>No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor.
You're kidding, right?
>For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap.
>For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term.
So are many dirt cheap outsourced developers. That doesn't change the why they are hired.
>So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term,
For a long term investment pay off.
>Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
I've literally never seen a company make a net profit on interns. Talk to people running intern programs: it's explicitly seen as a hiring funnel for full-time, not as an end of itself.
> A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
The lawsuit came after the cartel had already stopped functioning. Facebook refused to play ball and started recruiting aggressively from the other companies (particularly Google), directly undermining the wage-fixing.
You should work at a law firm sometime. Interns are very, very profitable for them, because they work insane hours and do everything they are told without question.
The tech industry isn't that different. The only reason kids get a not-horrible salary interning at Google and jack shit at Marie Claire is because of the prevailing industry salaries.
(which is something the tech titans are trying to "fix")
You're kidding, right?
>For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap.
>For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term.
So are many dirt cheap outsourced developers. That doesn't change the why they are hired.
>So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term,
For a long term investment pay off.
>Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.