Unpaid Internships: Get on the Right Side of History

Do these exist at all in tech? It is not something I have heard of, or can even imagine.

As someone who goes to a state university in the silicon valley, none of my peers have received any unpaid internships. The lowest paying internships that I have heard of are $25/hour.

I have really mixed feelings about this. As the founder of a self-funded, bootstrapping startup, every dollar that we spend is coming out of my $dayjob salary, which really limits what we can spend on paying other people. Even paying minimum wage is probably not a realistic option.

And, I think an unpaid internship can be a win-win for both parties in at least some situations.

And, as a libertarian, I reject the notion that the govt. has any business interfering in private contractual arrangements that don't involve the use of force or fraud.

So, would we offer and engage in an unpaid internship at Fogbeam Labs? Well... I don't know. As I said, I don't think they should be prohibited, but the idea also leaves something of a sour taste in my mouth.

We've been talking to some intern candidates over the past couple of weeks, and the idea we've been batting around is to offer a fixed sum stipend, on the order of a few thousand dollars, as compensation for a 6-8 week internship, where the intern would be asked to contribute around 20 hours / week.

8 * 20 = 160 hours, and at $10.00 / hour, you'd be looking at $1600 dollars. The number we have in mind is higher than that, so I guess we actually are talking about paying more than minimum wage. We could only afford to take on one intern at that rate though, but that's probably OK... I doubt the founders have the bandwidth to manage more than one intern anyway.

Author here - The unique requirements at many Silicon Valley companies for rapidly scaling teams require robust, well paid, competitive internship programs. The famous perks at Google, Facebook, etc. definitely extend to internship programs for good reason. We don't know the exact numbers, but somewhere around 50% of all internships in the US are unpaid.

The goal has always been that you compensate a person for their time. Time can always be equivalent to money. It doesn't make any sense to bring someone in, have them bust their tail to create or work on bettering something and yet they don't get paid. If you are good at something it shouldn't come free. To me that exposes the culture and ethics of a company. Not only how they treat employees but also its interns. The goal of a founder/entrepreneur is the sense that we get to create our own great businesses and or products and create opportunities for others. Interns today, bring in not only fresh ideas that support the founders but also they also many times your greatest ambassadors. What message are we sending when we don't pay them and force them to find another job outside of this internship so they can support themselves and the companies they works for free? It would be the same as Being the entrepreneur that works hard to create a product that is suppose to sell but everyone takes from you for free yet you are spending the money to create. You'll go out of business because you're just burning cash. It's the same philosophy in having working interns. In short, Pay Them!