In my country, almost every college student is expected to finish their degree and apply for an internship, with some universities forcing them to do it and making it a requirement to finish their studies.

Now, this wouldn't be so bad if almost every internship employer in the country didn't expect you to work for free. Seriously, I can estimate 80% of the internships pay you NOTHING. WTF.

Fortunately this is not the case for CS, but every time I tell somebody I recently started an internship, they will ask me: "Oh, but they don't pay you anything, do they?". Of course they pay me! I wouldn't be going to an office every day for 4 hours to do someone else's work if they didn't!!

Why the fuck is it even legal to employ somebody and not pay them a cent, just because "it will look good on your resume"?? And why do people still accept this shit??

Is is like that on other countries as well?

Because an intern is often not only of little use, but consumes valuable time of highly paid professionals. The internship is often a learning process - a continuation of the studies. Except for devs, since they know how to dev, and processes are very well set up in such a way that the intern can quietly sit and develop something without bothering anybody. Which means added value, which translates into payment.

Well, my counterpoint is that devs still in education are a bit of a gamble. Sure, sometime you can get someone who is productive on day one, do great code and understand process.

But most of the time, you get someone who never used a CVS (depends on the school, obviously), code "student-style" with no regards for maintainability, will need to be trained to your development method (agile, waterfall or whatever variant method you use).

As I like to think, you wrote the code and it works? Great, you did about 10% of the work (if not less). Students are able to do that. That's the other 90% that hurt.

With that in mind, you are going to invest sizable time (= money) for very little return, since the guy is only there short-term.

I did the maths. Frankly, I won't employ any dev intern, because even without paying, the return is negative to my eyes.

P.S. : all of this only apply in companies that have proper process and high code quality, obviously. Meaning not THAT many.