What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company | Hacker News Reader

What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company

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26 pointshellacious35 comments

I'd also add that it doesn't build good will. I did an unpaid internship in college. It was good experience, and I was doing real work (not just getting coffee), but I did resent not being paid. It sucks to be told, in essence, "we don't value you at all; we're doing you a favor. Now wear a tie to work and act like a professional, even though we're not treating you like one."

I did it because I needed to pad my resume. But it didn't make me want to come back and work for the company, or sing their praises to my classmates.

True in your case. Not true with many of my friends. I run into at least one friend daily taking up an unpaid internship. Even after I lecture them on how it is illegal, they insist they are excited about it and don't really care about the money.

The possible illegality of them is no problem for the interns, only the company. I can't see how your lecture could be convincing, especially since a lot of people think they're moral, each side is getting consideration in the legal sense.

This is falls in line with one of the fundamental problems with college and that problem is that success is college is skewed towards those whose parents, or whomever, pay their way as opposed to those who pay there own way. Some kids are financially independent during schools so they MUST have a paying job. This means that they can't take an unpaid internship to get a resume boost. They have to stick with their bar tending or wait staff job to keep making it. Most kids like this are working 20 - 30 hours a week. This doesn't leave a whole lot of time to build up the resume in any real way. Kids who have to work don't have time to go out and join clubs and take "leadership" positions within them. Since leadership positions and work experience in the field is what employers look for these kids are at a disadvantage. Now take a kid whose parents pay for tuition, rent, books, etc. He has the time to work for free and become the president of the student union because he doesn't have to wait on the drunk college kids 8 hours a night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

I've actually always thought that employers who learned that a candidate put his or herself through college thought more highly of that person. Being able to show up daily and get through the trudge would be, to me, hugely more telling than a 'leadership position' at a club or a student union. Though, maybe that's just my lack of school spirit showing.

I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations. I do think that small companies tend to value skill and hard work more, however I find, being in school right now, that it is the large corporations that are recruiting students at job fairs and not smaller companies and start ups. I think students who work, and and learn skills on their own are better off looking for jobs on their own outside of official recruiting. At least for people going into tech.

I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large corporations.

I don't know about that. I think it's more impressive myself to see that someone worked his or her way through school than to see tons of extracurricular activities. In fact, unless they're professionally relevant, extracurricular activities don't rank very highly at all on my list of things I'd like to see on a resume.

Edit: Of course, I should add, I don't work for a major corporation, either.

Amen to that. Also for companies job fairs can look a bit disappointing.

What would the alternative be? Require all students to pay their own way, thereby disincentivizing parents to work hard and save for their children's college education?

On the other hand, there are a lot of intangible benefits to be had by paying your own way through college; benefits that will never be recognized by those born with a silver spoon in their mouths.

In other words, I don't see this as a fundamental problem. It's just the way it is.

I agree with you. I guess I was simply stating the way it is.

1. You're giving young people opportunity for learning and experience, both in a profession, and in working with others.

2. You're helping establish a new generation of relevant workers by offering them meaningful experiences instead of typical summertime opportunities such as burger-flipping or lawn-mowing. Your internship is about their future, a typical summertime job is nothing more than "spending money"

3. You're allowing yourself to fully evaluate a potential employee's abilities.

My career began with an internship (over 20 years ago), which I always value as having been a springboard for my career.

In some professions it seems the only way to get experience is to do "mandatory volunteering" (i.e. an unpaid job where you have set hours and can be fired, but you aren't an intern). Perhaps not in CS but in psychology and others.

Was your internship paid or unpaid?

Where did you stay while you were interning? How were your living expenses paid for?

Unpaid, at home, and with my own money. I didn't treat the internship as a career. It was a part of my education, and I was happy to invest the time and effort. I learned an enormous amount, and it benefits me to this day.

Where'd you get the money to live on while you were doing your unpaid internship? What I'm getting at here is that part of the point of the article was that unpaid internships favor people who come from more privileged backgrounds.

Yes, for those whole three months I fended for myself with my savings.

Your interpretation seems as though something is being imposed on someone, and some social injustice is being committed. Unpaid internships have advantage for the employer, and for the intern. That there are some people who can afford to invest their time and effort more so than others is not the fault of the employer, or of the intern who has the means. Nobody in this being is treated favorably, and nobody is being denied.

Life isn't inherently equal and fair. People with 'advantage' (meaning wherewithal and means) and will use it, and should.

Right, and this should still exist, but the people should get paid for the work they do. An internship is an investment in peoples' careers so as to encourage them to have a favorable opinion of you, and maybe work for you. As it's a short-term money-loser by design, there's no reason it shouldn't pay at least a pittance.

But they're not about developing a positive opinion of the company in the potential employee's minds. Yes, a company will do that because a company always wants to paint itself positively -- but from their perspective the purpose of internships is to filter through and prove talent.

The company isn't investing (after all, they're not paying). 'tis the intern investing in his or her own career -- as it should be!

The company is more concerned with if _they_ like _you_. The reward for the intern is experience, and maybe a future position.

If something is interesting enough and if I like the people short internships (two months tops) close to the place where I live (I can drive there with my bike) are something I would most certainly do. (And they are legal in Germany. No minimum wage, either.) I don’t know whether I would be overly eager to work all that hard. Depends on the stuff I’m working on, I guess. Yet money – even if it’s only a little – shows me clearly that you care. I think it’s a important signal. I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a little money.

"I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a little money."

Absolutely. As a college student, I would have been happy with a low wage; I didn't need to support myself with the internship income. But after working half the day somewhere, it would have been nice to have a few bucks for a meal, and made it feel less like slave labor.

Mostly it would have been the symbolic value, though. The statement that "you're worth hiring, and we're better off for having you here."

Why is the government exempt from unpaid internship laws? The White House has tonnes of unpaid interns from what I hear.

Aren't unpaid internships illegal?

Updated: Yes, sometimes...i read the rest of the article.

Most are. There are six criteria an (unpaid) internship has to meet for it to not be illegal. Essentially, the company offering the internship has to be offering it solely for the benefit of the intern and can derive no real benefit from it themselves. (And a company can't offer an unpaid internship as a way to avoid paying employees for training.)

The full list (linked from the article) is here: http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/new-study-raises-qu...

"Most are."

I think that's the most important point. The six point test is important, but its so vague that it can give people a false sense of safety.

From the linked NYT article:

"'If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,' said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html

"and can derive no real benefit from it themselves"

I would think that would be pretty impossible to conform to no matter how you structured the intern's day/tasks. Unless you simply provided them a desk in which to study, or worked and let them observe with no interaction I would think sticking to this rule would be difficult.

I think that's the idea, to make it impossible for them to be useful and legal.

In addition, an unpaid internship only attracts students who do not know their own value. The really good ones know they can find a place willing to pay at least some of what they are worth.

This may vary with the field. I think it's true of say, web development, because the student could definitely work freelance and get both experience and money. But it might not be true of journalism, or law, etc.

Although it's definitely true that by offering money and/or other perks, the company would get better candidates. Think about how easily Google can choose the best engineers, based on their reputation as an awesome place to work. Now think how much lower a college student's standards are for what's awesome - they've probably never made real money. "They buy you lunch every day" would count as awesome, and doesn't cost much.

"They review your work with you every week and help you improve, then write you a good recommendation" would be even better for highly-motivated students.

If a company became known as the coolest place for students to work, they'd be able to pick the best students for their internships, and those students would be more likely to come back to work there, or recommend good people to work there, after they graduate.

No they attract only students who DO know their worth.

$BIG_WALLst_COMPANY will only employ people who have done an internship on Wall St.

This means that all Wall st $BIG_COMPANIES can offer unpaid internships because they have a $$$ value to you. And compared to the $$ cost of going to Harvard/Yale (the only other requirement for Wall St) it doesn't really matter.

If a student thinks that the $1000/month they could be earning in a paid internship doing web design in Idaho has more value they are probably wasting their tuition anyway.

students who go to Microsoft or Google can expect to make about $5,000 a month. A friend of mine god an offer from a financial who was trying to give him $6,000 a month.

I'll also add that my cousin is a global controller for a relatively small (I guess?) hedge fund on Wall Street and he cut his teeth working a job during college. Also, he went to Ohio State.

In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are paying you (by them or any other company).

And again, going beyond that, my friends who are working on Wall St. (CMU kids) are being paid.

Unpaid (and poorly paid) internships are for suckers.

"In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are paying you"

Indeed. I very recently checked with my friend who runs MIT's EECS undergraduate program and she said that all their internships are paid.

>my friends who are working on Wall St. (CMU kids) are being paid. They are working as programmers/quants? The ones who are going to be partners aren't being paid.

Yeah, because God forbid anyone in this country from actually producing something... Damn system.

I think unpaid internships can be good. We must realize that there is more value than money. If a company establishes something that they have considered how you can benefit from, then I think they should be encouraged, particularly for early phase startup companies that don't have the cash but have interesting new solutions.

There may be more value than money, but there isn't more you can eat than food.

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