Comment by hetspookjee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hetspookjee | Hacker News Reader

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I have a hard time believing that you will get in trouble for hiring interns and compensate them more than 500 euros. In the NL you aren't even obliged to give them any compensation and if you are compensating them you are free to do so as much as you'd wish.

Internships in the Netherlands are akin to modern slavery imo. You work full time and with luck you get a compensation of 500 euros a month,though often no compensation is more likely to be the case. You will get a maximum loan of 1100 euros a month from the government, so a lot of students have to take on a second job if they don't get any compensation at all at their internship.

National institute of neuroscience provides no compensation whatsoever, and for applied mathematics students the average compensation is around 200 euros.

Obviously not wholly related to your comment but the internship situation in the Netherlands really grinds my gears.

Normative answer (in Dutch), I have no practical experience either way: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/minimumloon/vraag-e...

Your employer has no obligation to compensate for your internship, but is not prohibited either. There is no minimum or maximum amount set for this compensation.

The focus for internship should be on training, not work. If the Inspectie SZW (employment auditor) finds that the internship consisted of mostly paid work, the employer will be ordered to salary the intern according to normal wages [effectively, minimum wage].

However, there is a practical limit to compensation: students earning more than E20,000 a year are no longer eligible for the student loans you mention.

AFAIK that maximum is only for the "gift" that was superseded by a loan which has no max income limit.

Oh believe me... Coming from the US, the summer between my first and second year, I was compensated 5k for three months of work. When I first heard what was standard in NL I was shocked. Then again, I was also paying 50k per semester for school, soooo yeah, take your pick haha. I wouldn't say slavery, more like indentured servitude. Anyways, I make it my personal goal to give our interns as much of mine and our senior devs' time as possible, as well as support after their internship is over.

I would hope you'd make more than $5k working in software for a summer. I was making that a decade ago wearing a hard hat and pushing a broom in a power plant on my summer breaks...

> I have a hard time believing that you will get in trouble for hiring interns and compensate them more than 500 euros.

Student visas?

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