Hacker News Reader

Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting turn of events.

Just 2 weeks ago when this story popped up on HN recommending unpaid interns (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1202168) I thought it may have been legal, but now we know where the lawmakers stand.

View on HN

When I was a student the first year of a UK law graduate's work in a practice (articles) was unpaid. This was necessary to keep the wrong sort of people out of the legal profession after they started letting anybody go to university in the 60s and 70s.

Yeah, this allegedly happens in some areas in the U.S. too, especially business and law--- unpaid internships as a way to filter out the poor, who can't afford to work unpaid internships.

It's not just business and law in the US. When I was a CS student in college (not very long ago), during the summer students had to make a choice to go do low-paying internships for brand-name companies like MS, Google, and Amazon or take real summer jobs that would pay better but not look as good on a resume. Poorer students with more debt would take the short-term better paying jobs while students whose parents were footing the bills would take the internships that would give them better future prospects.

What are you talking about? I interned at Microsoft for a summer 3 years ago and was compensated almost 20k... Low paying my ass.

Yeah, in my experience it's always been the opposite: internships from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Intel are about the highest-paying summer jobs (~$30-50/hr) any college student is likely to find, versus "normal" summer jobs that pay more like ~$15/hr at best. When I decided to do a $5k-stipend research internship instead of working somewhere like that, it was turning down a good deal of money.

My upcoming Microsoft internship is more than $5k a month. My summer NSF REU last year was $3k total.

My experience has been completely different. I'm a CS student from a low income household, yet it was the brand-name (and well-known startup) internship opportunities that were not only incredibly educational and provided with me with invaluable experience, but also paid pretty darn well. I made more than half of our annual household income in a single summer.

I know this is just a single anecdote, but I don't think my story is that unusual for people in the tech/engineering/finance industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com