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Comment by cweagans | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager, this program seemed pretty sketchy from a legal perspective. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that interns need to be paid for their work if they're working on projects that have some commercial interest attached.

Austen DMed me about this on twitter a while back (presumably in search of pilot organizations to work with Fellows), and my response was this:

> I am reasonably sure that’s not legal if they’re working on “real” client work since at that point, the company would be the primary beneficiary of that person labor. The DoL fact sheet doesn’t make it entirely clear (https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdf...), but HLR’s article about Glatt v Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc summarizes it well (https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/02/glatt-v-fox-searchlight...).

I know there are some Lambda folks around in this thread. Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk.

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One quick point: Fellows is first and foremost designed for our students. We started by looking at our Labs program, which was 8 weeks long, and thinking about how we could make it better. Labs is a simulation, and a good one!, but will always be simulated. The incredible value for students of Fellows it that it's a "real world learning experience." We now think the 1-2 punch is Labs + Fellows.

> Have you done any legal vetting or anything along those lines? I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile, but I'm not interested if it means putting the company at risk.

Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor."

In general, we do not encourage students to take unpaid internships. And if a student has the opportunity to take a paid position elsewhere, we recommend they do that.

As I mentioned in another response, our North Star for this program is an unparalleled learning experience for Lambda graduates. There are a few steps we've taken to ensure that it is a valuable learning opportunity for students:

1. We heavily qualify the companies we allow to host Lambda Fellows and require that they have a dedicated mentor in place, a meaningful project for the student to work on, a functioning team for the student to be a part of, and hold them accountable to provide and foster a positive learning environment. Companies who fail to meet these expectations, at any point, have had their Fellows removed.

2. As part of the qualification process for companies, we require that they have an open role for a junior developer that would be a qualified placement that the Lambda Fellow can apply for at the end of the Fellowship.

3. We remove the interview process for the students participating as Fellows and deploy them straight to the host company.

You're exactly right: the law basically asks "who is the primary beneficiary of that person's labor?" This was designed from the ground up as part of the educational journey of Lambda, and we've designed Fellows such that the student is the primary beneficiary of each step of that journey.

I don't think this answered the OP's question. I get that you're arguing that the student is the primary beneficiary of the free labor they are giving to the company - but I'd be suspicious that a court would allow this interpretation.

At worst this allows for negative cost labor where an employee pays/borrows money in order to provide value to an employer.

To the direct question - do you provide appropriate indemnity clauses protecting employers should the legality of the arrangement be called into question?

Wasn't trying to dodge the question!

I'm not sure, but email me and I'll check with legal: jess.martin@lambdaschool.com

You say:

> Yes, absolutely! We've taken the legal side of this very seriously since we realize it has the potential to be interpreted as "free labor

Your copy reads:

> Add talented software engineers to your team for a 4 week trial at no cost for your company.

That page is targeted at the value proposition for the company, not the student.

There are legit benefits to the company, in addition to the major benefits to the student.

I would urge you to drop this program both for ethical and legal reasons.

Unpaid internships are deeply unethical and unjust. Not just because everyone deserves to be paid, but more importantly, because they cause massive social inequality. Students who are well-off can afford to take unpaid internships. They get many opportunities riding on their wealth, resulting in students who are not well-off, who cannot afford to work for free, missing out.

Programs like these cause massive social inequality. They are how the old boys network continues to live.

Also, you totally need a labor lawyer. That page clearly shows that lambdaschool fails the test for an unpaid internship. Not only are you exposing yourself to a lawsuit, you are exposing anyone who participates in this program too. And this page will be used as an exhibit that the program is not about training, it is about displacing existing work onto students.

We all know what you're trying to do. Get experience for you students. As a fellow educator, I appreciate that and also understand how hard it is to arrange. But this is not the way.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that this program (as it's currently structured) wouldn't be beneficial to the student. There's no substitute for real experience working with a real team on real projects with real clients.

I appreciate the level of qualification that you're doing -- I think that definitely protects against (at least to some extent) predatory/exploitative behavior and it's great that that process is part of the program from day one.

That said: if a company is getting free (or negative cost) labor for real commercial work that they would otherwise have to pay a substantial amount of money for, there is a clear, material benefit to the company. If this program were ever considered in court, I suspect that it would boil down to figuring out what the ratio of benefits is (is it 20% company and 80% student, vice versa, or closer to 50/50?) and that's a really risky proposition to consider.

From my standpoint, the thing that would make this program essentially risk-free is a requirement to pay at least the minimum wage for whatever jurisdiction the company is operating in. That may significantly reduce the number of companies that can/will utilize this program, but it sends a very clear message: Lambda grads are worth paying for, even in an apprenticeship role. Another model would be to have the grad work as a contractor for a flat, predetermined fee on a project identified and scoped at the beginning of the engagement.

Additionally, rather than selling this as a mentoring/apprenticeship/internship program, you could consider selling it to employers as a _hiring_ program. For instance, something along these lines:

* Work with a Lambda grad for 4 weeks * Employer does all of the vetting steps you mentioned before and pays $x/hour * At the end of the 4 weeks, employer is obligated to hire the grad, try a different grad, or close the role req for x days (or something like that -- maybe if n grads don't work out, waive this requirement or something)

Structured like that, it changes the _hiring_ process in the same way that Lambda is trying to change the education process. Best case, I'd be looking at $1600 for the cost of acquisition of a new employee. We have a fairly rigorous interview/hiring process. I'm not sure exactly how much it costs, but the amount of time and attention required from various members of the team is certainly above $1600, so this would be a bargain for me.

> Additionally, rather than selling this as a mentoring/apprenticeship/internship program, you could consider selling it to employers as a _hiring_ program.

They do: "Add talented software engineers to your team for a 4 week trial at no cost for your company.", "We’ll help you onboard and deploy a talented software engineer or data scientist to your team for 4 weeks at no cost. At the end of the fellowship, you can hire your fellow with no recruiting fees."

Of course, the more convincingly they do this, the more it undermines their argument that it is a legal unpaid internship and not a violation of the primary beneficiary test, constituting wage theft under federal (and, separately, most state) labor law.

This was very helpful, Cameron, thanks!

This screams desperation.

Just looking at the "testimonies" on the page we read: "She knew how to work with React and Git right away, which is more than I can say for most students coming out of University."

Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast.

Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period?

I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0].

It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

> Takes about 3 hours of reading to any grad from any decent CS program to figure out git. If you understand graphs then you'll grok git pretty fast.

Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path.

> Is the market so over-saturated that they have to offer the 4 month trial period?

*week

And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis.

> I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students.

Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know.

Of course, that breaks down if you _pretend_ to be an expert at the thing that you're teaching. It takes some humility, I guess.

> It's no better than some diploma mills but any state school with half a decent curriculum sounds better than this.

AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience.

Having hired multiple new grads, my biggest problem was that they'd go down the rabbit hole of computing theory rather than focusing on solving the problem at hand in a practical way. IMO, applied software engineering education is pretty lacking across the board and bootcamps are a good place to experiment with new approaches. Even if Lambda and other bootcamps aren't necessarily the perfect solution, they're an attempt at a new solution to a hard problem.

> Not all engineers are CS grads. Not all engineers _need_ to be CS grads. Git is a great tool, but it can also be pretty complicated if you have to go off the beaten path.

I expect someone that calls himself an engineer to be able to get git, nevertheless.

> And IMO, it's not a question of saturation. It's a question of credibility. You, for instance, are (presumably) skeptical of whether or not Lambda grads would be able to pull their weight on a team. Spending 4 weeks working directly with a Lambda grad seems like a pretty good way to either prove or disprove your hypothesis.

> Skepticism is healthy, however I object to the idea that one needs to be an expert to teach. Even if you're just a _little_ better at something than someone else, there's no reason that you can't teach someone what you know.

> AFAIK, very few schools have an applied software engineering program that adequately prepares grads for doing real work on a real team. That's something that really can only come from experience.

My issue with bootcamps is that they teach "tricks" and not fundamentals. Someone with the fundamentals can easily adapt to another tech stack/codebase. But someone who simply learned whatever framework through rote won't. When you look at the "final projects" these bootcamps often get their grads to code, you'll pretty much get N identical github repo of that batch. But sure, if a dev shop measures performance by the number of Jira tickets a new hire can fix then yeah, getting someone from Lambda who learned that exact framework through rote might give you a good signal after 4 weeks while your college hire is still figuring out how the toolchain and lib work. But my bet is that the college hire will outperform the bootcamp grad in the long run.

I think the only way to prepare new grads to real work is to blend-in semester-long assignments and projects into the coursework. That and select students that can learn fast.

I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK you would have to be legally paid for this work.

It's illegal in NY, at least. I don't know about other states.

Illegal in all states. This arrangement fails several of the prongs of the Fair Labor Standards Act's "primary beneficiary test", particularly the "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

> he "conducted without entitlement to a paid job" test, as the "fellowship" is clearly being undertaken with the hope of receiving a full-time job.

"A hope of X" and "entitlement to X" are not the same thing. I tend to agree that this is likely illegal, but it seems to have been very carefully crafted to have at least a superficially-plausible argument for compatibility with the primary beneficiary test. I don't think it was done in ignorance of the law, but a careful and deliberate attempt to hack around it.

Isn't this the new playbook for startups? Break the law but acquire enough resources to change the law. Then lobby like there is no tomorrow in an attempt to change the laws again to stifle your competition?

In the Netherlands unpaid internships are fine, as long as the main goal is the learning experience. Why would this be illegal if both parties benefit? Exploitation doesn’t strike me as super likely here, as it’s rather easy to get out and it’s easy to fire abusive employers.

There is already a history of unpaid internships being abused in the USA, as they became the only way for people to enter an industry - entry-level labor became completely saturated by unpaid internships.

This causes a whole host of problems. One is that it acts as a filter for people who can afford to spend 1-2 years being an unpaid intern. For a high status industry, this prevents swathes of people who don't have the support networks to afford being unpaid.

The other is that, once this becomes an industry standard, entry level labor being so cheap incentivizes bad labor practices. Why hire a senior level talent when we can hire someone to manage 6 unpaid interns? Why promote this person when we can pay them literally nothing?

I am not a lawyer.

In the US, to qualify as an internship the student’s educational institution must meet certain standards. Internships meeting this standard may be unpaid. Student teachers are an ordinary example that happens at scale.

The legal strategy here seems to include calling the students “fellows.” Presumably, Lambda School does not meet the educational criteria necessary to provide interns. There’s probably enough fog around “fellow” that retained council applying ask-forgiveness-not-permission would write a memo to cover the forgiveness asking phase not improbable in the future given the similarities between the way this quacks and the unpaid internships Lambda School presumably does not qualify to offer.

> In the US, to qualify as an internship the student’s educational institution must meet certain standards. Internships meeting this standard may be unpaid. Student teachers are an ordinary example that happens at scale.

Student teachers almost entirely fall into the rule that "unpaid internships for public sector and non-profit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expectation of compensation, are generally permissible."'

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

Other than plausibly displacing ordinary workers, student teacher internships tend to meet the ordinary requirements as well. The standard that Lambda School would struggle with is "academic credit."

Take a look at the links I posted. The deciding factor isn't whether or not both parties benefit, but who is the _primary_ beneficiary of the internship. The line is more of a large grey area in the middle, and the consequences for misinterpreting the specifics of an arrangement can mean pretty large financial penalties for a company (wage theft can mean treble damages in some jurisdictions. At a minimum, that's 3x the local minimum wage, but I think I remember reading about a case where a judge determined the fair wage for an employee based on the fair market rate, so damages could have been 3x what's normally paid for somebody in a given position).

Not for long.

The EU is finally on the path to banning unpaid internships. https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/european-parl...

In the next few weeks the Council will likely separately adopt a rule that will shortly ban unpaid internships too.

So this is all coming to an end thankfully!

Interesting. I’m obviously not against paying interns money, but this might have the obvious unintended consequence of less available internships. We’ll have to see.

That's encouraging to hear that the Netherlands has an allowance for unpaid work when the goal is the learning experience. It's really clear to us at Lambda that the best way to _learn_ to do a thing is to do the _real_ thing, but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience, which is kinda self-defeating.

> but US Labor Laws can make it difficult to have students doing real work that would provide the best learning experience

No, they don't.

They make it difficult to not pay people at least the minimum wage for doing real work, whether or not they are students.

> No, they don't.

I would encourage you to look into this more - specifically respecting that there is a massive difference between _real world_ experience and the experience a school can _simulate_.

I could refer to literally hundreds of cases where US Labor Laws inhibited students learning experiences in this regard.

If your company has the bandwidth to create, manage, and mentor not-real-client-work, surely you have the resources to pay interns.

> I like the idea, and I think it's worthwhile

I can't think of any reasonable person who will accept 4 weeks of unpaid work and be treated as a trial product on top of that.

I think a ton of reasonable people would do that. Getting a job as a developer is reasonably difficult without connections or experience in the field. Many of us have degrees or years of being a geek before we get our first job. I think that leads to success but it's not a necessary pre-requisite.

I see people coming out of bootcamps from non-glamorous backgrounds who take months to find a job or eventually give up. If companies can explore this talent pool with lower risk, I'd think they could identify some significant potential

A take-it home project with 1 week maximum allows for that with some amount to be paid to the person. Many respected companies do it that way if not whiteboard interviews.

Lambda already takes a cut out of these student's future salaries.

Sorry, I don't agree. The way this is advertised is gross.

A 1 week take home project doesn't give experience, doesn't test how well the student works with others, doesn't showcase communication skills, etc.

There is a LOT more to development than coding

> There is a LOT more to development than coding

Agreed. Many companies already have paid work hours for hiring. I just listed those examples because those seems to be more common than work days ATM and isn't most employment in US at will unlike EU and developed parts of the world?

I understand the company will still have some cost to that but why should individuals be worked for free to offset that?

The alternative isn't that these people get paid, the alternative is that they continue to get their resumes screened and either remain unemployed or go back to the undesirable field they were in pre-bootcamp.

That's the reality for many people. This can help those people- although I agree that it won't help anybody who's qualified to field an offer right off the bat.

I don't think the OP disagrees, but the keyword here is "unpaid", let alone the opportunity cost for working at a potentially bad-fit company for a month.

Just compare the value proposition to something like college. People will sacrifice quite a lot to get into the career they want to be in- and it's very often worth while.

I won't make the argument that this is preferable to fielding and accepting an offer immediately, because obviously it isn't. However, this is preferable to going unemployed for months on end or giving up and going back to unskilled work- which is the reality for many folks right now.

You can’t? What if there is a measurable economical advantage for you? If you’re super inexperienced these four weeks unpaid internship might be way more valuable long term than four weeks sitting on a couch writing job applications with a near-empty CV.

That's definitely the way our students see it.

May be hard for many who have secure tech careers to empathize with how difficult it is to break into a new industry and what a leg up this experience gives them.

People with secure tech careers in hard-to-break-into-industries get those careers by being able to work for little-to-no-pay due to their privileged upbringing.

This isn't sour grapes, I am one of those people. This program is exactly the sort of thing I would have taken advantage of because I could.

Hooking your students up with companies is a good thing, but companies should expect to compensate people for labor, even for a trial period when it's on the scale of an entire month.

This isn't in Lambda School's direct power to solve, but the real issue here is companies are entirely unwilling to properly mentor new cohorts of engineers. You're expected to graduate from college/trade school a rockstar and start your new job landing PRs in time for the daily deploy. It's bad for the profession.

Based on reading the Lambda School income sharing agreements, I suspect the student is already obligated to repay a substantial some. As a terminal phase of the program, the student would be pretty much “all in” financially when seeking a fellowship.

There’s selection bias as well because coding boot camps have a strong appeal to the desperate in their careers and better viability for students with independent means (since Federal Financial Aid and conventional scholarships tend not to be available).

Psychologically there’s a lot of sunk cost with deferred payment to influence decision making.

Sorry, just to be clear: I like the idea of pairing new devs with experienced devs in an apprenticeship-like role, especially since the software industry tends to lean pretty heavily toward the weird "You need experience for this entry-level job" thing (especially for stable jobs with larger organizations).

I'm not so convinced of a 4 week internship trial thing when it's structured like this though.

Yeah, it sounds like you're just going to end up wasting the senior engineer's time hand-holding the intern for 4 weeks while they learn an existing codebase, and then they go off on their merry little way. The concept is interesting, but 4 weeks just really isn't enough time to get a new-hire up to speed to be very helpful with software in most corporate settings.

Try it and see ;-)

They basically are using this as the final exam of the school, in place of working on a project with peers.

That would mean the final exam is optional - and most students will not take it (at least until the fellows program gains more traction to take on more students).

This is _not_ the final exam. Your comment is uninformed.

I would've loved this as a new university grad. I remember lamenting that nothing like this seemed to exist at the time.

Q: What kind of reasonable person would spend 4 YEARS doing work and PAYING between $10k - $35k a year (on average) for the privilege of doing so? And get 0 support for finding a job afterwards?

A: US college student.

Keep that in mind when you complain about 4 weeks of unpaid work with a high chance of getting a highly paid job afterwards.

"High chance" because obviously Lambda will stop working with companies who see it as a free labor program.

I am unaware of any colleges that don't have a career services office that help students get jobs and internships during and post-graduation. Even community colleges have these things. Though, like Lambda School, they can be of questionable quality.

Additionally, Lambda School is specifically to focus on getting a job. Getting a job can be one outcome of college, but it's not necessarily the specific focus. For that, a comparison to a trade school might be more on point, where the specific focus is to learn a trade and then get people a job in that trade afterwards. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be Lambda School to Barbers College.

sigh something is wrong here and I can't pinpoint exactly what.

I can - it's that secondary education has issues that are getting worst faster than they are being solved.

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