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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

This is where the horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees, comes to bite us in the ass.

The whole idea of interns, is as training positions. They are supposed to be a net negative.

The idea is that they will either remain at the company, after their internship, or move to another company, taking the priorities of their trainers, with them.

But nowadays, with corporate HR, actively doing everything they can to screw over their employees, and employees, being so transient, that they can barely remember the name of their employer, the whole thing is kind of a worthless exercise.

At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very good engineers, upon returning to Japan. It was well worth it.

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I agree that interns are pretty much over in tech. Except maybe for an established company do do as a semester/summer trial/goodwill period, for students near graduation. You usually won't get work output worth the mentoring cost, but you might identify a great potential hire, and be on their shortlist.

Startups are less enlightened than that about "interns".

Literally today, in a startup job posting, to a top CS department, they're looking for "interns" to bring (not learn) hot experience developing AI agents, to this startup, for... $20/hour, and get called an intern.

It's also normal for these startup job posts to be looking for experienced professional-grade skills in things like React, Python, PG, Redis, etc., and still calling the person an intern, with a locally unlivable part-time wage.

Those startups should stop pretending they're teaching "interns" valuable job skills, admit that they desperately need cheap labor for their "ideas person" startup leadership, to do things they can't do, and cut the "intern" in as a founding engineer with meaningful equity. Or, if you can't afford to pay a livable and plausibly competitive startup wage, maybe they're technical cofounders.

>At my old company, we trained Japanese interns. They would often relocate to the US, for 2-year visas, and became very good engineers,

Damn, I wish that was me. Having someone mentor you at the beginning of your career instead of having to self learn and fumble your way around never knowing if you're on the right track or not, is massive force multiplier that pays massive dividends over your career. It's like entering the stock market with 1 million $ capital vs 100 $. You're also less likely to build bad habits if nobody with experience teaches you early on.

Yup. It was a standard part of their HR policy. They are all about long, long-term employment.

They are a marquée company, and get the best of the best, direct from top universities.

Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there.

We got damn good engineers as interns.

>Also, no one has less than a Master's, over there.

I feel this is pretty much the norm everywhere in Europe and Asia. No serious engineering company in Germany even looks at your resume it there's no MSc. degree listed, especially since education is mostly free for everyone so not having a degree is seen as a "you problem", but also it leads to degree inflation, where only PhD or post-docs get taken seriously for some high level positions. I don't remember ever seeing a senior manager/CTO without the "Dr." or even "Prof. Dr." title in the top German engineering companies.

I think mostly the US has the concept of the cowboy self taught engineer who dropped out of college to build a trillion dollar empire in his parents garage.

Possibly also because they don’t observe added value of the additional schooling.

Also because US salaries are sky high compared to their European counterparts, so I could understand if the extra salary wasn’t worth the risk that they might not have that much extra productivity.

I’ve certainly worked with advanced degree people who didn’t seem to be very far along on the productivity curve, but I assume it’s like that for everything everywhere.

Graduate school assistant in the US pay such shit wages compared to Europe that you would be eligible for food stamps. Opportunity cost is better spent getting your bachelors degree, finding employment, and then using that salary to pay for grad school or have your employer pay for it. I’ve worked in Europe with just my bac+3. I also had 3-4 years of applied work experience that a fresh-faced MSc holder was just starting to acquire.

I really think the loss of a mentor/apprentice type of experience is one of those baby-with-the-bath-water type of losses. There are definitely people with the personality types of they know everything and nothing can be learned from others, but for those of us who would much rather learn from those with more experience on the hows and whys of things rather than getting all of those paper cuts ourselves, working with mentors is definitely a much better way to grow.

> horrific disloyalty of both companies and employees

There’s no such a thing as loyalty in employer-employee relationships. There’s money, there’s work and there’s [collective] leverage. We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.

> We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.

A majority of my friends are blue-collar.

You might be surprised.

Unions are adversarial, but the relationships can still be quite warm.

I hear that German and Japanese unions are full-force stakeholders in their corporations, and the relationship is a lot more intricate.

It's like a marriage. There's always elements of control/power play, but the idea is to maximize the benefits.

It can be done. It has been done.

It's just kind of lost, in tech.

>It's just kind of lost, in tech.

Because you can't offshore your clogged toilet or broken HVAC issue to someone abroad for cheap on a whim like you can with certain cases in tech.

You're dependent on a trained and licensed local showing up at your door, which gives him actual bargaining power, since he's only competing with the other locals to fix your issue and not with the entire planet in a race to the bottom.

Unionization only works in favor of the workers in the cases when labor needs to be done on-site (since the government enforces the rules of unions) and can't be easily moved over the internet to another jurisdiction where unions aren't a thing. See the US VFX industry as a brutal example.

There are articles discussing how LA risks becoming the next Detroit with many of the successful blockbusters of 2025 being produced abroad now due to the obscene costs of production in California caused mostly by the unions there. Like 350 $ per hour for a guy to push a button on a smoke machine, because only a union man is allowed to do it. Or that it costs more to move across a Cali studio parking lot than to film a scene in the UK. Letting unions bleed companies dry is only gonna result them moving all jobs that can be moved abroad.

Almost every Hollywood movie you see,that wasn’t filmed in LA, was basically a taxpayer backed project. Look at any film with international locations and in the film credits you’ll see a lots of state-backed, loans, grants, and tax credits. Large part of the film crew and cast are flown out to those locations. And if you think LA was expensive, location pay is even more so. So production is flying out the most expensive parts of the crew to save a few dollars on craft service?

> Because you can't offshore your clogged toilet or broken HVAC issue to someone abroad for cheap on a whim like you can with certain cases in tech.

Yet. You can’t yet. Humanoids and VR are approaching the point quite rapidly where a teleoperated or even autonomous robot will be a better and cheaper tradesman than Joe down the road. Joe can’t work 24 hours a day. Joe realises that, so he’ll rent a robot and outsource part of his business, and will normalise the idea as quickly as LLMs have become normal. Joe will do very well, until someone comes along with an economy of scale and eats his breakfast.

All the Joes I know would spend serious time hunting these robots.

IMO, real actual people don’t want to live in the world you described. Hell, they don’t wanna live in this one! The “elites” have failed us. Their vision of the future is a dystopian nightmare. If the only reason to exist is to make 25 people at the top richer than gods? What is the fucking point of living?

> If the only reason to exist is to make 25 people at the top richer than gods?

You just described most medieval societies.

It's been done before, and those 25 people are hoping to make it happen again.

Hoping is the wrong word. They’re trying harder than ever.

I have been in Union shops before working in tech. In some places they are fine in others its where your worst employee on your team goes to make everyone else less effective.

I personally care a lot about people, but if I was running a publicly traded for-profit, I would have a lot of constraints about how to care for them. (A good place to start, by the way, is not bullshitting people about the financial realities.)

Employees are lucky when incentives align and employers treat them well. This cannot be expected or assumed.

A lot of people want a different kind of world. If we want it, we’re gonna have to build it. Think about what you can do. Have you considered running for office?

I don’t think it is helpful for people to play into the victim narrative. It is better to support each other and organize.

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