Unpaid internships in San Francisco

The clearest outline is from the FSLA, and the criteria is outlined below:

"If all of the factors [below] are met, then the worker is a “trainee”, an employment relationship does not exist under the FLSA, and the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to the worker:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction; 2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees; 3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation; 4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded; 5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and 6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. "

EG if an internship meets those criteria, you don't need to be paid.

(1) http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pd...

1. Pay them a graduate starting salary for the duration of their internship.

2. Make sure we had the time to invest in helping them grow before going back to university rather than just giving them shit jobs or using them as cheap labour.

Unfortunately number 2 was derailed by the fact that we took a full time graduate on and felt that this combined with illness meant we couldn't guarantee the mentoring that we wanted to provide. We felt that we couldn't do right by the intern we wanted, so we postponed the programme.

We set up a hack week for next month in order for our geographically disparate team to get some time together and some proper training. In addition to bringing the team we invited both the intern we had to cancel and the student we wanted to intern with us for next year (as we found him this year but he was a year early). Our plan is to spend a week breaking stuff and training each other up on core pentesting areas. The students get to come along and join in on that as well as take part in ad-hoc hacking sessions. Both students took us up on it and we're covering their costs. Our not quite intern will probably be offered a job around graduation time, the other lad will almost certainly be our paid intern next year.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do internships. If you can't do it the right way I believe you shouldn't do it at all.

By all means offer them opportunities if they're genuine, but don't dress them up as internships. Just be straight with them. The students attending hack week will go back to Abertay Uni to do their ethical hacking degree projects having spent the week living with a pentest team and hacking all the things, something none of the other students will have done. While they haven't been paid they won't pay a penny for the week. I will reluctantly let them chip in for beer if they insist, but everything else is on us. It just wouldn't be right any other way.

As a small business owner I'm not yet in the position to employ others yet I have work that could provide decent training/work experience for somebody. I feel like an internship programme at my company would be mutually beneficial for us and the intern. Alas, for now, I'll be working alone.

Edit: This country has almost NO skilled workforce. I could help out if they would only let me.

An unpaid internship is better than doing nothing. It might even be better than working at McDonalds.

At the previous company I worked for, I had managed quite a few paid interns. I love managing, but I've always turned down serious management positions out of fear that I'd fall behind from a technical standpoint. I have never turned down an opportunity to manage an intern and my company took the relationship seriously. Interns negotiated salary just like any other employee, however, they were treated as a short-term contract so as a manager I was not able to see salary specifics. Despite that, I've been confided in and they were doing quite. Minimum wage was nowhere to be found.

Purely for CS grads looking to land a career in software development (and I'm not in The Valley where things are arguably quite different): Don't take an unpaid internship. If the place is incredible and you really, really want to work there, ask yourself why they're not willing to pay you. My former company hired some of the greenest interns* from colleges you've likely never heard of. They were paid and they were all very good after a couple of months of apprenticeship. They also never worked a minute over 40 hours (by design, they were paid hourly as my former company had a fear of overtime).

I haven't had this opportunity at my current employer, but if offered a "free intern" to manage, I'd turn that option down. Anyone willing to take a job where I work (an aside: good job, good company, but not the sort of thing that a recent grad would consider exciting enough to skip the paycheck) is probably going to cost me more than just doing the "intern work" myself.

* I don't mean this condescendingly. We all start somewhere. I've have the privilege of managing incredibly intelligent people being an "intern manager" and every experience, thus far, has been rewarding for both of us. I keep in touch with them (some are likely reading this) and they all, currently, have well paying jobs as professional developers.

Edit: I think this might have come off wrong: I was saying that's the mindset of these employers. They put these jobs/internships out there because they know someone will take the bait. I am don't condone this behavior.