Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You can't always make that choice when an industry holds all the cards.
Really? There is only one industry? You may have spent 8 years in school and be $200k in debt due to med school and not like the workplace when you come out but that doesn't mean you have no other options, you can always go work at McDonalds. The outcome in that case may be unacceptable to you, in which case you'll have to deal with how much it sucks to work as an unpaid intern.
You have a choice. You're trying to ignore things you don't like as if they aren't choices, but thats just because you're whining about it rather than facing reality.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Remove federal minimum wage and there will be paid internships once again.
Twitter: @dainsanefh