You’re plugging the gaps with unskilled labor. And you’re usually not reviewing their work very much.

So you end up making work by taking on interns. Either that, or your quality suffers. (But you probably don’t know about it because you’re probably doing QC with interns….)

I believe this is most likely made worse by not paying them, for a bunch of (I think) obvious reasons: They have to have another “job” to support themselves (mom & dad will only have so much depth to their wallets); they’re liable to start resenting the lack of pay at some point and either sabotage or slack off; and, most insidiously, the fact that you’re not paying them for their labor means you’re not likely to pay someone to mentor them in their labor.

But it will keep happening until something breaks. (Really, it’s going to have to be a lot of somethings, I think.)

I think it’s less a case of what the market will bear than it is of what the market can afford to fight.

(Note, though, that in areas with immediate functional feedback and a real need for skilled workers, like software and engineering — see John Sawyer’s comment — there are well-paid internships. But the differences there are a whole ‘nother thread.)

On the other, a number of my clients are small or startup software companies. For them, an software developer intern would be of net negative value; somebody not even done with college will likely soak up more time than they’d contribute in work. When they had cash to spend on an employee, they get somebody who will be actually productive and stick around more than 3 months.

Although they could never afford a paid intern, the experience for the right person would be fantastic. In a small company, you get to see how a business actually works; in small ones, you see a tiny, often dysfunctional piece of the whole. On a small project, you get to touch real code and have a real influence. Interning with a small, tight team, you’d get a great deal of valuable mentoring.

I wish I could have had that kind of intership, even unpaid, early on in my career. It would have taught me things that took a long time to figure out.

I’ve been interning for a tiny little publisher for the last month– by tiny little publisher, I mean the company consists of the President and 6 interns, who come and go on three or six month intervals. For the three months before I started, the company published a major title (it’s received a lot of press in the last few weeks) based on the work of a single editorial intern and a design intern, while the President herself was often gone for days at a time in the midst of some nasty personal issues.

Who thinks that this is ethical? Even if most of the “real” work in the publication process was paid for (editing and design were contracted out to freelancers), the administrative duties of running the company were mostly left to these interns, who did all and more of the duties that an Editorial Assistant would normally be paid for.

We certainly require supervision, and a paid professional could do our work better–but the fact is that this company could not function without interns. The President literally cannot afford to pay her workers(the Accounting interns told me so)–so she doesn’t; she hires interns.

Thoughts?

My second internship was required to graduate (English; professional writing concentration). A software developer in the extremely small town expressed interest in having me do tech writing, paid, with a strong whiff of employment after graduation. That company waffled for so long that I finally had to look elsewhere in desperation. I ended up at the university career center, unpaid, doing somewhat related work but mainly just sitting around since they were too busy to deal with me. The only reason I was able to do it at all was because it was during my last semester.

If internships are going to be required, they should be paid and meaningful.

We don’t actually have interns who are looking for jobs here after they graduate. They are *all* wanting to go straight to med/grad school, and it will be 10+ years before they’re looking for a job, which is highly unlikely to be in our field.

When we have people who are actually looking for entry-level jobs here after graduation, what we do is help them find part-time entry-level jobs here for during school/summer, that can transition to full-time after graduation — but those aren’t interns, those are regular employees, with decent salaries and benefits. Out of those, the percentage who go on to full-time work here is pretty high — I’d guess 80% of those who actually want to work here after graduation, closer to 100% some years.

@113, No the other Scott

I wasn’t generalizing my post to what it is like for all companies, I was replying to a specific set of posts that were stating that *all* interns should be paid, no matter what, and to do elsewise was unethical. I was attempting to explain — and perhaps not successfully enough — that there are indeed situations in which paying interns does not make sense, and not doing so is not unethical in the least. When interns are actually doing work, I’m all for paying them — see my comment above in this post to MadLibrarian.

And if an internship is really just a pre-employment training program, then I think it makes sense to pay them then, too — really, it’s equivalent to what the first few months on the job would be. In those cases, the company is still getting a real benefit from the time the intern is spending there, because it’s that much less time the company would have to spend “getting them up to speed” once they are hired. But the reality is that some internships are just drastically different than that.

Now, we occasionally have interns who come back a year later and are interested in entry-level work — often because they realized while interning here that those sorts of tasks aren’t as “beneath them” as they had previously thought, and that working here is a better deal than babysitting another summer. :p But at that point, they switch from being unpaid interns to being paid interns — paid, because they are doing entry level work, even though they are requiring extra supervision. We only still call them interns because they have no intent on working here after graduation, and it’s useful from a workflow perspective for us to delineate that. In the payroll system, though, they are regular employees, and are paid at the same rate — and the work they are doing is employee work, not intern makework.

With the exceptions of Pixar and ILM. Dude, I’d go for intern there any time. And how would you like your coffee?

(I managed to get hired six weeks before graduation by overhearing that the radio station we were visiting was shorthanded. Got a letter of recommendation and sent in my resume before the week was out— never hurts to know someone’s desperate.)

I was always expected to work for my spending money. Yes, I got a small allowance, but I was encouraged to work for all the stuff that didn’t cover. So I babysat until I was old enough to do other stuff, and then at 14 I started working retail (had to get a special work permit to do that). I worked at Baskin-Robbins, then at the local bank giving away the gift premiums you’d get for opening a new account.

By the time I graduated college (at 20) I had six years of work experience. (I worked all through college, usually full time, usually close to minimum wage.) True, none of the work had a thing to do with my college degree (languages) or ultimate careers (computer stuff, plus of course running a little indie record label), but I did learn how to show up, do my work, work well with others, organize my tasks, and document my work for others.

It did, of course, mean a lot less time for teenager stuff, some of which I regret. There were school activities I couldn’t join in because I had to be at work most days after school. But overall, I feel incredibly fortunate that my parents encouraged me (heck, practically required me) to get jobs and pay for things I wanted (like a clunker car to get to work in). In a lot of ways, it gave me a real leg up on other folks my age.

WTH! To say that out loud in the front of all the grad students! Forget about me ever applying for a job with that company. And to make it even more shocking, this is not the US of A (where, as everybody over here knows, workforce is treated like dirt). This is Sweden, a worker’s paradise, where workers’ unions rival the government for strenght, where everybody has unemployment insurance and health insurance payed by the state (ultimately paid for by the companies of course, tax on paying somebody a salary is roughly 40%), where you can’t fire people at will, etc etc. It’s always worse when it goes against your pre-concieved notions, isn’t it.