Announcing HackStars

Actually in Austin TX it's been a common practice for a very long time. The reason being, in many degree programs at University of Texas students are required to do a semester internship to graduate. Therefore, it can actually put a pretty enormous burden on companies in the area to facilitate internship programs twice a year. Because it is tied to degree programs, there's also a fair amount of documentation and work that these employers must do. In addition, interns require training which costs money and wastes time, and they usually quit as soon as their requirements are complete.

That said, unpaid internships are justified and common here. However, as a general best-practice I always advise companies to pay their interns if they are working on billable / revenue-generating work. If they are just doing mindless work, then I feel they are compensated with 3 hours of school credit and the cost/time sink.

Having worked with a lot of interns from the school, you get a lot of fickle results and often it's really more of a waste of time than beneficial situation for the company. And I damn sure would not trust an intern to work on mission-critical projects until they proved themselves, which often takes longer than their internship requirement. To any UT students, I was able to get out of mine and get 3 hours credit because I was self-employed w/ 2 companies. :)

It's all about mutual benefit. For example, I'm going to be doing a few server installs for a friend while I'm traveling, in exchange for some cycles on those machines to use for my own project.

My friend is happy, because he doesn't need to spend $2k per server to have an engineer fly out and install them. I'm happy, because I'll be traveling anyway, and I get to use a pile of machines around the world without having to pay for and install them myself.

No money is changing hands, and we both benefit in a way that we find acceptable.

An unpaid 'internship' for a 'guru'? Fifteen hours a week for no pay and no equity?

I think not.

Actually I know quite a few people in my unpaid internship (programming) who don't have "real" jobs and are not exactly rich either. What they do is learn the trade by day, and go home at night to contract out their work on e-lance or something. It's basically a homework assignment that pays for your education.

Yep. Pretty much.

There's a big difference between working for no money and working for any amount of money (or for equity). Even if they agree to pay you minimum wage you at least have a job to point to -- and a starting point for future negotiations. There is no raise so difficult as the one from "free" to "$x".

Another point I'd make is that working cheap like this is a deal that might make sense for a few hours, but which will make exponentially less sense as you do more and more work. And you'll know it, too. The first three hours of free work you do for someone can feel great, but eventually it will rankle.

[ I've moved the rest of this post to a separate comment. ]

Any software startup that would accept an "intern" on the team is failing one test of viability. The last thing you need in startups is more than one level of hierarchy. [1] You don't want people to expend valuable mental and emotional energy trying to figure out if task X is "right" for a mere intern, or if it's really important not to have conversation Y in front of the intern, or (in general) whether or not the intern is really a member of the team. One likely result is that your team will not gel. Another is that the team will gel, but suffer a breakdown when the intern inevitably quits. A third is that the team will defend itself by shutting out the intern, assigning him or her to go mend broken XHTML tags or make coffee while everyone else does the real work. Which is another good reason not to be that intern. ;)

Interns are for big companies, where they make only a tiny marginal contribution to the already massive political overhead. ;)

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[1] Two levels, if absolutely necessary. But the best leaders are the ones who always manage to convey the feeling that it's really only one, that they're only the leader because somebody has to have their name on that line of the corporate charter and be forced to take tedious phone calls from big clients.

I can also attest that, if it grows, eventually your software startup will need a hierarchy. But at the beginning it's probably just unnecessary friction.