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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
'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.
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.
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.
Someone has to serve the coffee. And make sure they use skim milk!
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.
Ugh, self-replying because I forgot to explain why.
The more people accepts working for free, more workplaces will take advantage of it. Just don't accept such jobs until they realize no one works for free.
While my field is IT, I work in the commercial aviation sector. We get interns all the time from local colleges, and all of them have been placed in either airport or airline jobs. In my sector at least, interning seems to pay off. We got lots aviation management majors and airlines seems especially quick to snatch them up.
It may well be the case that in a few fields, interning is a bad idea and it's just free labor with no real reward. But in other professions, not only does it provide real world experience that you don't get in a classroom, it seems to open doors to real jobs.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
oh the poor destroy lots of things
for example, they destroyed the french monarchy, and the russian monarchy
some guys with wacky ideas came and told them they were entitled to more in life than to barely scrape by without any hope, and they believed it
those crazy poor people
the point is, if your society does not have a path for self-improvement, if it doesn't educate regardless of economic condition, if it doesn't provide for health regardless of econmic condition, if the door is closed to the possibility of a better life by a self-serving classist structure, revolution is the ultimate end point. inevitably
so you keep saying "let them eat cake"
it probably wont' hurt you. but like most self-contented rich assholes, you don't care about anything except yourself, even if it means your children or grandchildren will have to be the ones who have to deal the mess your mean-spirited "i got mine, fuck you" attitude creates in society. who cares what your offspring have to deal with, you got yours, right?
the point is not that the poor deserve anything. the point is what the poor will do, justly or unjustly, if you close the door on them
or: you just keep imagining they'll meekly accept their stagnant lot in life. can't hurt you, right?
go ahead, ignore history and it's lessons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"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
"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"
The free-market fundamentalists do understand this, but what makes them free market fundamentalists is the belief that whatever the free market does is - by definition - a good thing. And government interference is necessarily a bad thing because it distorts the infallible free market, which is always and necessarily good and cannot be questioned, much like God.
In effect, they worship Mammon.
If the free market destroys the meritocracy, then it should be destroyed. If you cannot climb out of poverty then it's because you're morally inferior to the rich who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. If all wealth accumulates in the hands of a few then it's because they worked hard for their wealth and deserve the fruits of their labor. If the middle class is destroyed and 99% of the population ends up in grinding poverty, it's because they are lazy and morally inferior, but to suggest that such a thing can happen is heresy.
Also, never mind that the free market is itself very flawed and not ever free, or that it's completely immoral - that's heresy as well.
Do you have any idea what slave labor is? Sitting in an air conditioned office with free cokes while you sort papers does not quite compare to being tied in chains and forced to work in a diamond mine.
The fact you even compare the two is sickening.
it's very simple:
all of your complaints are government are real and valid. all of those problems are evil
and yet, without government, every problem you describe only gets much much worse
do you understand that?
"I'm just saying we'd be better off letting charities and the places we work voluntarily provide such things"
this argument always made me laugh
people who argue emphatically for how wrong it is to help poor people, are going to help poor people generously on their own. you realize what a pile of steaming shit that is, right?
the fact is, people DO need help, and you realize that. you just don't want to help them. that's fine
so get the fuck out
you want the BENEFITS of society, without paying for the COSTS of society. you are full of shit, or you don't realize how helpiong people pays DIVIDENDS in YOUR life: lower crime, better safety, etc. you'd rather the usa become like haiti or somalia. that's what the usa will become if we followed your philosophy
so fuck you and your "charity will take care of it." that's a nice cheat to make your philosophy work (in other words, it is not a complete philosophy)
no charity won't work in a society full of blindly self-concerned assholes like you: there won't BE any charity, because you advocate for a society without concern or care for those less well off. it's a contradiction you won't admit. because you're blind and selfish. and people like me, people who can think, won't lett assholes like you destroy this great country with your idiotic lack of understanding of how you benefit for what you don't want to pay for
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage 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
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.