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Working for free and other desirable behaviors
I run into this link, which is Lambda school offering to place a student of theirs at your company for up to four weeks without having to pay them or the student. They market it as: Add talented software engineers to your team for a 4 week trial at no cost for your company if you do not hire the fellow.
Just to point out, this is not relevant to me or mine, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I run into this offer because of this:
“This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid.” https://t.co/Dko0zgy05E
— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) November 19, 2020
Scott then wrote: “Pay people for their work. Pay interns.”
I think that this ties closely together with the previous posts on money and open source. On the one hand, I think that this is a pretty good offer for a student, because they are able to get over what is likely to be their biggest hurdle, actual experience in the field. It also lowers the bar on actually getting their foot in the door, after which the second step is likely to be much easier.
On the other hand, for the company, it is a great way to do test runs for entry level positions. Hiring developers is hard, and being able to trial run for a few weeks is much better than trying to predict the candidate’s ability based on a short interview.
On the gripping hand, however, there are a bunch of issues here that are rife for abuse. This also means that the only people who’ll get to this program are those who are able to actually go a month or so without pay. Or that they will need to do this and their regular work as well.
An “easy” way to fix this would be to pay at least minimum wage to the students, of course. The problem is that this would curb a lot of the advantages of the program. I’ll refer you to Dan Ariely and the FREE! experiments for the reasons why. From the company’s perspective: Paying a minimum wage or getting an employee for free is pretty much the same thing. But there is a lot less process to getting someone for free. And once there is a foot in the door, it is a lot easier to convert internally.
What I wish was possible was to be able to hire people (at or near market rate) for a short amount of time and then decide if you want to keep them on afterward. The idea is that actually seeing their work is a much better indication of their capabilities than the interview process. That reduce the pressure to perform during an interview, gives candidate far better chance to impress and show off, allow them to learn, etc.
This is technically possible but not actually feasible in almost all situations. Leaving aside labor laws, consider the employee’s perspective in this case. If they are already working, going to another company and doing a “trial run” which can be unsuccessful is a very powerful reason to not go there. A company with the kind of reputation of “they hired me for a month and then fire me” is going to have hard time getting more employees. In fact, being fired without a few weeks or months of getting hired is such a negative mark on the CV that most people would leave it all together. Because of this, any company that want to do such trail runs cannot actually do so. They have to make the effort to do all the filtering before actually hiring an employee and reserve firing someone after a short time for mostly egregious issues.
The internship model neatly works around this issue, because you have a very clear boundaries. Making it an unpaid internship is a way to attract more interest from companies and reduce the barriers. For the student, even if they aren’t hired at that place, it gives actual industry experience, which is usually a lot more valuable in the job market. Note that you can pay the grocery bill with Reputation bucks, it just takes a little longer to cash them out, usually.
The unpaid internship here is the problem, for a bunch of reasons. The chief among them is that making this free for the companies open this up for abuse. You can put controls and safeguards in place, but the easiest way to handle that would be to make it so they pay at least minimum wage to avoid that. The moment that this is paid, a lot of the abuse potential go away. I can imagine that this would be a major hassle for the school (I assume that the companies would rather pay an invoice rather than hire someone on for a short while), but it is something that you can easily do with economies of scale.
The chief issue then, however, would be that this is no longer free, so likely to subject the students to a much harsher scrutiny, which defeats the purpose of getting them out there in the field and gaining real experience. That is also a problem for the school, I think, since they would have to try to place the student and face a bigger barrier.
Turning this around, however, consider that this was an offer made not for a company, but for open source projects? A lot of open source projects have a ton of work that needs to be done which gets deferred. This is the sort of “weeding the garden” that is usually within the capabilities of someone just starting out. The open source project will provide mentorship and guidance in return for this work. In terms of work experience, this is likely to be roughly on the same level, but without the option to being hired at the end of the four weeks. It also has the advantage of all the work being out there in the open, which allows potential future employers to inspect this.
Note that this is roughly the same thing as the offer being made, but instead of a company doing this, there is an open source project. How would that change your evaluation? The other aspects are all the same. This is still something that is only available for those who can afford to take a month without pay and still make it. From the student’s perspective, there is no major difference, except that there is far less likelihood for actually getting hired in the end.
Comments
Well if it's a mandatory part of education then it's ok to not receive a salary. You don't get a salary for attending university lectures (actually quite the opposite). If the education is provided by the state then also the employers should not be obligated to pay the salary, they just should have an obligation to take certain number of interns onboard every year and provide education-relevant tasks to them (which means - actual work in the area of student specialization, not cheap workforce for mopping the factory floors). The students should know where the education ends and exploitation begins and also there should be a certain time limit on all internships, like no more than 2 months. Equal rules for all.
Rafal,
I can tell you that there are various professions here that have a required initialization period. CPAs and Lawyers are mandated to have 12 - 24 months of in field experience before they can receive their license.
They are generally treated pretty badly. Get ~minimum amount of wages and are considered to be mostly disposable workers, because they have to complete the initialization / certification period.
Similar results for doctors in residency, I understand, but not much knowledge there. Having to do something like that for a few months vs. years is a major difference.
Contract-to-hire is fairly common for software developers here in the US. A developer may work as an independent contractor for about 3-6 months and then the company can choose whether to hire them on full-time. The developer can also use the contract period to evaluate the company and decide whether they want to stay.
Matt,
Contract to hire is understood to last long enough that it is worth it.
I'm talking specifically about the reputation of a company that does just that with shedding people that they find unworkable in a short order.
Moving jobs is a risky thing, and if there is a reputation for "they'll let you go in 4 - 6 weeks", you'll likely skip it. Note I'm talking about this as a way to avoid the filter in the interview.
But what is that particular case? Some clever company makes a business on providing students to companies for free, and also without having to pay these students (but they mention something about payments... i dont know). So, basically, this is what i dont like - there is some commodity, or something that works without money and we all accept it for we consider it beneficial for the society. Like the internships (or at least the original idea) - the student gets the relevant experience, the employer takes part in training future specialists they will need, both take some benefits from that and so there is no necessity to add salary to the mix. Both sides are in this because they get some benefit from that, and it's not forced on them in any way (not talking about lawyers and doctors here). But then, some clever business comes and says 'ok, this is nice arrangement, looks like someone could make business on it, so we do it first and claim the territory'. And then it gets dirty, no more mutual agreement, no more voluntary participation, one side is making a business and the other is not. And a possibility of exploitation arises, basically it's all exploitation if one side is making money on others doing stuff for free. Looks a bit like Starlink company and their thousands of sattelites in the sky - suddenly, out of nowhere and without a particular necessity, a private company starts putting thousands of their devices in the Earth orbit, without asking anyone for opinions, without considering the consequences for all other people on the planet, just because they have money to do it. The only justification is that they will solve internet access problems that some people may have somewhere (but without asking these people for opinions anyway). Basically, they could do it, nobody owns the sky and nobody owns the orbit trajectories, but it's not 'nobody' - its rather us all.
Rafal,
The company is a school that teaches people to program, basically.The idea is that once they are done with the course, they can go and get work experience and might even be hired. The problem in the model is that the business is getting something for free, and it isn't clear what the student is getting. I think that the work experience is valuable, but it is only available for those who can afford it.
looks like attempt to pass something as internship where the regulations for such type of arrangement do not exist So there's some contract between the school and business, but student is just a product and not a side in the contract? I wonder why not just make it a proper internship with all the regulations that apply to make it clear that student is a student and not a product.
Getting a job without experience is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The internship model is one, but I am in the camp that doesn't approve of it.
Some coding "bootcamps" have a model where you pay no tuition and only pay later from wages you get from a coding job. It seems their strategy is to concentrate on having a very good rep in the job market.
The way they achieve this is 1) they weed out most applicants before the course starts with various aptitude tests and tasks and 2) the course is very demanding and around half drop out. (I know this from my son who did a 16-week bootcamp.)
Peter,
I believe that this is the most ethical option, yes.
I would argue that the company isn't getting something for free. It may even be a loss. Ramping up a beginner/intern to be useful on your product or services codebase, system design, apis, infrastructure, etc. etc. is not an effort without costs to the company both directly - Bob is helping the intern to learn, and indirectly, Bob COULD have been doing something himself to deliver features. It magnifies if the engagement is short and the probability of the intern remaining relatively small.
Brent,For the most part, you have them do something that is isolated.I think that Google Summer of Code does a good job there. When we had (paid) interns, we gave them ancillary tasks that didn't involved jumping head first into our codebase.
I just finished reading It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy At Work by the Basecamp duo and they mentioned this is what they do -- pay some market rate for a 1 week project. The way I have seen this in practice, not at Basecamp but I think Auth0 which my colleague applied for is that you do it remotely and you have a small assignment. You are added to the company's Slack with access to a channel that has your "team" as part of the project. Then you can meet, ask questions, and work on the project with them for that week. I am not sure whether there's actually a deliverable or it's more like 10-20 hours of working alongside the team since he didn't go further into the process. I also haven't read what exactly Basecamp's process is like. Because you're right, it isn't feasible to have a prospective employee quit their dayjob to work full-time for a week or even a month if it's possible it doesn't work out. So I think the places that do this manage to scope the work small enough that you can work in smaller increments over a week or two.
Kamran,
I think that you can do something like that only in very high profile cases. Because unless you don't have a job already, taking a week off is a huge expense, even when you are actually getting paid for it.
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