Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships • Hacker News Board

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#141

Post by kbatten » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #66

zeemonkee wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the value of a college degree as a screening procedure is in fact dropping. The potential value of college education is still high, but the piece of paper doesn't really give any insight into what value the student took. All it shows is that the student payed the fee (and probably is in debt) and put in his/her time.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#142

Post by philwelch » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:46 PM UTC

_csoo wrote: post #72

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. Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education? The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them i…

There's no such informal agreement at all, only individuals who know that they can earn better elsewhere. In other words, a market. The key to this is that IT workers actually generate enough wealth for their employers that it's worthwhile to pay us well. It's completely different from a union (which is basically a cartel).

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#143

Post by dangrossman » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:47 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #81

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the idea of an internship about learning, not about producing? If your producing for the company something they are selling (or creating net value), don't you have to get paid? I mean, people here are talking about actually working on projects the company is earning money for. That's not an internship. Am I clueless, or are other people just ignorant?

If you're in the US, you're absolutely right, and other people are ignorant. You can't use unpaid interns like free workers, even for menial work like updating websites or e-mailing prospects... yet several HN regulars have advocated doing exactly that before. It's not legal.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#144

Post by philwelch » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:50 PM UTC

argv_empty wrote: post #94

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…

It traps people with low skills out of work What exactly are these skills they lack that are needed in order to get work? Putting together a sandwich? Stacking boxes of food on a shelf? Putting dishes on a table and collecting them after they've been used?

Things like showing up on time every day, not goofing off, and not being a dick to the customers are what distinguish valuable employees at that level.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#145

Post by Confusion » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:17 PM UTC

If you're not paid, you're not valued. Nothing you produce will ever be good enough. Nobody will make time for you, because they have more valuable things to spend their time on. No money is lost if you're struggling to do your assignments; no money is lost if you don't learn anything.

A company should be invested into their interns and the best way to be invested is by paying them a wage and expecting decent work in return.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#146

Post by mitcheme » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

synnik wrote: post #134

mitcheme wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my school, we call them "co-op jobs". If you sign up for co-op, you get college credit for them, but either way you get paid. And of course if you're any good, your co-op employers will want to hang onto you after you graduate. I didn't bother signing up for co-op because co-op or no, it's impossible to complete all the other graduation requirements and not have enough credits. So the credits you get from a co-op…

You also inadvertently prove a more subtle point of internships. Employees who offer the greatest value are ones who are engaged with the company and want to be part of it. If someone doesn't think enough of us to want to go through the trouble of an internship, and think working for us is absurd, then they would not have been a good fit anyway. No loss to us if they don't work with us.

Paying money to work for anyone is absurd. I don't care if your company is the best thing since sliced bread. It isn't worth going homeless, nor is it worth taking on tens of thousands extra in loans to (a) support myself while providing you with free labor and (b) cover other expenses I could've paid for out of pocket if I'd been paid fairly, such as tuition. If free internships became standard, it would put students from low-income families at a serious disadvantage. Who needs meritocracy when we can make a caste system? Hopefully, your company will be successful, so you can afford to pay all your kids' expenses and put them through unpaid internships of their own.

I want to be able to buy gas and keep my car maintained so I can actually come to work, so I'm not "engaged". If I want to pay enough of my tuition up-front so that when I graduate I can afford to work for small companies doing interesting projects, instead of auctioning myself to the highest bidder to cover my loan payments, then I'm a "bad fit". So be it, I guess.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#147

Post by JoachimSchipper » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:39 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #84

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a software developer (researcher), but are there really no tasks simple enough for interns in your average software company? When I worked as a sysadmin for a couple of months, the two (paid) intern programmers seemed to do most of the work on some (small) contracts. They definitely had some things to learn, but they got it done (with some help) and were absolutely net positive. Maybe we just had unusually go…

Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience and we're back to paying them for work done. Complicated tasks need guidance and take time. But they're great for experience. It's not even that they're really hard tasks, but that there are so many little details to software develop that everyone treats like common sense, but it's not... Until you have experience.

In this specific case, they created some simple Rails websites - one seems to have basically been a simple CMS (with a nice design) for a customer, another was an internal time tracking tool. Both had at least one (more-or-less harmless) WTF [1], but the customer seems to have been happy, time tracking worked, and they definitely learned something.

[1] To be fair, one was putting my sample code in production.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#148

Post by nhaehnle » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #102

zeemonkee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People made unemployed by the minimum wage require more benefits than they would if they could be gainfully employed at (e.g.) 50% of minimum wage.

There is no empirical evidence that introducing a minimum wage causes job losses on a scale where the increase of unemployment benefits would outweigh the benefits of its introduction.

The whole idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment is a myth that is based on incorrect labour market models.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#149

Post by nhaehnle » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 8:10 PM UTC

_csoo wrote: post #72

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. Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education? The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them i…

Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness.

Psychological studies indicate that unemployment is bad even if you can still live comfortably. (A reliable stream of anecdotes for extreme variants of this observation comes from lottery winners.)

The thing is, HN is a very startup- and hacker-centric community. One of the properties of a hacker is that they always find something to occupy themselves with, even when they don't have a formal day job.

Most people are not like this. Once they're out of a job, they don't really know what to do with themselves. This causes them a lot of stress and unhappiness.

Over time, they will convince themselves that they are actually happy in their welfare-dependent unemployed state. We humans can so easily fool ourselves.

The truth is that for most people (but probably not for many of the HN-type) unemployment causes a lot of psychological suffering.

Re: Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Interships

#150

Post by gnosis » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 8:14 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…

"for which I was paid one gravis ultrasound ACE. I think I ended up better on the deal than the owner, but it was a close-run thing. ... Another time I was contracted to do a job for an oil company. It took me a month to do something that would now take me a day, and the end result was so bad that they got no return on investment of the the AUD 300 they paid me for the job."

You're undervaluing yourself.

Even if you did absolutely zero work that doesn't mean the company that "hired" you got zero value out of you.

They probably got some social benefits from having you around, making the place you worked at less lonely, and perhaps making some people at the company feel better about themselves for hiring an intern or gave them an opportunity to teach (which can help the teacher as well as the student). You probably also gave the other employees ideas and feedback, and may have tested some of the work they did (essentially acting as part of QA).

All of that is worth more than a cheap sound card or 300 AUD.