Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships • Hacker News Board

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#61

Post by rmc » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:17 PM UTC

WillyF wrote: post #37

I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. My startup helps college students find entry level jobs and internships, so I'm constantly aware of what the latest trends are. One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like…

I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S.

Ireland has been hit by a strong recession. Unemployment is high (~15%), and particularly high amount young people. Many are emigrating to find other work. The media is full of stories about how there are no jobs.

Which is a shame because there is a massive skill shortage if you know programming/sysadmining in Ireland. Companies spend months trying to find employees.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#62

Post by widget » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:18 PM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #7

Perhaps it is different for design, but taking on an intern for a software shop is almost always a greater burden than benefit. I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are…

In general, a shop that wanted to make very much money off of interns would have to have them work on new code(any sizable code base is going to take a while to get up to speed on), and/or hire only excellent students (though in this case they wouldn't have the option of not paying, good programmers never have to work cheap).

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#63

Post by cturner » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:19 PM UTC

zeemonkee wrote: post #41

cturner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to…

Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". No, but that's how serfdom started - t…

    If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ?

I have a couple of problems with this, and will do my best to explain my reaction, but am not entirely happy with clarity.

I think you're making a static view of the world, and are not considering the dynamic of the system. Legislation like the minimum wage has an effect on the economic systems that you apply it to. It changes the numer and nature of employers, and the number and nature of employees.

It's impossible to measure the opportunity cost, but we can talk about the sort of costs we'll be taking. There are potential businesses that would exist if they could pay less than they do. This would create greater economic activity in general, and skill development. Both of these things which would feed back into stronger businesses and ultimately demand for labour, higher wages, lower tax.

The Internet should offer us awesome opportunities to reduce knowledge asymetry coming from labour being misallocated, or taken advantage of. Consider a version of linked-in that was oriented around networks that tried to offer and make contracts. You could see who worked with who, and then the contracts that were on offer. I doubt Linked-in will go in this direction - it would piss off recruiters. It'll happen though.

    Since when did a living wage for a day's work
    become a controversial issue ?

Outside of America, questioning this is one of those "things you can't say".

A politician who made these arguments in I'm putting is remarkable to survive at all, and definitely hated for life - Thatcher is the obvious example. The last change of power in Australia was caused by exactly these issues. Chile is lining up to have it out on these lines in the next year and will be interesting to watch.

The caricature of the right wing leader who's out to screw the workers to help the big end of town is like honey to the mindset of people who see themselves as victims, and who don't recognise that they are in control of their own fate.

There's always a labour movement party (run by teachers, lawyers and party workers) in there reminding people that they are victims, pushing those images, and suckling on the milk of votes that this easy play delivers.

Except in American - a country where labour flexibility and entreprenerialism are central to the culture.

Another evil I forgot to mention about minimum wage earier is the trap effect. Imagine your effective wage is worth less than minimum wage, but you've managed to land a dead-end job making minimum wage. Now you have a disincentive to refocus on something that would make you more valuable than minimum wage.

That pattern repeats at other levels of the economy. You sometimes see areas of government, banks or protected "national champion" businesses dominated by people who don't do much but also don't make trouble. They're keeping a low profile because the employer is able to pay too much because of the luxury of its legislative protections. Left unchecked, the good staff (who care about what they do) gradually leave for other gigs, and you get overrun by pretenders.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#64

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:29 PM UTC

zeemonkee wrote: post #41

cturner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to…

Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". No, but that's how serfdom started - t…

If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us.

If a potential employer chooses not to employ someone, who pays? The welfare system.

For either low pay or no pay, low value workers will require welfare. I don't see how this is a valid argument for a minimum wage.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#65

Post by nagnatron » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:33 PM UTC

gorog wrote: post #58

This past year I followed a web development course. I'm now supposed to work 3 months for free. I don't mind it because I've been jobless for a long time before. The problem is, I just can't find an employer (in France). I get the interviews, but my interviewer always assumes that I'm supposed to know everything by heart, have nothing more to learn, and more importantly, they want to see a portfolio of sites I've don…

Did you try remote work?

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#66

Post by yummyfajitas » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC

zeemonkee wrote: post #54

caser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Saying "you're free to walk away" is not a moral argument; if the only way a young person can find work is through doing voluntary servitude then they are stuck in that position until they do so." I disagree. My unpaid jobs have always been much more accommodating when I leave - they realize they're not paying me so they don't give me a hard time at all. It's more of an attitude of, "We knew this day would come. Goo…

You completely missed my point. If unpaid internships become the norm, that is it becomes expected that a person has to perform a period of unpaid work as some kind of apprenticeship, then they will be forced to do so if they want a paid job at the end of it. So I might walk away from an unpaid internship, but I'll still need to work unpaid in another internship until at such point employers deem that I've done my ti…

Your argument applies equally well to any screening procedure - e.g., college degrees.

Do you believe that requiring/favoring people with college is also a bad precedent that needs to be stamped out?

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#67

Post by zeemonkee » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:35 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #64

zeemonkee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life. You don't travel. You don't get educated. You don't have upside. You can't escape. You're screwed. An unpaid internship is not at all like this. Unpaid internships are not "essentially a form of serfdom". No, but that's how serfdom started - t…

If people don't get enough from employers, who pays ? The welfare system, i.e. the rest of us. If a potential employer chooses not to employ someone, who pays? The welfare system. For either low pay or no pay, low value workers will require welfare. I don't see how this is a valid argument for a minimum wage.

Well, the employer gets cheap (or even free) labour - and therefore higher profits - paid for by the taxpayer. In essence, the employer is exploiting the system as much as any "welfare queen".

Sure, workers on minimum wage may receive benefits - but they would require less benefits than if there was no minimum wage.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#68

Post by quanticle » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:37 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #39

zeemonkee wrote: post #14

Unpaid internships are essentially a form of serfdom. The serf system in Russia IIRC started with free peasants who sold themselves into slavery to the landowner when they fell into debt - unlike African slaves in the US, who were essentially kidnapped into servitude. In the same vein people are taking up voluntary servitude in order to get a paid job - sometimes even paying for the privilege. Moreover - a point not…

There's a temptation in politics to see patterns and then fit language to it that kind of fits. It's important not to do this, because it ruins the sense of scale. For example, when someone describes a politician they don't like as a "fascist" it's disrespectful to the memory of people who are squashed under tanks and who are taken in the night by state agents, raped and murdered. Along these lines, it doesn't fit to…

>If your labour has value then you can find work that pays you a rate for it (except for minimum wage - more about this shortly). You have the opportunity to expose yourself to experience by doing internships. If you don't have anything better to be doing, then it's a win-win situation for you and the person you're doing internship.

That only works in an absolutely frictionless labor market. Meanwhile, in the real world, there are many sources of friction - location being the most prominent. If you have valuable skills, in say, graphic design and the one print shop in your town shuts down, then it doesn't matter how good you are as a designer - you're not going to get a job. Through the '90s, it didn't matter how good a machinist you were - if you lived in the Detroit area, your employment prospects were poor, just because of the glut caused by hemorrhaging auto industry.

>There is an argument in favour of minimum wage, and it's this: some people are too incompetent to be capable of standing up for themselves, and these people would be easy to take advantage of for malicious bosses, of which there are no shortage. The minimum wage is a blunt force mechanism that aims (and fails) to protect this set of people. The reason it fails is that in protecting low-wage employed people, it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unemployed.

Nice job with that straw-man. Unfortunately, the argument you cite bears no resemblance to the actual reason we have a minimum wage. The reason we have a minimum wage is that historically, its the lack of a minimum wage that has created an underclass of people in poverty that don't have the resources to increase their station in life. All throughout the 1800s and early 1900s the US tried to be your minimum-wage free utopia. The results were horrific. We had a permanent underclass of (usually immigrant) tenants living in squalid conditions. If you want to regress to 1890s-era working conditions, then yes, by all means repeal the minimum wage.

Lacking a minimum wage also hurts the economy. Without a minimum wage, the number of consumers for any good beyond basic food, clothing and shelter products would be drastically cut. History has shown that without outside incentives, employers will pay only the minimum needed to keep their workers alive (and sometimes not even that). A minimum wage ensures that there is a bottom in the race to the bottom for wages.

>The minimum wage system is a mechanism designed by the elite to allow that elite to paper over things and sleep at night pretending they're doing the right thing. It hurts the people it claims to protect.

If that's the case, then why do the elites always protest vociferously every time the minimum wage is raised? There are massive lobbying efforts by big business every time the minimum wage issue comes up for debate, despite the fact that there is no economic evidence whatsoever that the presence of a $7.25 minimum wage has had a measurable impact on employment.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#69

Post by ivanbernat » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:41 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #61

WillyF wrote: post #37

I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. My startup helps college students find entry level jobs and internships, so I'm constantly aware of what the latest trends are. One trend that really scares me is that there are some "career experts" whom I interact with regularly who offer their own unpaid virtual internships (I've seen lots of other internships like…

I didn't realize that the unpaid internship situation is as bad in Ireland as it is here in the U.S. Ireland has been hit by a strong recession. Unemployment is high (~15%), and particularly high amount young people. Many are emigrating to find other work. The media is full of stories about how there are no jobs. Which is a shame because there is a massive skill shortage if you know programming/sysadmining in Ireland…

Wow, how can I move there?

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#70

Post by lojack » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 1:43 PM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #7

Perhaps it is different for design, but taking on an intern for a software shop is almost always a greater burden than benefit. I interned at a few different places while in college, and I was definitely way ahead of the class as far as writing useful code. Regardless, the overhead of people bringing you up to speed on their specific projects and processes for only three months of work just doesn't match what you are…

That overhead you're speaking of is present with bringing anyone onto a project, not just interns.

I actually went to a school that required every student in my program to do a minimum of 1 year of paid internships (split into 3 and 6 month blocks). Judging by how abundant and competitive the companies looking for interns were I'd say they found it very much worth the overhead.