including corporate data management. We teach them, train them, and give them defined tasks: they usually get extremely productive, and we don't like seeing them go. In the past some of them have ended up with real jobs here; unfortunately the ongoing economic mess means we are barred from hiring, so this is the best we can do for now. Companies don't want to pay for negligible skills, but the solution is not unpaid work. Instead, better recruitment practices by the companies and better preparedness by the students would let them agree on a decent rate for the work.
I worked over the past year for a company as a "contractor". One of the reasons I accepted this position was because I was in difficult times in my life. I needed a job. We've all been there. They said they would make me an employee after 90 days and that taxes would be deducted after that. But, of course, they never got around to it.
They also had such bad business practices, and were so good at making false promises to customers, that it became almost impossible to deliver on the work that was being contracted for us. Work orders were ambiguous and easily disputed which turned potentially paying projects into long, drawn out nightmares which yielded paychecks that couldn't even cover monthly expenses.
Eventually, when they laid me off, they tried to sugar coat it by offering me a "business opportunity" in a new startup they were funding. It was a commission only cold calling position. I'd learned my lesson by then and bowed out. At that point, however, I was living on savings and managed to burn through everything I had planned to pay in taxes, leaving me with $3000 of debt to the government.
American business culture is dropping to new lows. Between the interships and the contract positions, companies want to profit while showing no sense of responsibility to the people that help them get there. It's unfortunate that I had to learn this the hard way, but I don't think that most people ought to. It's time we do something to correct these kinds of criminal practices or they will lead to much bigger problems in the future.
Yes, I have, and one that was well over MW.
The "quarter an hour less" is downward force on the upper side, not upward force from the downward side. That is, businesses expect the moon, the stars, and the kitchen sink - while paying absurdly low prices and putting in various roadblocks of their own.
If businesses weren't as bad as they have been empowered to be, you would have a point. There are good ones out there, but you're not defending them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Here's who it hurts â" companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do
How does free labor hurt the companies? Isn't that what capitalism is all about - paying people as little as you can get away with?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Contract positions are almost always based on distrusting the person doing the actual work. The only case it is otherwise, is if the person has a realistic chance at choosing between the same kind of work being offered temporarily or permanently.
It's a case where government interference would work - to counteract incentives for business to be dishonest with people who need honesty in the workplace the most.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
A company that holds unpaid internships is cheap and deservedly gets whatever reputation among the future pool of potential interns.
It also starts the business relationship on a bad footing: "welcome to your internship at company X, you are so worthless that we aren't going to bother paying you even though you have a life and living expenses".
Think about it... as an intern, do you really want to start your career in a place like this?
Considering they paid me $8.30 and hour to be a help desk grunt back in 1996 and I learned that I was capable of working well in this industry and steered me towards pursuing it in my college studies. Before the internship I was a freshman in college, with no clue what I wanted to do, looking to work for the summer in their mail room.
For the record, they did end up hiring me. $38,000 a year salary and I hadn't even completed college. I don't think most college grads make that out the door.
When they outsourced their help desk they moved me in with their network and system administrators. My salary also got a huge jump; somewhere into the 60-65k range. Today I work for a different company and make even more than that.
Say what you will, but I am grateful to them, their internship, the crap $8.30 an hour they paid me, and everything I learned on the job. I made of it every single bit that I could and it paid off for me huge.
I have an internship with a company that pays very handsomely for having me on board, I feel like I'm learning something, I think that the company might hire me after I'm out of school, I do work with an awesome team, It does look great on my resume, many people have told me, and I do make great connections by working there.
I agree that unpaid internships are bogus, but unless you want to intern for Google, its easy for talented students to find one that pays well.
The article talks about unpaid internships which are a robbery.
If you create value for someone , you should get paid for it. Otherwise you are either a slave or a mug.
Definitely wasn't going to take an unpaid internship; it just seems like common sense.
Even if "useful experience" was applicable (i.e. you don't end up as a copier grunt or something), I'm not going to let a third-party use that as an excuse to screw me out of money.
All of the co-ops for RIT students seem to be paid.
My current position actually pays quite well (even accounting for the sky-high apartment rents around here), and the work & work environment seem quite relevant to my field.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yeah, this is *way* different from donating all your time to an open source project in order to get some experience...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
If you are going to an internship and providing work instead of LEARNING, you and the business are doing it wrong. If you want a paycheck, McDonalds is always hiring. But if you want to learn current real world skills that aren't taught by your ivory tower profs who only know textbook theory, then find an internship position that will teach (not train) you how things work. It is the baseline requirement for them. They get benefits for teaching you.
If you are not taught and expected to simply provide free labor, leave. Whether you are a coffee maker, or part of a major project, you SHOULD NOT be working for free. The internship is supposed to BENEFIT you skillwise, you should be LEARNING. If the company is fearful of you using that knowledge and then taking it to a competitor, then they should not be in the business of taking interns.
they were clearly referring to MS's shady/unethical business practices using contractors as full-time employees [reuters.com], and the consequences thereof.
...which would be what, working around government mandated per-employee overhead which contributes to out-sourcing to avoid unfunded government mandates?
Per employee overhead reduces the number of people a business can employ. Personally, I don't think health care ranks very high on Maslow's hierarchy of needs compared to, say, food, but increasing employer per-employee costs is unlikely to increase the number of employed persons.
Feel free to correct my logic.
-- Terry
You just factor it in to part of your education costs. Green kids straight from college have no idea how to act or behave in an office, or how the hierarchy is structured. If anything the value in an internship is that when you get your first real job, you don't look like you have no idea what you're doing and you don't talk out of turn. There's a reason why every job posting on the planet says "Job applicant must have 2 years work experience". Let someone else whip them in to shape in exchange for making coffee and copies. A company gets free labor, and you get a gold star on your CV that says "this unemployed college grad has at least been potty trained".
At the dog pound which one, is more likely to get taken home? All other things being equal - the one who only pees outside, or the one that pees on you when you pick him up?
moox. for a new generation.
Why should a business get all it wants while not compensating for it?
Businesses normally had that as a part of their own company, where you'd pick up how they worked as a part of paid work. You are asking someone to know about your company, in the worst possible way - as an indentured servant.
Your portrayal of it being a master-slave relationship underscores the problems that some businesses create. The only proper action is to legislate this kind of thing out of existence.
For all the freedom businesses want, why do they keep on providing the incentives for and pursuing the creation of slaves?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My experience in the software development field is that employers generally consider two kinds of software developers to be a "net negative:"
1) People less than two years out of college
2) People in their first few months at a new job.
They perceive these people as not understanding their trade and/or not understanding the job that needs to be done. They may be able to produce something of value, but they require a significant amount of mentoring by someone who is much more productive. Further, there is a significant chance that anything actually produced by an inexperienced developer will have to be thrown out and/or redone.
This perception makes it hard to enter the field. Employers much prefer to hire someone with a few years of experience rather than a new grad.
All the "If the company asks you to work for free, they are trying to rip you off" comments miss a fundamental point: If interns were economically advantageous for the company, there would be a lot of companies staffed mostly by interns. But there aren't. Instead you see companies very reluctantly get one or two interns in order to address their corporate citizenship obligations. And then they neglect the interns, because they don't care enough about corporate citizenship to actually invest in the interns.
Co-ops and internships (paid or unpaid) are a way for newcomers to the field to get past this barrier to entry. I'm not saying every intern has a good experience. But internships in general address a very real problem for the intern. My advice to anyone who wants to be a software developer is: get as much on-the-job experience (paid or unpaid) as you can while you are in school. If you don't, you will have a difficult time finding a job at graduation. There is a very real chance that you will have to take a job that diverts your career in a direction you don't want it to go.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Actually, it's common practice in countries (ie - dictatorships) like China as well, to defend the system and blame the workers.
The reason we are going backwards so quickly is because if this, btw:
(source - debtclock.org)
Medicare - 819 Billion
Social Security - 714 Billion
Military - 700 Billion
Total for these three items: 2.233 Trillion
Total tax received: 2.195 Trillion
Those three items take it all. If you got rid of NASA, money for roads, education, govt pensions, immigration, or all of the entire rest of the U.S. budget, which includes tens of thousands of departments and items, and millions of employees, AND unemployment and all social services.... It still would not be enough.
Medicare, Social Security, and Military spending account for 102% of our tax revenue, currently. We're broke because our leaders are morons who can't stop or reign in these three items. note - this also doesn't include interest on the debt, which is another 211 billion or so every year.
Let's be honest here folks. Most interns are not yet skillful or experienced enough to be able to make active contribution to a real world dev team. If you can't provide value to a dev team from Day One then it's really hard to justify paying someone. If your a student with mad coding skills then odds are YOU WONT NEED AN INTERNSHIP because you'll be able to find a position at one of many startups who look for people who can get real dev work done and don't focus as much on BS credentials such as a Bachelors.
1. 'You'll get training.' : I did get training.
2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' : I was offered a job but ended up taking one somewhere else (I wanted to do something a bit different).
3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.' : Worked under a semi-famous designer and with a programmer who taught me some very cool tricks.
4. 'It will look great on your CV.' : It did.
5. 'You'll make great contacts. : I did.
I did not get paid, I got the internship as part of my training from my specialty school. It was a lot of fun and I did learn a lot. It was less than 2 months though, perhaps if it had been a year I would have had issues with it. Other people in my class who went to different places did have less than spectacular experiences that maybe didn't do as much for them but most of them didn't have good enough marks to get into better places for internships. I guess it's all dependent on how much you are willing to learn from the experience as well as where you go and for how long.
As you may know Ireland is suffering a financial crisis.
Jobs being lost, taxes up, wages down, IMF and EU keeping things ticking over etc..
We up until recently had a state funded project called "Work Placement Programme". Basically companies generously gave jobs to recently unemployed skilled people to help them upskill and the state paid the wages with our overly generous social welfare system. The employee kept whatever welfare benefit they were entitled to while unemployed. A single person gets €200 a week + rent + free healthcare. This has lead to a situation where small to medium size companies and professional service providers such as solictors, doctors etc.. now get state funded secretaries, admin staff, web designers, architects, accountants or whatever for free. so unsurprisingly they are not really hiring people.
Given the enormous success of that scheme at generating political approval for those that seek such things a new scheme has been introduced called Jobs Bridge. In this scheme the state will now pay more than the social welfare payment the person would have been entitled to to provide free labour to profitable companies that want to help the state by generously taking on the free staff.
By and large the people being hired are qualified and experienced all ready.
By and large jobs for admin type work have disappeared.
By and large jobs for lower end IT Tech have disappeared.
By and large Jobs for Web Design, Graphic design etc.. have disappeared.
This is all because the state is paying for companies to have FREE labour.
It's depressing being here at the moment to be honest.
References:
http://www.welfare.ie/EN/Schemes/JobseekerSupports/Pages/wpp.aspx
http://www.jobbridge.ie/
I haven't been an intern (unpaid or otherwise) but both of my brothers have. Depending on what field you are in it can be the best way to break in or find out if you like it. One is in finance and the other is in athletics. For finance it was a foot in the door and confirmation that he wanted to do that with his life, and yes he was used for menial work but it was the same work he was doing when he started working for real too. For athletics it was the only way to get the job he wanted, he had experience, he had even trained gold medal athletes but for the job he wanted he need very specific experience and being an intern was the only way he was going to be able to get it.
Neither of them regret their decisions and both of them were unpaid.
My advice? There is no right or wrong when it comes to unpaid internships as a whole so weigh every opportunity and don't take them at face value, do your research or end up jaded and full of regret like this blogger.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
If you have technical skills, you should seek paid internships. They are not hard to find. Laugh in the face of people that offer you an unpaid internship; you are worth more than that.
there was a time when an internship could be a valuable experience. but consider this: there is very little training and mentorship occurring in the past 15 years. time to market is everything, there is no tomorrow. the time to do internships is what a person in jr high and high school should be doing. the typical developer cannot even keep up in their own area of focus. it's balls to the wall. it's survival of the...
It's a load of crap. Unpaid internships unfairly enrich larger companies at the expense of the smaller companies that can't possibly hope to attract a high level of what is, in most cases, free employees. It helps the company more than it helps the interns and it unfairly removes tax revenue.
Last time I checked, my government allows corporations to exist to benefit the people. It's not the other way around and it's WAY past time some of these companies learn that they are a privilege, not a right.
Not being from the USA, I thought that an intern was a junior Doctor, working long hours in a hospital.
Then I heard about Monica Lewinsky and other 'intern' al affairs and I thought that interns were there to provide sexual favours. Now I find out that they are not paid.
I tell you I wouldn't get screwed for no pay...
I did 4 internships as an undergraduate (in engineering) and averaged a bit over $20/hr plus bonuses. Well paid internships were definitely the norm at my college (a large state school) not only in engineering, but in business and design. I think the internship market is actually pretty good right now because interns cost less than new full time employees, don't need benefits, and are more expendable (but if the economy improves and the department gets a req. or two then they have someone ready to go).
Only non-profits can give you unpaid internships.
I call BS on lies 1, 2, 4, and 5. We recently hired someone who had interned for us last year. This person received the training he needed to do the job he's doing now during his internship actually. When he was hired, he joined the same team he interned for. While he was an intern, we certainly didn't load him with with a full or even part time employee's workload, so clearly we didn't cost anyone a wage as there wasn't a position available. Now that this person has joined us full time, his role with his team is far greater than what we asked of him as an intern. So that disputes #1 and #2. As for #4 and #5, both are subjective and can therefore simply be tossed out. My definition and your definition of "great contacts" may differ, but that doesn't make either of us wrong.
If you are not getting paid, you are doing it wrong...
Internships are like going to grad-school to get an advanced degree - a waste of time, effort, and money. These days even a BS is becoming a waste of time, you're better off working in the field you want to work in, the government has basically said that your time in college is worth nothing more than working in the field you choose - so do it. Then use the training company's will finance to increase your knowledge - if they are willing to pay you to increase your knowledge in an area, they aren't serious. It really is that simple.
It is dead simple. If the "intern" produces anything of value and you do not pay them, you have broken federal laws.
My internship was some of the best real-world training I've had, at least in terms of learning how office politics work and learning how to handle some drudgery. However, at least it paid min. wage, which I think is fair.
Table-ized A.I.
Internship Well Paid
My manager and I working in a top 5 financial investment bank actively interviewed and hired ~5 interns at $14/hour in 2000 from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, US for positions on the Windows Server Administration team during the school's summer time break. The internship was fully sponsored and encouraged by the company and paid very well for basically a very light work load 20-30 hours a week with a fully flexible schedule (come as you please). Other departments such as Desktop Support, Network, and Telecom also got candidates for internships but from different schools.
Interviewing Interns
We interviewed the students at their university during an open internship session where there were representatives from all the other major corporations there looking for young talent. We would read each candidate's resume, check their chosen course of study, skim the clubs that they were part of, but really focus on their technical hobbies to have them talk to us about their experiences with technical equipment and/or using and fixing their laptop and computer systems. We would ask them open ended questions such as if you had a project to build a powerful workstation computer for a high-up executive what would you need, which components would you choose, how would you build and configure it. Some interns did not have extensive technical or computer experience but we would still give them a chance to show us that they had the interest and ability to learn something new for them, such as building new servers, clusters, and storage systems in the data center then troubleshooting them.
The interns that showed interest in hardware would become apprentices to one of the Core team members and would focus on new server hardware, cabling, clusters, storage, and rack builds in our data centers and would shadow to learn the procedures then actually perform all of them under supervision.
The interns that showed interest in the operating system and active directory would work on the Infrastructure team to maintain and deploy new file servers, domain controllers, name servers, etc.
The interns that showed interest in software would work with the Application Support team members to learn the various business and back-end packages, databases, web servers, etc.
The interns that would spend a lot of time chatting and talking on their phones would be put in the Rapid Response team and deal with incoming trouble tickets, phone calls, and general issues and would learn proper communication, diagnostic procedures, and how to put their yappers to good use.
We would then rotate the interns half-way through their internship so that they could learn the work of another team and we would give them a choice where they would want to work. They got about 4-weeks of time in each team and learned the work pretty well.
The interns would also be given special projects to work on that were ideas that we had for improving our work such as consolidated information web sites and portals, documentation, organization, and other things that required fresh thinking and ideas in a rigid work flow. We listened to their ideas and also used some of the web sites and automation tools that they produced for us so that was a great help.
Internship Impressions
The interns all got a pretty good and realistic view of what it is to work as a Windows Server Administrator and do the normal blue-collar work that we do as admins. A few of them expressed interest in working as an admin doing real (often boring) work as administrators and we expressed interest in hiring them for our department, desktop, or network departments after they graduate. A handful did get hired in various departments.
Many interns did not have the knack nor the interest for server administration and had dreams of higher goals for their life and some were honest enough to tell us this at the end of their internships. I hope that their experience showed them what real
I'm an electrical engineering student, and as an undergrad in my city (admittedly one with a high cost of living) most undergraduate level engineering internships I was aware of paid something like $15/hr for new hires. At my internship after my sophomore year I was making more than that upon hire, and the company gave me annual performance reviews with bonuses and raises so I was making a pretty decent amount by the time I graduated and they hired me as staff.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that engineering is awesome :)
But seriously I think all interns should be paid, because if the intern provides no value to the company then the company wouldn't waste their paid employees' time by bringing them on in the first place. And since they must be providing value to the company, they should be compensate with minimum wage, or more based on their value. But these companies are probably happy getting their slave labor, they don't want it to change any time soon.
I read the comments here, the passionate communist circletimessquare has posted a number of highly moderated replies, so I understand the local sentiment.
Here is the other side of this equation:
Most people who go to the universities are wasting their time and paying arm and leg for the privilege, and since most people who go there don't want to give up an arm and a leg right away, they get the government approved mortgages instead so that they can have the privilege of being stuck with that mortgage until they do lose an arm and a leg, and they still are in no better position to land a well paying , satisfying job.
So if INSTEAD of going to university the students went to become interns, that would make actual sense. Training on a job and not paying for it? Where is the question?
You see, university education is inflated, just like housing prices and US bonds are. To differentiate yourself from the rest, you have to get masters and even more than that today. But in reality, people who go there, they get their mortgage (without the house), and they take humanities.
So these "sociologists" later understand they can't get a job, so they move on into law, getting into more debt in the process.
What most people really should do is never to go to any university but instead they should try to get internship right after high school. In 4 years, when their "highly edumacated" counterparts will be coming out of their universities, these interns would have had 4 years of on-the-job training, paying NOTHING for the privilege and likely in that time period they would have already landed a job that was paying them, even if they took the first 1-2 internships for free.
Internship is an excellent SUBSTITUTE for college, but you have to understand that, and you have to understand that in reality to get yourself differentiated from the pack you really need to think outside of the box the government has placed you into.
Government, (regardless of what communists like circletimessquare tell you), are the evil incarnate intrinsically. But since the vacuum will not stay vacuum forever, the government must be created and maintained in extremely limited capacity, so it cannot hurt the society (as it always does) by growing and destroying the economy and creating poverty in the process.
So called "solutions" to poverty, that governments profess, are in reality their way of staying in power and indeed stealing ever more power by offering those, who do not understand the world around them (the voting majority) to sacrifice those, who actually truly increase the wealth of the society - business creators.
Yes, business creators, those who wake up one day and start their own business, find the money, find the idea, get excited, hire somebody for help (and maybe get an intern as well), and begin the insanely difficult task of trying invent a way to make profit by providing the society with new goods/services and providing the society with new wealth and jobs. These people contribute much more than their 'fair share' before they pay any taxes. If they succeed, it's not because of any government help. If they succeed though, the government wants to come and claim its cut.
If they lose and do not succeed, there will be no government there, standing offering help with all the losses. (Of-course there is a huge exception, as government has shown time and again, that it will protect its preferred monopolies in all industries, to the detriment of economy and society, and will bail them out without regard for the economy and society, so that's another way governments are evil.)
Back to the topic here:
If you are a university student already, and you are doing intern work for no pay - then it maybe counterproductive, because you have already lost.
If you decide to do unpaid internship instead of going to a university - you have your head in the right place, as opposed to those, who have their heads up their asses, you are thinking.
As to the other complains, that
You can't handle the truth.
just get a payd internship if you dont like working unpaid, oh wait that requiers you to be at least a little competent, probably not the case with you
over here its usual for half the students in engieneering fields to find part time job in their field before they actually graduate. in fact i had a job in my field(electronics engineering) before i even started collage. so like many others im balancing job and school and im getting by with both of them somehow(job goes better than school tho) so find a job and stop whining
That's right, YOU are supposed to be TEACHING him real world knowledge, not using him for free labor. In fact, your company could be liable for legal penalties because you have not held up your end of the bargain, but yet are fraudulently receiving tax benefits for this. I would advise you to talk to your legal department and ask them what an internship entails on your part. If they can't outline more in depth what I just mentioned, then you have a piss poor set of lawyers to go along with your bad managerial skills.
In short: you teach, he learns. Don't like those requirements? Don't take in interns then, and hire regular employees instead.
People need to understand: You are not forced into the internship - it is up to you. If you already have real-world experience without the internship great. On the other-hand without it you are likely not as productive as an employee no matter how many mountains of theory books you've read. Myself I did some "internship" type work for next to nothing, the others doing the same job earned about 5-10 times / hr I was earning. One year later from that position I had learned huge amounts, stuff that is not found in text books. After that I was prepared for going into the world as a solo contractor, and multiplied my wage 10x while some of my friends who had been too fussy about their first jobs after study where still working at fast food joints while they tried to find that killer contract deal. The reality is: if you get a chance for really good experience, take it, and you can use it totally to your benefit. Of course it is also just as possible to totally squander the opportunity and see it as somebody just taking advantage of you. Good luck with your career then.
Unpaid internships illegal? Maybe in the USA. Not necessarily in other countries and the article is about Ireland.
A degree does not mean that a candidate is smart, capable, or even a good problem solver. A degree indicates that a candidate can be trained to handle difficult material and conformed to a lecture-style environment.
Research, side projects, and yes, internships show that the potential hire has experience solving problems. In the case of an unpaid internship where the intern just fetched coffee, they will at least have been exposed to working in a corporate environment, and if they spent their time well, they will have made some useful professional connections while serving coffee and manning the photocopy machine.
I'm working an internship right now. It is paid (as far as I can tell, unpaid engineering internships do not exist). They did hand off the red-headed-step-child projects to their interns, but in the process of conducting efficiency and feasibility studies, I am making solid professional connections inside and outside of the company.
In short: working a fax machine, photocopier, or percolator? Collect business cards, names and handshakes. Until you are managing the work of others, the only person who can waste your time is you.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
....Then the job has no worth to the company. Why would I want to do work that has no value to a company?
If I were ever offered an "internship" I would stand up, leave the interview and walk out laughing loudly.
Every couple of years, I take on an intern; I simply couldn't do it more often than that. But that's because I DON'T see them as cheap labor — I see them as a student. Sure, they do projects for me, and yes, it's things I would otherwise be doing myself -- but I could do it more quickly, and right the first time, were I to do it myself. I spend time away from work, preparing lessons, examples of various concepts and practices, potential minefields, case-studies that illustrate 'why' we do it this way, etc. I work to get them into meetings above my pay grade (meetings I rarely attend) so they can see the decision-making processes and the bigger picture. I farm them out for short periods to co-workers with slightly different specialties, so they can see 'the job' from other angles. In short, it's more work for me than it probably is for them -- but I don't mind, because 1. I don't have kids of my own, so this is a way of leaving a mark on the future, and 2. Some part of me deep-down, always wanted to be a teacher, and this gives me an outlet for that.
When I was in university, I had paid coop jobs. At the very least, they paid better than ordinary summer jobs, and there was at least a veneer that what you were doing was somehow related to what you wanted to be doing. Volunteers at least don't ever expect any kind of return. With interns, there is a lie perpetuated that eventually something good might come their way. WHAT A LIE! The company/people they are working for considers their efforts to be worthless (since they aren't being paid). Training takes two weeks. If you don't have it all down in two weeks, then it had better be paid. Pay for work is how it works. If I work, then I want to be paid. If I volunteer, then I don't expect to be paid, but I work on my schedule, and what works for me. Want my devoted unflinching attention? Pay me! In truth, all unpaid interns should just be 'job shadowing' anyway. The entire 'unpaid intern' thing is just a way for companies to get free labor. I hate to call all interns 'tools' but they are. A tool is something that is used and then thrown away. Almost by definition, interns are tools.
The whole point of an internship program is that an intern is not ready to go out and stand on their own in the job force. Could be because they don't have enough experience to get their foot in the door, or maybe they're technically saavy but don't have enough business sense to apply it effectively. Either way, yes, an intern can provide valuable service to a business, but they're also taking the time of other employees to mentor them, i.e. this is what you learned in school and these are the reasons why it doesn't work that way in the real world. Most technical programs don't teach you anything about the basic stuff that you actually need. I.E. instead of an AS program teaching students about what IRQs are used by what devices and how token ring works (seriously, who's needed that info in the past 10 years?), they should substitute that with a course about how to effectively communicate with non-technical people - i.e. the people you have to do work for, and the people you have to report to. It'd also be great if they could at least give people a summary overview of operating systems and operating system history. It's great that you've been trained on Windows 7 and Server 2008 because your school subscribes to the Microsoft dog food, but how does that help businesses that are still running XP, Server 2003, Win2000 and even NT4 and DOS? You might think they're obsolete, but in my local area, I know of at least three large IT employers that are still running applications on NT4 because of compatibility issues with Win2XXX. I'm not saying that they should spend a bunch of time teaching kids about WinNT, but it'd be nice if they at least know that it exists when they show up for an internship. But, they don't, and that's why they're not ready to stand on their own in the workforce. Remember that most people graduating from IT programs have no prior IT experience, and all the little nuggets of knowledge you've picked up from reading Slashdot and other tech news over the past 15 years, none of these people have any of that. It's not that reading tech news makes you an expert on any given subject, but at least you have a passing familiarity with stuff. I.E. I've never used FreeBSD, but I know what it is.
I am a veteran nonprofit sector worker and I can say that it isn't much better over here either. Unpaid interns are strung along to think that the internship will benefit them in some way, but they are made to do the shit work that other people don't want to do. Then people take credit for the work of the intern.
The part that rankles me the most is that whatever modicum of benefit an unpaid intern gains is the small leg-up that one needs to become a "professional" in the world. Poor people and those who are otherwise disadvantaged for not fitting in to the norm are cut out of the loop. Anyone who actually can't afford to work for free will continue to work waged jobs and exacerbate the social stratification we currently live under.
Then all of the middle-class white people at the nonprofit whine, "why don't we have any diversity?!"
This whole flap over interns cracks me up. Work for nothing...it will be good for your advancement?
No, to me it just shows that you can be brown nosed into doing something for free.
Screw that, someone offered me a no pay job out of school, I would have told them to jump in a
lake!
See, the point is, if someone pays you for your work, they need for you to do such things where such money will come back somehow, so you'll be stuck doing interesting and useful tasks (in my case , lots of CAD and assembling + testing prototypes plus assorted workshop work) ,and which doesn't take time away from their paid employees.
If they don't pay you , it's more than likely they will throw you around doing unskilled work which is little risk in the case you show up to be a total fail
Unpaid interns are also illegal. Companies owe back taxes and worse. It gets expensive.
Free market is a myth I read about in Econ.
Here is a definition:
Business governed by the laws of supply and demand, not restrained by government interference, regulation or subsidy.
Let me know when you spot one of these in the wild. I think they are extinct.
A true free market would be a meritocracy, rewarding entities that can produce goods and services either better of cheaper than their competitors, and penalizing entities who produce lower quality goods and services, and commodity goods and services at a higher cost. The issue is there is no such system on the planet. Let's stop talking about this straw man, and start talking about the mixed economy that we live in. Perhaps the reason that the U.S. middle class is being destroyed is because we are being forced in to a "free trade" arrangement with countries that can produce goods and services cheaper than we can. There is no real competition here, as we "compete" with countries that have outlawed labor unions, and collective bargaining, who's workers live 8 to a room, do not enforce child labor laws, and where a 40 hour work week is a dream. How's that "free trade" working our for us? Where are those nice, clean, safe auto factories in Mexico that NAFTA promised us? The idea of protectionist or tribal economies have been demonized, so we can all buy cheap imported appliances and clothing. Never mind that without importation taxes, we export living wage jobs, and replace some of them with low pay jobs or jobs without pensions, and reduced benefits and training, while our buying power diminishes year by year. The squeeze has been in the works for about 25-30 years now. This political cartel of Republicrats along with the Democans, have conspired with business to lower costs at the expense of the middle class. The number of Americans living in poverty is growing. There has been a vast transfer of wealth from the working class to big business, governments are closing schools, and we're sitting around distracted by some congressman sending suggestive photos over twitter to a a teenager in Washington, or whatever. Well, more and more people are balking at buying the new cars, and other goods, simply because they can no longer afford it. Inflation is on it's way back, in spite of what the idiot running the FED thinks. I propose the we have a consumer strike. Let's stop buying everything not vital. Buy food, pay your bills, fix your car. Reduce your driving, vacation at home, give up cable and netflix, get a pay-as-you-go calling plan, and let's start showing these guys the future of the US economy. Perhaps they'll get the message, and start protecting US jobs, rather than exporting them. Perhaps they will not make the change, and eventually the consumer strike will be involuntary. Once that happens, perhaps we'll be rolling to a great reset. They'll rename the Great Depression to the Not-So-Bad-After-All Depression. Buy seeds while you can afford them.
The longest duration of such a practicum should run for no more than a single semester.
Not that I think unpaid internships are generally a good thing anyways... but I actually can see the point to them in this one particular case.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I suppose that it depends on your industry. So often I hear the lament of recent graduates that are unable to secure a job because they lack ANY form or real-world industry specific experience. But, it is always that cliche Catch-22 situation because without the job, how can they gain any experience. The answer is, as it has always been, internship.
If you can find paid internship, well good on you. But, it is ludicrous to claim that unpaid internship has no value or is detrimental to your future prospects. With a year or two of internship in the desired industry, a new graduate can now state that they do have some limited experience in the industry. That gives them a competitive advantage over the next new graduate that didn't do the internship.
I know that it is popular on Slashdot to bash university degrees and certifications at every turn. But, the truth of the matter is that they give you a greater opportunity. Whether that opportunity pans out or not is a completely different matter. Likewise, the internship provides increased opportunity.
Yep..if someone in the USA tries to offer you an UNPAID internship, just report them to the IRS. They'll be hounded quite well.
Why? From the IRS's perspective not only are they robbing you of an income, but they are also skirting on the taxes that would have otherwise been paid, and thereby they are (more importantly to the IRS) also robbing the government of the tax income that would have otherwise been received.
So, do you really want the taxman at your door?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Remove federal minimum wage and there will be paid internships once again.
Twitter: @dainsanefh
Someone would hire, if all that could be done was direct hires without corruption of that intent.
Those who refuse to hire would end up shooting their own foot, and lose to those who choose to hire.
The problem is on the employer's side. Not mine.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I've had two internships thus far in my undergraduate career, one with an insurance company and another with a defense contractor. Both of them have been paid, so I guess the question is, who get's sucked into a non-mandatory unpaid internship??
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.