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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Yeah; it’s actually pretty easy work. Interns have a lot of uncommitted time, and they’re going to leave soon so you don’t want to integrate them into the team too much. It’s also way easier to build to a well-defined spec (which an in-production endpoint would likely have).

So you let them rewrite something that already works. If what they build is good, you‘ve just knocked out a good chunk of technical debt and found someone you probably want to hire. If not, they don’t get an offer. Either way you probably didn’t pay them much to begin with so there’s a lot of upside and not much downside.

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The question isn't whether or not the work is easy for the intern, it's whether or not it's appropriate. And this cuts both ways: a company that is doing serious core refactoring/redevelopment on the back of an underpaid "intern" is probably exploiting that labor in an unfair way. If it's in fact an unpaid internship, then they're straight up in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And, of course, a company that puts this kind of work on the back of a temporary worker is not treating its own codebase with the respect it deserves. This is rolling the dice with your expertise store -- you have to hope they did it well, because they aren't going to be around to answer questions if they didn't.

If they didn't build it well, you throw it away, and you're only out what you paid the temporary worker and your code review/acceptance test.

The point is this was a well-specified, independent component with an existing functional implementation. This makes an ideal intern/temp/first project, because of those factors - it doesn't require deep knowledge of the organization or other services in the environment or business requirements. You build this, and if we like it, we use it and may give you a job offer.

Unless given other information, you can assume the company complied with the law with respect to paying the intern and the intern accepted the internship offer, and it sounds like he got a great experience out of it.

> If they didn't build it well, you throw it away, and you're only out what you paid the temporary worker and your code review/acceptance test.

Yeah, and that logic is almost inherently a violation of labor law. The whole idea behind allowing "internships" at all is that the intern is deriving value (education) from the relationship that isn't captured by wages alone. The test for whether it's legal involves how much they are supervised by the people who are supposed to be teaching them.

Handing out throwaway projects like you posit is an easy trip to a class action suit.

> a company that is doing serious core refactoring/redevelopment on the back of an underpaid "intern" is probably exploiting that labor in an unfair way

> Handing out throwaway projects like you posit is an easy trip to a class action suit.

So if an intern shouldn't do work on the core product but also shouldn't do throwaway projects, what do you suggest an intern should do? What do you consider an "underpaid" intern? Would you consider 75% salary of campus new hire as underpaid?

GP didn't suggest "Handing out throwaway projects", you did: I think you misparsed their comment.

You ask the intern to do work that you want them to succeed at and you think they will succeed at: like the example given.

Most real internships pay under market rate, but not insanely low. A few years back, going rate for an undergrad CS internship was ~$25/hr or so.

If you’re recruiting on campus, you’re competing with other companies for the most promising candidates. If you come in with an unpaid internship, you’re going to get the leftovers.

I think you may be mistaken about this. If it helps any, I wasn't one of your downvoters; I upvote comments that may be incorrect but lead to an interesting and informative discussion.

I live with an HR exec and read some of this thread to her while she was cutting rhubarb for something she's baking.

She said (paraphrased), "Are you kidding? This is a perfect project for a summer intern. They won't have to take three months to get up to speed with all your internal systems, and of course there is educational value - they will get to see how some talented developers tackled the problem in one language while they translate it to another."

There is immense value to the intern just for being around; the biggest things software dev interns learn isn’t how to code: it’s how to code as part of a team. So check-ins, CI/CD, automated testing, daily meeting cadence, architecture discussions, backlog grooming, code reviews... all things they don’t teach you in school, and all things that you need to know to develop software in the real world.

Most kids right out of school are honestly pretty decent coders. The internship is more about the professional skills than the technical ones.

Is your point of contention the "your code review/acceptance test." as the only time investment?

Even ten years ago, I doubt it was an unpaid internship. They weren’t common in tech going all the way back to dotcom. And if it was a paid internship, labor law doesn’t care. As far as it’s concerned that’s a job like any other.

As far as I know, unpaid internships have not really been a thing in software development.

I was an intern back in 1995 and they paid us $10/hour ($16.88 inflation adjusted) and they provided housing on a college dorm. To put that in perspective, the $650 I made after taxes every two weeks was the cost of tuition every quarter at the state school I attended. I made enough that summer to cover my entire senior year including books.

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