What's up with those fucking internships? Is it a new way to exploit people and have someone do all the hard work that no one else wants to do but for free?

Oh and by the way, if your company is worth more than 10 million dollars and you still have unpaid internships FUCK YOU.

Internships are usually for newbs without experience. To illustrate it better: juniors are newbs with experience. Juniors can actually be productive, but their productivity is very low, and the code quality and solution quality is very bad, and always needs review, fixing, etc. In the end you waste a lot of time on juniors, while not getting that time worth of good stuff.

Now interns... They are like juniors, except they rarely do anything useful and demand a ton of time from mid and senior devs.

To pay that in any way is already a huge benefit for the intern. Only the best of the best deserve that.

@AndSoWeCode

I disagree. When you tell a person to spend 8 hours a day at your office, you pay them a living (at least minimum wage).

If your team is small, you can't afford interns.

If your team is large, you pay your interns well, you let the intern fix small bugs and prep tasks by doing research. You find work for them which is educational to them, useful to the company and make sure they can't infect a master git branch with naive code.

Interns and juniors are part goodwill towards the industry, part loyalty program. It's an investment you start paying for on day one, and will pay off after a few years.

It's not cheap slave labor.

If you use it as such it will bite your company in the ass eventually. People are not stupid, and reputation is everything.

@bittersweet does school also have to pay its students for attending classes? Because internship is extended school that drips into a professional career.

Fixing bugs... Most bugs I can fix by just looking at it, just by knowing that it exists and writing a coupe of lives of code. It takes me 5 minutes to fix any bug in code that I know well, and 1h otherwise. From my experience with juniors (not even interns), it takes them a day just to figure it out, with help from peers on fixing and validating the fix.

Interns are there to learn the ropes. Them doing anything productive is very rare, and is usually when the company doesn't do anything hard, like WordPress sites.

My former employer was stupid enough to entrust a client with a simple project to an intern(me), and it cost them their client. Similar stories I've learned from other colleagues.

@AndSoWeCode

A knowledge economy is based on people learning far into their lives, so that means living on debt until you're 30?

I've never been an intern, I'm a well paid senior.

But I don't think all the wealth should accumulate with older dirtbags, so yes, my company pays students/interns minimum wage (plus travel expenses, healthy lunches, insurances, etc) when they enter the company, quickly rising to market competitive rates (€40-70k) once they acquire more practical knowledge.

When I review their PRs I abuse them verbally, but never financially.

@bittersweet why would a company pay someone useless? What does it get in return? Because if it doesn't get anything, it's wasting money. A competitor that doesn't do that will have more money to spend on stuff that make them better.

The point is that while its a good feeling to help people, it's contrary to business. Not businesses should nurture people, but parents and the state should. If they do, they are becoming worse for everyone else.