

What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company - hellacious
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/04/unpaid_interns_heres_what_they.html

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billybob
I'd also add that it doesn't build good will. I did an unpaid internship in
college. It was good experience, and I was doing real work (not just getting
coffee), but I did resent not being paid. It sucks to be told, in essence, "we
don't value you at all; we're doing you a favor. Now wear a tie to work and
act like a professional, even though we're not treating you like one."

I did it because I needed to pad my resume. But it didn't make me want to come
back and work for the company, or sing their praises to my classmates.

~~~
zaidf
True in your case. Not true with many of my friends. I run into at least one
friend daily taking up an unpaid internship. Even after I lecture them on how
it is illegal, they insist they are excited about it and don't really care
about the money.

~~~
hga
The possible illegality of them is no problem for the interns, only the
company. I can't see how your lecture could be convincing, especially since a
lot of people think they're moral, each side is getting consideration in the
legal sense.

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dbaugh
This is falls in line with one of the fundamental problems with college and
that problem is that success is college is skewed towards those whose parents,
or whomever, pay their way as opposed to those who pay there own way. Some
kids are financially independent during schools so they MUST have a paying
job. This means that they can't take an unpaid internship to get a resume
boost. They have to stick with their bar tending or wait staff job to keep
making it. Most kids like this are working 20 - 30 hours a week. This doesn't
leave a whole lot of time to build up the resume in any real way. Kids who
have to work don't have time to go out and join clubs and take "leadership"
positions within them. Since leadership positions and work experience in the
field is what employers look for these kids are at a disadvantage. Now take a
kid whose parents pay for tuition, rent, books, etc. He has the time to work
for free and become the president of the student union because he doesn't have
to wait on the drunk college kids 8 hours a night on Thursday, Friday, and
Saturday.

~~~
brettnak
I've actually always thought that employers who learned that a candidate put
his or herself through college thought more highly of that person. Being able
to show up daily and get through the trudge would be, to me, hugely more
telling than a 'leadership position' at a club or a student union. Though,
maybe that's just my lack of school spirit showing.

~~~
dbaugh
I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large
corporations. I do think that small companies tend to value skill and hard
work more, however I find, being in school right now, that it is the large
corporations that are recruiting students at job fairs and not smaller
companies and start ups. I think students who work, and and learn skills on
their own are better off looking for jobs on their own outside of official
recruiting. At least for people going into tech.

~~~
pmiller2
_I do think the "leadership" bias is only really apparent in large
corporations._

I don't know about that. I think it's more impressive myself to see that
someone worked his or her way through school than to see tons of
extracurricular activities. In fact, unless they're professionally relevant,
extracurricular activities don't rank very highly at all on my list of things
I'd like to see on a resume.

Edit: Of course, I should add, I don't work for a major corporation, either.

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eplanit
1\. You're giving young people opportunity for learning and experience, both
in a profession, and in working with others.

2\. You're helping establish a new generation of relevant workers by offering
them meaningful experiences instead of typical summertime opportunities such
as burger-flipping or lawn-mowing. Your internship is about their future, a
typical summertime job is nothing more than "spending money"

3\. You're allowing yourself to fully evaluate a potential employee's
abilities.

My career began with an internship (over 20 years ago), which I always value
as having been a springboard for my career.

~~~
mcantor
Was your internship paid or unpaid?

Where did you stay while you were interning? How were your living expenses
paid for?

~~~
eplanit
Unpaid, at home, and with my own money. I didn't treat the internship as a
career. It was a part of my education, and I was happy to invest the time and
effort. I learned an enormous amount, and it benefits me to this day.

~~~
mcantor
Where'd you get the money to live on while you were doing your unpaid
internship? What I'm getting at here is that part of the point of the article
was that unpaid internships favor people who come from more privileged
backgrounds.

~~~
eplanit
Yes, for those whole three months I fended for myself with my savings.

Your interpretation seems as though something is being imposed on someone, and
some social injustice is being committed. Unpaid internships have advantage
for the employer, and for the intern. That there are some people who can
afford to invest their time and effort more so than others is not the fault of
the employer, or of the intern who has the means. Nobody in this being is
treated favorably, and nobody is being denied.

Life isn't inherently equal and fair. People with 'advantage' (meaning
wherewithal and means) and will use it, and should.

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ugh
If something is interesting enough and if I like the people short internships
(two months tops) close to the place where I live (I can drive there with my
bike) are something I would most certainly do. (And they are legal in Germany.
No minimum wage, either.) I don’t know whether I would be overly eager to work
all that hard. Depends on the stuff I’m working on, I guess. Yet money – even
if it’s only a little – shows me clearly that you care. I think it’s a
important signal. I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a
little money.

~~~
billybob
"I think many interns would be happy if you paid them only a little money."

Absolutely. As a college student, I would have been happy with a low wage; I
didn't need to support myself with the internship income. But after working
half the day somewhere, it would have been nice to have a few bucks for a
meal, and made it feel less like slave labor.

Mostly it would have been the symbolic value, though. The statement that
"you're worth hiring, and we're better off for having you here."

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zaidf
Why is the government exempt from unpaid internship laws? The White House has
tonnes of unpaid interns from what I hear.

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danskil
Aren't unpaid internships illegal?

Updated: Yes, sometimes...i read the rest of the article.

~~~
samdk
Most are. There are six criteria an (unpaid) internship has to meet for it to
not be illegal. Essentially, the company offering the internship has to be
offering it solely for the benefit of the intern and can derive no real
benefit from it themselves. (And a company can't offer an unpaid internship as
a way to avoid paying employees for training.)

The full list (linked from the article) is here:
[http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/new-study-raises-
qu...](http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/new-study-raises-questions-on-
legality-of-unpaid-internships/)

~~~
josefresco
"and can derive no real benefit from it themselves"

I would think that would be pretty impossible to conform to no matter how you
structured the intern's day/tasks. Unless you simply provided them a desk in
which to study, or worked and let them observe with no interaction I would
think sticking to this rule would be difficult.

~~~
hga
I think that's the idea, to make it impossible for them to be useful _and_
legal.

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avehn
In addition, an unpaid internship only attracts students who do not know their
own value. The really good ones know they can find a place willing to pay at
least some of what they are worth.

~~~
kiuygtfdghjn
No they attract only students who DO know their worth.

$BIG_WALLst_COMPANY will only employ people who have done an internship on
Wall St.

This means that all Wall st $BIG_COMPANIES can offer unpaid internships
because they have a $$$ value to you. And compared to the $$ cost of going to
Harvard/Yale (the only other requirement for Wall St) it doesn't really
matter.

If a student thinks that the $1000/month they could be earning in a paid
internship doing web design in Idaho has more value they are probably wasting
their tuition anyway.

~~~
alexgartrell
students who go to Microsoft or Google can expect to make about $5,000 a
month. A friend of mine god an offer from a financial who was trying to give
him $6,000 a month.

I'll also add that my cousin is a global controller for a relatively small (I
guess?) hedge fund on Wall Street and he cut his teeth working a job during
college. Also, he went to Ohio State.

In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they are
paying you (by them or any other company).

And again, going beyond that, my friends who are working on Wall St. (CMU
kids) are being paid.

Unpaid (and poorly paid) internships are for suckers.

~~~
hga
" _In Computer Science, at least, you will not be taken seriously unless they
are paying you_ "

Indeed. I very recently checked with my friend who runs MIT's EECS
undergraduate program and she said that all their internships are paid.

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sum1changdmypwd
I think unpaid internships can be good. We must realize that there is more
value than money. If a company establishes something that they have considered
how you can benefit from, then I think they should be encouraged, particularly
for early phase startup companies that don't have the cash but have
interesting new solutions.

~~~
akgerber
There may be more value than money, but there isn't more you can eat than
food.

