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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Are their internships open to ... non traditional students?

Folks changing careers and such?

I changed careers a few years ago and I would have been happy to get my feet wet in a new career with an internship or etc. But most are highly centered around the existing 4 year university system, so if you're not in that system that opportunity is closed.

A few were open to folks with other experience, but most were still traditional student focused.

I feel like with the way technology, jobs, and everything changes so quickly that internships too maybe should be more open to different paths.

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I think you're imagining that this would be a good way to get a foot in the door, but many internship programs are more competitive than full time programs.

Partly this is because they usually have limited spots.

Another large component is the makeup of the applicant pools. Internship applicants include lots of strong applicants that won't be in the full-time applicant pool because they'll get hired out of internships.

Anecdotally, our coding screen gives intern applicants a median score 13% higher than full-time applicants.

Intern applicants tend to also be much more likely to have prepared for coding interview questions.

I also had harder internship questions, and a harder time passing, when interviewing at places like Yelp than I did full-time at most FAANG-tier companies (disclaimer: I did not interview at Netflix).

Cloudflare specifically used to bring in paid interns from programs that targeted women that left the workforce due to having children. Plenty of interns were offered FTE once the internship ended. So I know they are happy to evaluate different types of interns, not just college students.

We still do, via https://www.pathforward.org/

Very nice!

I’m not sure bout cloudflare but over the last 2 years more tech companies are expanding their internship programs into “early career” programs that accept the non traditional candidates.

At my company at least, you have to be a "diverse candidate" to realistically qualify for that opportunity however.

At my company you do not. Anecdotally (again, for my company) I hear that being from a not-top-N-university helps your chances, so maybe that extends to no university? I'm really not sure.

if one can get past HR, most people probably don't care, though it might be seen as strange

imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.

> imho major reason for targeting this age group is that they are willing to work for cheap without being insulted.

I don't find this very convincing. we get a lot of bright, motivated interns at my company, but even so, there's a limit to what they get actually get done in three months working in an unfamiliar codebase. the deliverable itself usually isn't worth what you have to pay interns in a competitive market. we do find a large portion of our entry-level hires through the internship program, which I believe is the real value to the company.

Yeah my experience with interns is the same.

Outside of the exceptionally rare ultra high performers (I can think of maybe 2 I met like that). Interns really can't get a great deal done, even if just because they just arrived. There's a lot of onboarding for anyone joining, and productivity always takes a hit there.

I mean for any big tech company, its not that cheap. I made $42.50 an hour plus a housing stipend when I was an intern, and I don't think that I did very much. A lot of the reason that companies do that is that paying an intern about $20k for the summer and converting them to a full time employee after graduation is cheaper than what they would spend to hire someone through the interview process and stuff like that.

I worked with a lot of interns, and in my experience the ONLY value was finding folks randomly who were good enough to hire. The actual productivity / work for the interns on average was very low.

The rate was so low though that I'm not sure if it really was a net positive, but I think the company liked the PR and such too.

I mean yeah, that's not really a secret. The head of the intern program that I was at straight up told all the interns that it was worth it to the company if even 20% of the interns who were hired returned as full time employees.

We sometimes get completed usable work out of interns, but it’s much more a recruiting vehicle (for us) and a training/pay it back for the candidates. The recruiting can pay off for a decade when you land a star out of college and retain them.

To put things into perspective, a 3 months internship in France (which are usually imposed as part of master degree) is paid approximately 1650€ (1800 USD), for the whole internship. Yes, that doesn’t even pay a rent.

I don't know what perspective that really brings. I'm sure that there are internships that pay less, but Cloudflare is a big company that is in the Bay Area, so thats pretty much what they're gonna pay.

Certainly not in most paris tech compagnies : mine pays 1000/month and its a startup. In Big tech its at least 1500.

They don’t know they’re being insulted, and they lack the tools to address the issue.

But more importantly, you don’t get sass for being a bad boss from a bunch of kids who have never had a real boss before.

I wonder how often this "being insulted" thing is really a thing.

I worked with a lot of interns in my time. Almost everyone seemed to greatly overestimate their productivity / use. The internships we offered were NOT net moneymakers / all that useful. They were more PR, random chance of finding someone good enough to hire.

Maybe I wasn't seeing how many internships work but straight out of or in college into an internship is a real roll of the dice productivity wise in my experience.

No doubt at the top schools / top candidates are different, but most, I'm skeptical of.

For those of us changing careers... many of us are (well this was a few years ago so not me at the moment) too ;)

For most industries just getting any 'experience' is half the battle.

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