Calling BS On Unpaid Internships 427
theodp writes "Getting an intern is so hot right now,' writes Stewart Curry. 'It's also bull**** 99% of the time.' IrishStu also provides his list of Interning's Big Lies: 1. 'You'll get training.' 2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' 3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.' 4. 'It will look great on your CV.' 5. 'You'll make great contacts.' So, who does it really hurt, Stu? 'Here's who it hurts — interns. You have them working for nothing. Here's who it hurts — people who need a wage in order to survive. Here's who it hurts — companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do.' Inside Higher Ed also checks in on The Great Intern Debate."
Unpaid interns and IRS (Score:2, Interesting)
IRS rules require that an internship be primarily for the education of the intern. So, like Microsoft and contractors you are risking really big problems if you do not comply, including fines and back pay.
In before someone speaks for the businesses (Score:5, Interesting)
"Getting an intern is so hot right now,' writes Stewart Curry. 'It's also bull**** 99% of the time.' IrishStu also provides his list of Interning's Big Lies: 1. 'You'll get training.' 2. 'We might hire you after the internship.' 3. 'You get to work with an awesome team.' 4. 'It will look great on your CV.' 5. 'You'll make great contacts.' So, who does it really hurt, Stu? 'Here's who it hurts â" interns. You have them working for nothing. Here's who it hurts â" people who need a wage in order to survive. Here's who it hurts â" companies that want to pay people a decent wage for work they do.' Inside Higher Ed also checks in on The Great Intern Debate."
In short, it encourages asshattery on the benalf of business. They can do whatever they want, and have it amount to de facto indentured servitude. Never mind that it limits the set of people to those who have outside income.
To handle that and associated problems:
1) Start making temporary work more expensive by making benefit/liability requirements multiply
2) Allow people to bypass requirements after UI runs out, or immediately if ineligible for unemployment.
3) End the idea of unpaid internships, since they're the result of unreal requirements being placed for work
4) Take a page from banks' structuring laws, put them into employment law, and make circumventing regulations nearly impossible.
Tax evasion (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen cooperative training programs advertised on my university's website. The funny thing it was merely writing user documentation and they didn't care what you were majoring in. It was a paid position (bit over minimal wage). The reason it was good for the company is that they could avoid a lot of taxes, and get fairly intelligent person with knowledge of English and computer skills. (It was in Hungary, Nokia-Siemens Network.)
unpaid internship does not look great on a cv (Score:5, Interesting)
Unpaid internship does not look great on a cv; it's looks cheap. The best advice I got from my first job manager was: never work unpaid unless it is for a charity. Working unpaid is showing a lack of respect for your own self. If your work is worth something charge something.
There's new competition now (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, really, really Don't do it! (Score:5, Interesting)
You will sell yourself short, get crappy office tasks, not real training. It doesn't look good on a CV/resume ... if I read unpaid internship, I read 'MUG'.
There are plenty of proper paid jobs out there, including short term summer jobs.
Living in a European country, I was totally shocked to discover unpaid internships were showing up over here. Why on earth would I work for free ANYWHERE? Who on earth can actually AFFORD to work for free? Oh, yeah, the rich buggers who probably don't need to work anyway, or for whom Daddy will always be able to find easy, well paid work with one of their chums anyway.
Unpaid internships is a) exploitative bull-hockey, b) a mug's game.
Re:unpaid internship does not look great on a cv (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also looks like you aren't good enough to get a job or that your skills and experience have been evaluated and you have been made a pay offer of $0.
it's for rich kids (Score:3, Interesting)
if you have 100 applicants, all mostly equally qualified, and one says "i'll work for free", you hire him or her
it's a way for the rich to destroy the meritocracy: they have the benefit of not needing money to survive, and they can use this to extend an unfair competitive advantage over equally qualified or even more qualified poorer candidates
free market fundamentalists need to understand that you need government regulating society to counteract the force of gravity that is money. money attracts more money, and this is a force of injustice that NATURALLY develops. without government controls counteracting this, society inevitably stratifies into classes, with the rich having all the money, and the poor leading miserable lives they can't escape
it is not possible to believe in a meritocracy and a free market at the same time. the two concepts are mutually exclusive
it doesn't mean we should be communist societies. it means that pure capitalist societies are just as evil as communist ones
the answer?:
balance, in all things: a capitalist society with socialist safety nets. the only society with true justice and maximized happiness and a rich vibrant middle class
Re:Apprenticeships (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in industry, and apprentices get payed in every blue collar job I've had contact with. Not only do they get paid, but get payed above average starting wage for that place in the world. If you're an apprentice that means someone with much more experience recognizes you have talent that's useful and can develop. You get treated like you're worth something, because you are.
The fact that many interns are unpaid is a tacit admittance that the workers are inherently worthless to the company. Unpaid internships need to be made criminal. They are the systematization and normalization of worker exploitation.
Re:Why is some random guy's blog on Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe because internships are one of the biggest BS things going, but most of the people involved don't want to admit it because it goes against their own interests. Schools won't admit it, companies that use them won't admit it, and the students won't call BS because they won't graduate if they do ... so the cycle continues.
Interns are asked to pirate software [trolltalk.com], defraud job training programs [trolltalk.com], file off GPL copyrights [trolltalk.com], help defraud customers [trolltalk.com], and all sorts of crap [trolltalk.com]
Internships benefit the teachers, the colleges, and the politicians who say "we're doing something to help train people". It's all BS.
Depends On Context And Company. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In before someone speaks for the businesses (Score:2, Interesting)
They can do whatever they want, and have it amount to de facto indentured servitude.
Do you think that if you say "de facto" it makes you sound like less of an asshat than "literally"?
Indentured servitude means you have a massive obligation to that person that you're working off. How is an internship "in fact" indentured servitude?
To handle that and associated problems...
When you inflate the cost of employing someone to more than the benefit they can bring to the business, they just won't get a job. See, as a simple example, minimum wage laws and 75% teen unemployment.
Re:Why is some random guy's blog on Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
But since you bring up paid internships - the links I'm referring to are to government-subsidized (as in paid) internships that are just as bad.
Zombie companies that continue to scam the system even after the government dissolves them, because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing ,happen more often then you'd think.
Politicians like these programs because they make it look like they're "doing something", even though they are far less cost-effective than just spending half the money on "hookers and booze", and banking the rest.
Colleges and universities like these programs because they get to charge a grossly inflated price for "training" that goes nowhere - like "webmaster's assistant".
Students learn not to complain because the courses aren't coming out of their pockets or purses, and they get to extend their benefits for a year. If they do complain (irrelevant material, poor teachers, crappy on-the-job internships) they don't graduate AND lose their benefits.
We need more whistle-blowers, not fewer.
Re:You're demonstrating my point, thank you. (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to wonder if you've ever actually had a job. MW encourages shitty management by being set so artificially high that useful employees' wages are effectively no higher than the janitors'. MW is supposed to be what you pay a 17 year-old kid to flip burgers for the summer so he can buy a Dodge Neon, but when it's a quarter an hour less than people were making in established professional careers, all it ends up accomplishing is driving up consumer goods prices and effectively legislating professional careers into the poorhouse.
Open Source? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this is *way* different from donating all your time to an open source project in order to get some experience...
Re:Why is some random guy's blog on Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you study how to create physical things (circuits, engines, airplanes, cars, bridges, chemical refineries, etc.) and you never build one of industrial quality of at least 10-15 year ago, you wasted your time. Computers and computer simulations are tools. Knowing how to use tools is not the same as engineering.
Anything so advanced that it has NEVER been done by an engineer before is not really an engineering endeavor. It falls under applied sciences. Yes, I know that's a tautology. Unfortunately, that's true of anything which describes a middle stage of an iterative process. I suppose a more exact wording of it would be that something which has never been done by an engineer transitions from applied science to engineering only through an effort of an experienced engineer working with an applied scientist. Expecting that a novice engineer can bring about such a transition is naive.
Part of the work of an engineer is dealing with unpredictabilities which make their way into live systems. Emulators don't do that (not in the same way that real life does anyway). You wouldn't expect someone who studies all the nuances of a foreign language, but never practices it, to be a good translator. You shouldn't expect any different from an engineer. And someone who practiced in front of a computer wouldn't be a good translator, either (although he might be in a better position to start practicing with live speakers).
Re:Why is some random guy's blog on Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
I interviewed and hired interns. (Score:4, Interesting)
Internship Well Paid
My manager and I working in a top 5 financial investment bank actively interviewed and hired ~5 interns at $14/hour in 2000 from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, US for positions on the Windows Server Administration team during the school's summer time break. The internship was fully sponsored and encouraged by the company and paid very well for basically a very light work load 20-30 hours a week with a fully flexible schedule (come as you please). Other departments such as Desktop Support, Network, and Telecom also got candidates for internships but from different schools.
Interviewing Interns
We interviewed the students at their university during an open internship session where there were representatives from all the other major corporations there looking for young talent. We would read each candidate's resume, check their chosen course of study, skim the clubs that they were part of, but really focus on their technical hobbies to have them talk to us about their experiences with technical equipment and/or using and fixing their laptop and computer systems. We would ask them open ended questions such as if you had a project to build a powerful workstation computer for a high-up executive what would you need, which components would you choose, how would you build and configure it. Some interns did not have extensive technical or computer experience but we would still give them a chance to show us that they had the interest and ability to learn something new for them, such as building new servers, clusters, and storage systems in the data center then troubleshooting them.
The interns that showed interest in hardware would become apprentices to one of the Core team members and would focus on new server hardware, cabling, clusters, storage, and rack builds in our data centers and would shadow to learn the procedures then actually perform all of them under supervision.
The interns that showed interest in the operating system and active directory would work on the Infrastructure team to maintain and deploy new file servers, domain controllers, name servers, etc.
The interns that showed interest in software would work with the Application Support team members to learn the various business and back-end packages, databases, web servers, etc.
The interns that would spend a lot of time chatting and talking on their phones would be put in the Rapid Response team and deal with incoming trouble tickets, phone calls, and general issues and would learn proper communication, diagnostic procedures, and how to put their yappers to good use.
We would then rotate the interns half-way through their internship so that they could learn the work of another team and we would give them a choice where they would want to work. They got about 4-weeks of time in each team and learned the work pretty well.
The interns would also be given special projects to work on that were ideas that we had for improving our work such as consolidated information web sites and portals, documentation, organization, and other things that required fresh thinking and ideas in a rigid work flow. We listened to their ideas and also used some of the web sites and automation tools that they produced for us so that was a great help.
Internship Impressions
The interns all got a pretty good and realistic view of what it is to work as a Windows Server Administrator and do the normal blue-collar work that we do as admins. A few of them expressed interest in working as an admin doing real (often boring) work as administrators and we expressed interest in hiring them for our department, desktop, or network departments after they graduate. A handful did get hired in various departments.
Many interns did not have the knack nor the interest for server administration and had dreams of higher goals for their life and some were honest enough to tell us this at the end of their internships. I hope that their experience showed them what real
Calling BS on PAID post-secondary training (Score:2, Interesting)
I read the comments here, the passionate communist circletimessquare has posted a number of highly moderated replies, so I understand the local sentiment.
Here is the other side of this equation:
Most people who go to the universities are wasting their time and paying arm and leg for the privilege, and since most people who go there don't want to give up an arm and a leg right away, they get the government approved mortgages instead so that they can have the privilege of being stuck with that mortgage until they do lose an arm and a leg, and they still are in no better position to land a well paying , satisfying job.
So if INSTEAD of going to university the students went to become interns, that would make actual sense. Training on a job and not paying for it? Where is the question?
You see, university education is inflated, just like housing prices and US bonds are. To differentiate yourself from the rest, you have to get masters and even more than that today. But in reality, people who go there, they get their mortgage (without the house), and they take humanities.
So these "sociologists" later understand they can't get a job, so they move on into law, getting into more debt in the process.
What most people really should do is never to go to any university but instead they should try to get internship right after high school. In 4 years, when their "highly edumacated" counterparts will be coming out of their universities, these interns would have had 4 years of on-the-job training, paying NOTHING for the privilege and likely in that time period they would have already landed a job that was paying them, even if they took the first 1-2 internships for free.
Internship is an excellent SUBSTITUTE for college, but you have to understand that, and you have to understand that in reality to get yourself differentiated from the pack you really need to think outside of the box the government has placed you into.
Government, (regardless of what communists like circletimessquare tell you), are the evil incarnate intrinsically. But since the vacuum will not stay vacuum forever, the government must be created and maintained in extremely limited capacity, so it cannot hurt the society (as it always does) by growing and destroying the economy and creating poverty in the process.
So called "solutions" to poverty, that governments profess, are in reality their way of staying in power and indeed stealing ever more power by offering those, who do not understand the world around them (the voting majority) to sacrifice those, who actually truly increase the wealth of the society - business creators.
Yes, business creators, those who wake up one day and start their own business, find the money, find the idea, get excited, hire somebody for help (and maybe get an intern as well), and begin the insanely difficult task of trying invent a way to make profit by providing the society with new goods/services and providing the society with new wealth and jobs. These people contribute much more than their 'fair share' before they pay any taxes. If they succeed, it's not because of any government help. If they succeed though, the government wants to come and claim its cut.
If they lose and do not succeed, there will be no government there, standing offering help with all the losses. (Of-course there is a huge exception, as government has shown time and again, that it will protect its preferred monopolies in all industries, to the detriment of economy and society, and will bail them out without regard for the economy and society, so that's another way governments are evil.)
Back to the topic here:
If you are a university student already, and you are doing intern work for no pay - then it maybe counterproductive, because you have already lost.
If you decide to do unpaid internship instead of going to a university - you have your head in the right place, as opposed to those, who have their heads up their asses, you are thinking.
As to the other complains, that