Outreachy: an intern's perspective

Posted Mar 10, 2016 10:27 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950)
Parent article: Outreachy: an intern's perspective

> Thus it was a sad postscript to my internship when someone offered to hire me to build on my work. However, since he lacked
> the funds to pay me, he felt I should get my work up to production quality for a proprietary product, for free, as I was "supposed"
> to last summer. Then he "might" hire me for add-on work.

People with such behaviour is not just limited to Free Software :-P try dealing with a good procurement team; they're bastards and totally unreasonable plus you'll wonder how they'd ever come up with their arguments.

> I politely refused,

I hope polite didn't imply not saying what you wanted or should say. Likely the person knew exactly that it is entirely unreasonable. There's enough people who try to take advantage and often get away with it. I prefer the super direct approach with or without burning bridges :-P

If he offered to pay you, then this means you're in a negotiation. He's offer is that he gains everything for your effort (the weird argumentation is just like a procurement team; ignore it). If the offer starts like this, summarize it, send it back, reject the offer IMO.

Outreachy: an intern's perspective

Posted Mar 13, 2016 17:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Such behaviour is not even limited to software. Indeed, if you want to work in an exciting field with wonderful job prospects like, uh, print journalism in the UK, it is more or less impossible to get a first job doing that without first having a lengthy unpaid internship (which will probably end up with your getting laid off like half the staff). There are even tales of *auctions* of such internships!