[canistr]

I agree, particularly with the anecdote of the intern countering for a $15/hour wage. NYC is by no means a cheap city and even I was making $15/hour as an intern many, many years ago. $10/hour is rather insulting and barely makes a dent in the living costs of a student yet alone their tuition costs.

[greenyoda]

If you're working as an intern in software development, chances are you're already making a positive contribution to the bottom line, and $15 might even be way too low. However, if you're a marketing intern, like the person in this story, you might actually have a negative worth to the company (the time it takes others to teach you what you need to know could exceed your productivity), in which case the $10 per hour might be extremely generous.

[canistr]

While I agree in part that internships are generally a form of "charity" or public good that a company will provide in return for a small amount of work being completed, the case for $10/hour is still ridiculous in this day and age. And I'm not even getting into the discussion of minimum wage jobs.

[canttestthis]

But thats contradictory. If internships are a form of charity, or public good, then companies shouldn't have to pay interns at all. Its ridiculous that interns get _paid_ $10 and provide almost nothing to the company in return.

[canistr]

Not at all. Charity/public good doesn't imply free work. And it's still up to the company to provide work that generates value for themselves. It's not free on either part of the company or the intern.

I don't know what the case is in the US, but in Canada, the government does provide some taxable benefits to the company for hiring interns or people between 18-24. I don't know the specifics, but they do exist.

[mathattack]

It depends on the field. Software and Finance? Yes, terribly low for NYC. Fashion or Advertising? Perhaps par for the course.

[eli_gottlieb]

Wow, I'm interning at a software company in the Bay Area and my normalized hourly wage is way more than $15/hour. Is it just me, or do a lot of firms these days just exploit cheap labor as a way to avoid admitting that their business models are actually quite low-value?

[dshefchik]

They've been doing that since the dawn of the internship. Students are just starting to not accept that kind of crappy treatment

[TrainedMonkey]

I think that is just Bay Area and/or tech bias. My own internship years ago started at $15 and quickly scaled up. I was going to community college at that time. *typoed

[eli_gottlieb]

Ok, in support of your point, I got my BSc Comp Sci in 2011, have previous professional experience, and I'm really just working full time for two months while on grad-school vacation. So while I'm justifiably not paid as much as the real full-time engineers here, I'm more valuable to the company (I would hope!) than an average college sophomore doing his/her first internship in his/her own profession.

Again: anecdotal evidence, disregard that I suck bananas, etc.