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Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

How did you end up in an unpaid internship? I don't know a single person that didn't have a near 15k-20k/m-equivalent stipend tier internship for SWE/SDE. I'm genuinely concerned because I don't think I have ever heard of unpaid software internships outside of f.e., office wordpress-type labour scams or similar.

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I found the listing on angel.co, a website for finding jobs at startups. I applied to many paid positions, but for the vast majority of them I never heard back, and I was becoming drained from the internship search. I figured that with unpaid positions there'd be a higher success rate and I'd still be getting good experience (although I'm kind of regretting that now).

The startup that I'm working for is pre-funding so they don't have any money to pay to anyone.

Are you getting equity from them?

The role description said that there'd be a small amount of equity included but so far we haven't discussed it. Should I bring this up with the founders?

I would recommend discussing anything related to compensation before starting at a company (definitely before signing contracts). So would recommend sooner rather than later.

After internship searching for a while, there are quite a few internships that are "volunteer work," most are upfront about this, but others don't make it so clear. It is a little annoying to say the least.

Interesting. I almost never find any (for actual software roles), just checked Indeed again and still don't see any for here (SF). If I remove the word software they start appearing and are typically for nonprofits, arts, advocacy groups, etc and the maximum extent of tech is writing a blog article or sending emails.

Yeah, to be fair I never got the full scale of the tasks as if they ever disclosed they were unpaid, I didn't apply.

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