Tech’s coveted internships are getting canceled due to Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Tech’s coveted internships are getting canceled due to Covid-19

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66 pointssidhanthp34 comments

Hey, this happened to me today at 9:30AM. I’d lined up an absolutely dreamy UX Research internship with an incredible Chicago company — smart coworkers, awesome office, rigorous interview process, the whole 9 yards. Then my phone rang and everything evaporated due to forces beyond my control. I spent an hour sitting on the floor wanting to throw my laptop through the window before I counted the ways I’m lucky and made pancakes. Today has been terrible but I’ll be ok. I did it once, I can do it again :)

Just an idea, but looking back on internships from years past, three things they give you are experience/learning, networking/relationships, and a resume item.

Perhaps you could proactively address #3 now by using their sympathy to get them to write you a short 'recommendation' or vouch for the fact that they accepted you for their internship program, so that in the future on your LinkedIn you can note the summer of 2020 as the headline 'Internship at ______ - canceled due to Corona - instead I taught myself _____', and then in the body of that entry, start with their quote they gave about what impressed them about you, and then write the rest of the entry about what other stuff you learned / did instead.

>Just an idea, but looking back on internships from years past, three things they give you are experience/learning, networking/relationships, and a resume item.

you forgot one very important item: full time offer.

For whatever it's worth - after the "Great Recession" of 2008-2009, I graduated university with a 3.7 GPA and couldn't find a job... at all. Granted, I was in a small market and wanted to stay there but nobody wanted to hire me for any full-time job I applied for.

Finally, I found something for the city doing data entry. The salary was poverty-line level. I drove down the morning it was supposed to begin, but the door was locked. I got home and checked my voicemail - they canceled the position.

I had a decent business idea or two, and ended up becoming an entrepreneur out of just frustration really, and within six months I had meetings with executives of businesses I couldn't get an internship with about partnerships.

Just keep working and solving problems.

Write a blog about this.

Very interested to hear more...

>I did it once, I can do it again :)

honestly i feel that a lot. if my internship gets cancelled i'll be mighty disappointed after having anticipated it for so long (years) but one thing you should (and i will) keep in mind is that you can probably get recycled to next summer. admittedly that isn't a consolation if you're graduating next year.

Awesome attitude! That's probably what got you the internship in the first place.

Really sorry to hear that :(

basically this same story was posted last week and i commented on that one as well.

i have a summer internship with FB and i reached out to both my recruiter and team lead. both said that it's still on but possibly WFH. from what i've heard Google isn't cancelling software internships (the cited cancellation is for UX design) and doing online onboarding and WFH at the discretion of the managers.

if you're in the same boat you should probably email your recruiter and your matched team lead.

As a counterpoint, Bloomberg (a medium-sized tech company) is still hiring interns as well as FTEs. We are all WFH but the positions, hiring, internships are proceeding as usual.

Disclaimer: I am a team lead at Bloomberg.

What about interns outside of US/Canada?

i'm curious does Bloomberg have a lot of experience running internships completely wfh? can you talk a little bit about how you're planning to adjust how you mentor and coordinate (if you're hosting this summer)?

I got an email from my recruiter at a medium-sized VC-funded startup in Mountain View basically saying “if things don’t change by June we won’t be able to continue move forward with your internship”. I appreciated the transparency and that’s about as good of an an answer as I could’ve expected given the sheer uncertainty of everything going on right now.

Shame on any company too stuck in 1950 not to embrace WFH in this time for work not abdolutely requiring physical presence.

WFH will seriously hurt any internship. I think it's for the best, but it won't be nearly as good as actually being in-person with engineers.

WFH being worse is debatable, but people entering the workforce need internships now more than ever. Companies canceling them are failing in their social responsibility unless they suddenly can't afford the interns due to lost business.

>Companies canceling them are failing in their social responsibility

do you really believe there's a single incorporated entity on the planet that makes decision based on social responsibility? companies that continue to have internships are doing so because if they do not then they won't meet hiring quotas for next year (and will then be short-staffed because of churn).

> do you really believe there's a single incorporated entity on the planet that makes decision based on social responsibility?

By proxy when the unpopularity of a decision impacts revenue/public perception. We can choose not to do business with companies that are especially unconscionable.

And once in a while someone at the head of a company does just do something good too.

>By proxy when the unpopularity of a decision impacts revenue/public perception. We can choose not to do business with companies that are especially unconscionable.

do you really live in a fairy tale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/23/gilead-sciences-coronavi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

just off the top of my head

none of that disproves anything I said, and the fact PR departments exist proves perception matters.

>none of that disproves anything I said

i love people like you. gets presented with evidence to the contrary and just completely dismisses it. have you ever considered that you might let it roll around in your head before you make the call that none of it disproves anything you said? have you really done the due diligence on the examples i've furnished?

I'm familiar with most of it. Yes, obviously companies do bad things all the time, often get away eith it, and sociopaths are more likely to rise to high positions. How does that mean we can't judge companies for their actions and try to hold them to standards? Especially in this age where information travels so easily?

Here's one case of public reaction doing something: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/social-media-sha...

How slavery free diamonds became a selling point works too. Because people didn't want to buy blood diamonds so the business had to change.

> do you really believe there's a single incorporated entity on the planet that makes decision based on social responsibility?

Yes. These businesses exist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibil...

I learned about a few of them during the Sustainable Business Strategy course I took by Dr. Rebecca Henderson, who teaches Reimagining Capitalism in the MBA Program at Harvard Business School and is on the board of Ceres, a membership organization whose member companies are known to include such social responsibility and governance practices (collectively called ESG) in their businesses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_co...

There is also the triple bottom line accounting framework. There is at least one incorporated entity on the planet that makes decisions based on this accounting framework:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line

Right now a lot of companies who are seeing a slump but will be able to stay in operation after making some changes will be making decisions between laying off staff and cutting costs some other way (such as the executives taking pay cuts). This may be one way to help identify who they are. Watch for news of companies whose executives are foregoing their salaries and bonuses and dividends during this crisis in order to avoid laying people off that they could just lay off due to the slump.

Newsflash: companies don't do this as a "social responsibility."

I'm already personally finding it hard to onboard new engineers on the team. I don't think many would be keen to essentially lose one good engineer (as they'd be the mentor) to remotely ramp up one intern who may or may not be good and if the latter, may or may not return for a return offer.

Condescending trite like "nEwSfLaSh" will win you no favors. Go read the rest of the thread, I'm not repeating myself.

Companies mostly calculated the cost and devoted the investment for recruiting the intern beforehand.

> people entering the workforce need internships now more than ever.

What is the noncircular reason for that?

People need money more during a massive recession?

I got email yesterday from a midsize company, they cancelled my internship too.

Didn’t Yelp also rescind full time offers ?

Yelp's case is also more situational than the rest. They entirely depend on people shopping/eating out to search and make posts. That's clearly not happening right now and I'm sure SMBs are scrambling to cancel any ad purchases they already have with Yelp.

Remember, this is an emergency on an epic scale. Hopefully it will pass any things will return to normal (or something like it).

Hopefully WFH stays.

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