
Students Pay Services to Obtain Internships - ALee
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/business/09intern.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
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steamynachos
[http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-
intern...](http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-internships)

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abalashov
Hahaha! Nice.

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derefr
I don't understand this phenomenon. What company wouldn't take someone who was
willing to work for free? Strictly economically, working for $0 should mean
that you can choose any company on the planet to work for, as they all have
something [marginal] to gain, and nothing to lose (on the provisio that they
can't _rely_ on you, because that would potentially cost them money should you
fail to be reliable. They'd have to treat you as a truly "redundant" subsystem
to their machine, giving you tasks that they've already assigned others to
complete in the hope that you'll do them better/faster/whatever-er.)

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likpok
It costs time to come up with a project, for training, a coach, etc. In
general, internships are a good idea (they give both sides a trial run), but
some companies may not want to spend the resources on them.

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elai
Nice thing about compsci is that almost all the internships are paid.

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shaddi
Right on. I go to a large state school that a huge number liberal arts
students. I've never met any students in the sciences (esp. not computer
science) who have held unpaid internships (unless you count research for
credit), but I know several students in the liberal arts who are doing
internships completely unpaid. I even knew one who was living in London for
the summer out of his (or maybe his parents') own pocket! I can't fathom the
idea. Maybe when you have to /pay someone else/ to let you work you should
take the hint that the market doesn't value the labor you are doing. But hey,
we are talking about liberal arts majors here! (I kid, I kid...)

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abalashov
It seems strange to me that in a recession, companies would want less interns
(unpaid or paid), not more.

Yes, using interns effectively - especially in a large organisation - requires
considerable management resources. As well, their limited tenure (a summer,
say) gives them very limited value as a useful, specialised IT employee's
ramp-up period to break even can be longer than that.

Still, there are lots of smaller companies that use interns to build entire
products over summers; I think the one that's most well-known here is probably
Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. And I've run into several web-oriented
companies that do the same here in Atlanta.

I would think they'd be foaming at the mouth for a chance to get unpaid, or
very low-paid slave labour with a rather high skills to cost ratio.

Now, of course, I have little reference frame for the usefulness of interns
outside of the IT profession. But, surely there has to be a correlate to this
opportunity in other directions of commercial endeavour as well?

