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.

@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.

@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.