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Comment by Kristine1975 | Hacker News Reader

Kristine1975

> how does that work?

Unpaid internship. Aka exploitation.

It depends on the value the intern provides vs. the value the intern receives. In general, I think it's better for interns to receive some pay but money is not the only thing of value an internship can (or should) provide.

While I agree with you now, I recall being on the edge of tears when my very first internship concluded and my manager told me I'd already gotten paid in knowledge and should not expect cash on top of that. For the longest of times, I assumed the knowledge he was talking about was "managers are assholes".

You started an internship without knowing whether is was paid or not?!

"Managers are assholes" is not very valuable information, you can pick that up from sitcoms and Dilbert. But you can learn a lot from bad jobs and the mistakes of others, including managers.

Yeah, it was an internship with some friend of my parents. I don't believe there was a formal contract or that I read it if there was (but I was 16 and very naive).

The "managers are assholes" bit was meant as a joke, and I learned loads from that internship. It's just that when you're that young and self centered, you tend to see what you didn't get rather than what you did.

If you were 16, it was an apprenticeship, not internship, right?

There might not be such a distinction in France. It was a summer job with some level of mentoring, which we just call "internship". It's entirely possible that this is what Americans would call an apprenticeship, my vocabulary is not wide enough to know for sure.

>but money is not the only thing of value an internship can (or should) provide.

Of course not. But unpaid internship is always exploitation.

…and illegal in many countries, including the US unless “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern” what I can hardly imagine it can realistically happen. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf

The 'intangible' things of value that internships supposedly provide are the exact same things that "entry level jobs" used to provide.

I've only been alive a few decades and I've seen the corporations convert "entry level jobs" into "internships" in that timespan. So it is exploitative and it is a form of slave labor.

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