Is Your Unpaid Internship Illegal?

If anyone in the HN audience is participating in an unpaid internship — which I doubt, but … — please stop immediately. In this industry (software development) there is absolutely no reason to accept being stepped on like that.<p>You can easily find a paying internship at any half-decent tech company, just interview around at a few places. Speaking as a developer, mentor, and interviewer: internships are where we get our best hires and are an extremely good deal for us — paying $25+&#x2F;hr no benefits is a STEAL for us. And you should name and shame your current &quot;internment&quot; office, for being total assholes.<p>My 2¢.

Very important resource, but what a terrible interface for the questionnaire. Sliding and bouncing balls don&#x27;t add any real value over just showing the flow chart along the side of the questions.

I don&#x27;t think unpaid internships should be illegal. I worked in a lot of unpaid internships early in my career, and it helped me build my skill set. In some cases, a position didn&#x27;t exist, I just asked if I could work for free to learn. Those are jobs I wouldn&#x27;t have had, much to my detriment, if the employer feared being sued or fined for not paying me.<p>I think this is particularly important if you&#x27;re trying to learn how to run a company rather than learn specific job skills.

The United States Department of Labor fact sheet[1] on internships is perhaps more user-friendly than the website kindly submitted here, and is an authoritative source of information. Bottom line: if the worker is providing economic value to your for-profit business, you had better pay the worker at least minimum wage.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.gov&#x2F;whd&#x2F;regs&#x2F;compliance&#x2F;whdfs71.pdf</a>

&quot;Is your flowchart a usability disaster?&quot;

I thought any unpaid work in a Developed country would be illegal.

I haven&#x27;t met any programmers with unpaid internships but I have met individuals in other fields who did them. If I recall correctly it was an internship for a television company (not public) and was just a part of the culture of their industry. A &quot;paying dues&quot; if you will. What exactly are you supposed to do in that situation?

Ok, so I had an &quot;unpaid internship&quot; that essentially consisted of hanging out on this company&#x27;s couch and working on an open-source project (github.com&#x2F;andrewf&#x2F;pcap2har), with occasional mentoring, on hardware they had lying around. This resulted directly in a) a paid internship with this company the next summer, working on different stuff and b) an internship with Google the next next summer, working on pcap2har.<p>Am I supposed to be angry about this? They thought they were going to use pcap2har in their for-profit product, but in fact they didn&#x27;t. Does that change anything? Today, I certainly wouldn&#x27;t take an unpaid internship, having already been measured and found adequate. But for the company that first gave me a chance, I have nothing but gratitude.

Why don&#x27;t people understand it makes no difference if the internship is paid or unpaid? If you are working for an org other than the government or school the rules are the same. Interns don&#x27;t actually exist as a class of worker and labor code is based on a 1946 supreme court decision that referenced bricklayers.<p>I&#x27;m being sued by a former intern whom we paid a very respectable $15&#x2F;hr for part time work over the summer; she&#x27;s coming after me for like $100k because she alleges I wilfully misclassified her as a contractor rather than employee.<p>Bottom line: I won&#x27;t use ANY interns. I say blame it on the millennials and generation entitlement. Drives me out of my mind that this person is trying to get rich off the back of a start up.

I tried to get an unpaid internship once but the guy wouldn&#x27;t even consider it seriously. I was trying to switch fields and felt that if I had a month or two I could learn it and apply for jobs in the new field. In most areas we&#x27;d be able to deal with liability with a contract. Unfortunately, labor contracts seem to be illegal now. Somehow that feels wrong to me but no one talks about it.

Not labeling the start node in their diagram, and having overlapping circles so you can&#x27;t see the arrows, should be illegal.

This has got to be one of the worst implementations of d3.js I have encountered in the wild...

&quot;Is Your Unpaid Internship Illegal?&quot; If not, it sure as hell should be.

Is this diagram horribly put together? Quite possibility yes.

Never mind illegal, it strikes me as unalloyed exploitation.