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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
