81–90 of 205 posts
Am I clueless, or are other people just ignorant?
But even we pay our summer interns.
30-day free trials are for software. People deserve more respect.
So, why should someone be paid for not contributing to the bottom line?
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Interns don't produce much output. They're inexperienced. What would take a professional a day to finish might take an intern 2 weeks, and take time from others to boot. In that situation, the intern should be working for free (for the experience) and the company should consider any actual output to be compensation for the time spent having to help the intern along. As the post's author noted, the 2 job descriptions…
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…
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.
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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 wo…
Unlikely. Very few employees in the US make exactly the minimum wage, which is why it's true that minor increases have close to no effect.
There are massive lobbying efforts by big business every time the minimum wage issue comes up for debate
True, for example WalMart lobbies in favor of minimum wage increases. Out of concern for low-income workers, or to raise business costs for their competitors? Hmm...
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Complete and utter bullshit. When I started work I produced little output, because I was a newbie and knew nothing. I was paid just a little over minimum wage - but I still produced, even if it was crappy code and routine tasks nobody else wanted to do. Companies used to do this all the time - you start at the bottom, fresh out of school, and you have to learn. But you are still f *ing paid.
Agreed, and not just for complete noobs. If (as an experienced hire) you start a job somewhere enterprisey, the amount of bureaucracy and induction procedure you experience in your first week can mean that you won't be a productive employee for at least a week, if not two. You'll probably still be taking time from experienced employees for months. You still get paid. In such a place, the first week of employment of a…
Yes, an employee takes just as long to get up to speed as an intern, but hopefully that investment is paid off by years of work afterwards.
For a two or three month internship, you might spend half their time in getting them up to speed. And for that, you get the same amount of work (best case), then they are gone.
Yes, internships can be a great way of recruiting, probably the reason most companies do them at all, but saying that the upramp is comparable to normal FTEs is ignoring the fact that they aren't long term.
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…
If there are only a few internships available in a given field, having an internship would no longer be a de facto requirement for starting a career in that field (unless the handful of new employees who got the handful internships are all the new blood that's needed, in which case the unpaid internship system is just another way to string people along).
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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, an…
There are plenty of incentives to make better than minimum wage. Minimum wage doesn't exactly net you a luxurious quality of life. On one hand, it makes sense that if you allow the purchase of labour to be completely subject to the rules of supply and demand, information about what is needed where and most efficiently will spread through the network of economic activities. But labour has several disadvantages when compared to other commodities. Focusing on just one, it is expensive and time consuming for a person to upgrade the kind of labour they can provide. Education isn't cheap, and you have to support yourself while you obtain it. Being able to earn minimum wage while going through school helps to open up the opportunity to learn more valuable skills for many people. Unless your intention is to leave people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds out in the cold and allow their difficulties to propagate from generation to generation, there needs to be some mechanism to level the playing field, if only a little. My own tendencies would be towards even more socialist measures than just the minimum wage, but at least it puts a floor on how bad things can get.
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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.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/01/america-195-week
And this is with a minimum wage.