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Comment by jazzyb | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like a wonderful program, and that student sounds significantly more prepared for the working world than most recent-graduates I've met.

If I were the company, I would re-think not paying interns. I understand that they don't know anything when they come in and need their hands held, but an unpaid internship limits your pool of students to those who are well-off enough not to have to work. Paying even minimum wage could open doors for poor students who would otherwise be unable to engage in the internship because they have to wait tables or flip burgers to help provide for their family.

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It's not necessarily about the usefulness of the candidate but more the freedom it provides.

If he was paid he would need to work on chosen projects, not what he wants to work on.

"If he was paid he would need to work on chosen projects, not what he wants to work on." I don't think that has to be true. It's not inconcievable that a company pays an intern for undirected research.

But that speaks to the problem posed by this program: it blurs the line between mentorship and internship.

Mentorship is always unpaid and strictly for the benefit of the student.

Internship should always be paid (unpaid internships are legally questionable) and are founded on employer-employee relationships, which are almost always for the benefit of the employer first, then the employee.

While its great that the company supports mentorship, and that it worked out so well for the mentor and mentee in this instance, I feel like the ambiguous structure makes it a hard model to follow at many workplaces.

Unpaid internships are allowed if the intern isn't a) treated like an employee and b) the intern can't do work that would otherwise be considered that job of an employee. That's exactly what is happening here.

He was not doing the job of an employee nor was he treated like one.

As soon as he started doing the work an employee would normally be tasked with they put him into the payroll. They did the right thing.

Of course it works the opposite direction too, in that the youth unemployment rate has been increasing for many years such that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 (probably higher) can't get work, so if you're going to be unemployed anyway, may as well learn something that could be highly profitable in the future.

Another interesting anecdote is I "worked" as a paid intern in the mornings on Friday therefore I basically did meaningless manual labor for a semester, but that was during the school day 1st shift and it had no impact on my 2nd shift "real" meaningless manual labor job that paid my tuition (back when that was financially possible). If it were unpaid I'd feel free to shadow and learn from numerous employees as I saw fit, but being paid I felt I "had to" do my assigned job of pulling and terminating and testing cat-5 ethernet cable all day, which was necessary work but a complete waste of my substantial skills. They were a bottom up employer and I was completely uninterested and not terribly good at pulling and terminating network cabling, so we were both very happy when the relationship ended. "Well you've got to pull cable for maybe two years before you can transfer to networking or the PLC division or unix admin or VAX programming" "Uh well, no actually I don't have to, and I start a real job doing just that, two weeks after this internship ends" "Well OK that settles that then"

This is a high school student, not a college intern. I did a similar thing when I was in high school - during the school year there were incredibly tight restrictions on any job I could have, including limited hours per week, review and oversight by the school, and lots of extra paperwork for the company. Generally it is just easier for both parties to exclude the pay to get around these requirements.

> This is a high school student, not a college intern.

I know. My comment was addressing high school interns like the student in the article.

> during the school year there were incredibly tight restrictions on any job I could have, including limited hours per week, review and oversight by the school, and lots of extra paperwork for the company

I'm curious if we are even talking about the same thing. When/where I grew up, the school had no say in how much or where a student worked as long as it wasn't during the school day, nor did a company have to do any extra paperwork if their employee was a student.

> I'm curious if we are even talking about the same thing. When/where I grew up, the school had no say in how much or where a student worked as long as it wasn't during the school day, nor did a company have to do any extra paperwork if their employee was a student.

This might be state-dependent, but also might be county-dependent. I've even had multiple high-school interns in CA where we had to follow VERY strict guidelines and fill out a lot of paperwork. When I worked as a high school student in WA I was limited to 4 hrs per shift on any weekday and a max of 2 weekdays worked per week.

Fascinating. In Tennessee at the turn of the millennium, I knew many students who were working 6-hour shifts at fast-food joints after school and were working several nights a week. That doesn't even take into account the kids who had to work at their family's businesses (farms, stores, etc.).

> that student sounds significantly more prepared for the working world than most recent-graduates I've met.

I couldn't agree with you more.

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