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Comment by rdslw | Hacker News Reader

I trust you're doing for the good, yet it reminded me a story I heard some time ago.

Story went like that: I'm a gold miner. Gold mining is cool, everybody wants to gold mine. So I'll teach you FOR FREE how to gold mine, but during first year I offer you to gold mine for me at minimum wage. It's a shity goldmining you're doing, as you're newbie, so that excuses minimum wage, right? And I'm doing teaching for "free", right? There were hundreds I trained to goldmine and they didnt accept my WORK (sacred word) offer. They didnt also goldmine afterwards. I call it free service and in addition for my goldmining minions get 'feeling good' from it. Others call it sieve just to find enough 'wanna be gold miner' newbies.

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You make it sounds like the big corporations that pay developers good salaries are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. Apple, Google, Amazon, UBISoft, Nintendo, etc. are just as "exploitative". Part of developing your career as a software developer is knowing what you are worth at any point in time, and what your options are, and when to switch to a better option. I get the feeling the parent poster actually cares about maintaining a longer-term mutually beneficial relationship with his student/employees, which is already better than a lot of corporations out there.

Plenty of people pay lots of money to learn how to code. If someone is being paid to learn and work, isn’t that a pretty good deal?

It depends on what the exact deal is. I'm sure that in this particular case it is a good deal, however I've seen such jobs where they literally exploited these poor people.

yeah. My deal with them is to train them to become great engineers. No paperwork needed to enforce anything. They work with me 100% by choice and they know they could be getting a much higher salary somewhere else (and free to leave anytime).

If the only way to get a non-shit gold mining job is to have a few months experience in a 'real' gold mine, then the minimum wage job is well worth doing.

I started back in uni doing software dev for McDonald's wages. By the time I graduated I had two years' experience which got me my first 'real' job.

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