Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

And as usual, I disagree.

When I was just starting my career, I would have gladly worked for free as an intern to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now, I wouldn't have done it for -long-, but internships aren't supposed to last a long time. As it was, instead I spent a year unemployed, and then took a job as a stock clerk at a grocery store. That time would have been much better spent as an intern... Especially since I think I could have found a job after 3 months of being an intern. 6 at the most.

The reason his entire post is wrong is that the person DOES get something out of it. They get training (whether it was structured or not is a different matter) and they get experience. Guess what helps you get a job most in the IT industry? Experience.

As for being hired, any company worth their salt will offer a real job to anyone who shows skill. Job offers should never be automatic.

View on HN

It's easy to get an internship today. Douchebag companies who will not pay me at least a minimum wage can have someone completely clueless who knows nothing.

You can get experience and not get paid working on any large open source project. You'll probably get even better mentoring.

In fact, it's not that hard to get paid doing open source work now that you have GSoC.

You may have been better off as an intern, but I could see the argument that if nobody's willing to work for free companies will have to pay a decent wage - a degree of collective bargaining by students and recent graduates who are unwilling to sell their summers for almost no money.

Interns don't produce much output. They're inexperienced. What would take a professional a day to finish might take an intern 2 weeks, and take time from others to boot.

In that situation, the intern should be working for free (for the experience) and the company should consider any actual output to be compensation for the time spent having to help the intern along.

As the post's author noted, the 2 job descriptions he linked to do not fit the above criteria.

Any company that expects actual productivity from an intern is in the wrong.

I'm not a software developer (researcher), but are there really no tasks simple enough for interns in your average software company? When I worked as a sysadmin for a couple of months, the two (paid) intern programmers seemed to do most of the work on some (small) contracts. They definitely had some things to learn, but they got it done (with some help) and were absolutely net positive.

Maybe we just had unusually good interns, though (this was in the Netherlands).

Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience and we're back to paying them for work done.

Complicated tasks need guidance and take time. But they're great for experience.

It's not even that they're really hard tasks, but that there are so many little details to software develop that everyone treats like common sense, but it's not... Until you have experience.

"Tasks that simple don't provide them any experience"

Utter bullshit.

In this specific case, they created some simple Rails websites - one seems to have basically been a simple CMS (with a nice design) for a customer, another was an internal time tracking tool. Both had at least one (more-or-less harmless) WTF [1], but the customer seems to have been happy, time tracking worked, and they definitely learned something.

[1] To be fair, one was putting my sample code in production.

Especially in the case of liberal arts internships. A programmer is one story - paid internships for essentially unskilled labor are very rare.

What's wrong with paying at least the minimum wage to interns? I presume you can't claim unemployment benefit if working as an intern, so who is funding an interns living expenses? Unpaid work should be reserved for charitable organisations.

You pay wages to employees. (IE People who produce efficient output.)

You pay experience to interns. (IE People who take time from efficient employees and produce little output.)

Complete and utter bullshit.

When I started work I produced little output, because I was a newbie and knew nothing. I was paid just a little over minimum wage - but I still produced, even if it was crappy code and routine tasks nobody else wanted to do.

Companies used to do this all the time - you start at the bottom, fresh out of school, and you have to learn.

But you are still f*ing paid.

Agreed, and not just for complete noobs.

If (as an experienced hire) you start a job somewhere enterprisey, the amount of bureaucracy and induction procedure you experience in your first week can mean that you won't be a productive employee for at least a week, if not two. You'll probably still be taking time from experienced employees for months. You still get paid.

In such a place, the first week of employment of an experienced hire is exactly the same as it is for an intern.

These aren't comparable. One is an investment in the person that pays off over time, the other isn't.

Yes, an employee takes just as long to get up to speed as an intern, but hopefully that investment is paid off by years of work afterwards.

For a two or three month internship, you might spend half their time in getting them up to speed. And for that, you get the same amount of work (best case), then they are gone.

Yes, internships can be a great way of recruiting, probably the reason most companies do them at all, but saying that the upramp is comparable to normal FTEs is ignoring the fact that they aren't long term.

The only reason they aren't comparable is because the intern is an intern. Not because the intern is a neophyte.

My point (possibly not particularly well made) was not that you should take on inexperienced pretend employees, treat them like real employees for three months, then get rid of them; but that you should take on inexperienced real employees and treat them like real employees.

Three months is a pretty normal probationary period for a real employee, so you can just as easily get rid of one if it doesn't work out; as you can an intern.

If you're not able to produce valuable output then there might be something wrong with your schooling. If you have studied already 3-4 years computer science than you can do something useful.

You pay experience to interns

Very dependent on the type of internship. I saw one (unpaid) internship offering to give people experience working in a convience store. They basically wanted a normal employee to work as a cashier, but didn't want to pay them.

For the record here's a screen grab of the "Get experience tidying a shop": http://www.broadsheet.ie/2011/05/17/no-salary/

Thanks for the reply. In the two examples I linked there was no mention of training. People were required to already have the skills required to do the work.

I agree that those 2 examples are in the wrong. Especially the first one. Experience should never be a requirement for an internship, and a '1 day trial' is absolutely ridiculous for an internship.

Unfortunatly the examples are the rule and not the exception here from the jobs I have seen advertised. Internships (in Ireland) are pretty much seen as "work for me for nothing" rather than any kind of learning experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com