Fuck everyone who expects interns to work for free and Fuck you if you think that an unpaid intern is lazy.

Change my mind.

@C0D4 shouldn't it be the other way around?
Either way if you are already brainwashed, nothing I can say can change your mind, mate.

@HitWRight not really.
Convince me this is wrong 🙄

Ps: interns get paid here.

It's not work if it's unpaid.

@C0D4 There is inherent power difference between the Employer and the employee. Employers can easily abuse the employee, if the employee's (believe) livelihood depends on him/her. If an intern is not paid, and he is doing useful/profitable it is voluntary slavery and sadly young people in the market seem to fall for it mostly.
If an intern is free, he most likely get a mind-numbing repetitive job to do for his next 3 month career with close to zero experience from it. It happens way too often and the saddest thing to see other older people advocating for this fucking bullshit.

@electrineer it's internship

I kinda disagree.
Even though both my internships were paid, but that was because I was expected to be delivering from the word go.
On the other hand, there were two interns in our organization this summer. One of them, at the end of it, gave us nothing but only ate his mentor's hours and head. I don't think we'll even hire him.
On the other hand, the other intern, hardly knew proper OOP either even though he thought he did. Not even the basics... But in him we saw a quick learner, and a hard worker. Eventually, he did started doing things on his own.
He did learn a lot (I know because I was his mentor) and against the hours I put in on him, my company got a potential good hire unless he joins some other company.

So, both the interns took something back with them. One of them, a potential job offer... But they got no stipend.

Obviously if you expect an intern to develop a website for you with very little guidance then you ought to pay.

I actually feel that I work more than those who work there on a normal basis..

Eh, there's two sides of a coin here.

One: Employer side - he's investing money to mentor you. In any case, he's losing money.

Different one: Employee side - he's not getting paid for the work he does. He's losing income for that time.

Now... This can't be all black/white. If intern is doing great and actually kicks off fast enough - why not to pay him? Especially if he doesn't need attention and just works? Of course, if he can't deliver anything on his own and you have to invest a lot, he might end up on a coffee duty (making fun of those but you may get the idea) - then yea, it isn't working for both parties.

We've always had paid interns as long as they provide us with some business value. Be it a low salary or just enough to survive a month - but we paid it. If the intern was a fast learner and adapted fast - we've paid him more as he brought more value. BUT... We had few ones that didn't get paid as they costed us too much time and demanded too much. Just saw no value there

@BugsBuggy @potata I love that you drop some of the somewhat reasonable arguments, but the main point I was trying to make is that companies here who exclusively hire free interns do not lose any money, they order to do menial tasks which somewhat profit the company. Example, you need to upgrade 250 workstations to Windows 10 from Windows 7, or due to bad upgrade script, they are told to delete the bad entries by hand, all 10000 of them, one by one. That is just mental.

@HitWRight oh, this is not internship, it's modern slavery :)

In fact, some internships are actually slavery that is legal

I think any student should realise when to say no. At one point during my internship the stupid boss told me that because of 0 guidance and changing requirements that I still haven't delivered they may not be able to pay me, I directly told him that under no circumstances shall I work without stipend, even though the internship was remote.

I once had to to a two week unpaid internship (German social system can be complex). I "worked" as such. They didn't want me but that feeling was mutual.