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Comment by carterschonwald | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing the part where an unpaid intern can support living in SF and working up to 7 days a week, esp in software where pretty much every internship in industry pays quite nicely

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You're right that it's not the right opportunity for everyone. For people with a little more flexibility (or who are already in the Bay Area) and want a more entrepreneurial summer experience that coding for a big software company, we think this could be pretty sweet.

You'll put SW into people's hands almost immediately, get to work through the business implications of what you're building, and more. We also hope that this becomes seriously lucrative for the intern(s) over the course of the next year.

Also keep in mind that this is an experiment, in many ways. We haven't tried this before, and we don't know anyone else who has, either. It's a relatively risky internship in that sense, but one with pretty significant upside potential, too.

I think it's a very cool experiment. I could see it working very well. However, no pay and only 10% of the profits doesn't seem like such a great deal.

To me, getting a full time job and doing affiliate marketing at night--keeping 100% of the profits, seems like it would be a better deal.

There are many very profitable affiliate companies in San Francisco that both pay well and offer revenue sharing deals to their workers. These companies really know what they are doing in the lead gen/affiliate space and offering a decent base salary is small peanuts to them.

You could be right, but I suspect the groups of people that enjoy building software and doing affiliate marketing have a relatively small area of overlap.

Yes, I think you're right about that.

I read the post a little too quickly and it seemed like more of an affiliate role than a software dev role.

Indeed, 10% sounds pretty low. 10% sounds like what it would be fair for the company to retain.

I should have said at least 10%. We'll talk with whoever's interested, take a look at projected cash flows, and find the right number for everyone. Everything is always up for discussion.

As tptacek points out below, many internships are unpaid or offer minimum wage. How do people afford them? Parents and student loans, I imagine. We think this is a pretty decent option.

So you're OK with intentionally biasing this internship towards people with rich parents, and possibly ignoring someone who has to actually make money over the summer that might be better off at making whatever application it is that you're interested in having made?

"Biasing the internship toward people with rich parents"... what is this, a John Hughes movie? Give me the choice between two comparable people, one of whom will work for nothing because she has rich parents, and I'll take the free one (or maybe both) every time.

Why are you trolling this guy? It's an internship. Many internships come with no compensation whatsoever. You don't need an internship position? Awesome! Neither do I. But stop acting like it's weird to offer them.

I'm not acting like its weird to offer an internship, merely pointing out that not offering some form of guaranteed payment in exchange for work will exclude a group of people who don't have the money (either set aside or from an outside source) to do such a thing.

Unless you're seriously suggesting that someone should take out a few thousand dollars worth loans in order to go move hundreds or thousands of miles across the country in order to work without knowing if they'll be able to pay that money back anytime soon? Which is more of a troll then anything I've said IMO. Not that I can see how anything I've personally said in this thread is a troll at all, but we all have different perspectives on things and definitions of trolling, so I suppose that's subjective.

From when I was looking at internships for this upcoming summer, there's not that many Engineering/CS internships that are unpaid. An overwhelming majority of the unpaid internships are Marketing/PR/PolSci internships. The Engineering/CS companies tend to realize that its a good idea to pay people for doing work.

You're right. Unpaid internships definitely exclude people who can't afford to live without a living wage. Also, you are right that most CS internships are paid. This is, as you point out, an unusual offer.

It's necessity, not preference. We just can't pay a normal, livable salary for the summer.

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