| I think the relevant question is more, is it morally defensible to quit a (perfectly suitable) internship, due to the grass being greener somewhere else? The company now counts on you being there, and most like have started planning, executing and incurring expenses... Personally, I think no! I would never go back on a promise to show up. Think about it the other way, how would you feel should the company dump you because they found a better candidate? (I know that the company most likely is unable to do that, but companies just a bunch of people, and getting dumped sucks no matter the setting). And how knows if you later internship is actually better? I can think of at least a couple of interesting things, that internship will offer you, that the "better one" will not: - most likely work with people who have actually worked on the same codebase for a decade or more.. that gives a different perspective that then rushed "consumerism" of modern devs (oh, that legacycode is already four weeks old, lets scrap it and reimplement it :) - It will most likely be a very balanced place to work (senior as in "more experienced" working in enterprise world usually have better working conditions that cool upstarts - and often better pay too, not for your internship though) - It might surprise you how little of the new hype-driven development is actually new.. That might again change your perspective! - You might end up liking it there and have a job for the next decade. Bouncing jobs every 6 months due to running out of funds and not getting paid gets old really quickly :) Personally I work both with newish backend technology (I tend to stay 3-5 years behind on purpose to skip learning stuff that is dead within 24 months). But I regularly work on a three decade old system written in an equally old language (that most people have never heard of), and it is not as bad as others expect... |
Yes, it is. If that company decided tomorrow they needed one less intern they wouldn't hesitate to cut OP or another intern loose.
This is a business transaction. OP is exchanging their time for money and in return the employer is hoping to extract more value from the employee than they put in. If either side of that transaction feels they aren't getting the value they want from the arrangement it's in that parties best interest to move on. The OP hasn't started working there yet and isn't scheduled to start until June, that is plenty of time to find a replacement. There is no shortage of capable CS students in the world.
Additionally if the OP just isn't interested in the work it's not really in anyone's interest to have them there. OP shouldn't be stuck working at a place they aren't really motivated to just because of the timing of the offer. I'm sure any manager would prefer to have an interested and engaged intern rather than just going through the motions.