this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.
Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.
Which industry do you work in? In "big tech", it's very common for interns to work on regular projects that full-time employees would otherwise work on. Usually a senior-ish FTE would determine the best project, write a project plan, scope it, define milestones and deliverables, etc, and the intern would just work on the actual implementation.
I'm a senior software engineer on my team, and when it's intern season, we usually find things in our backlog that we haven't had time to implement and that would be interesting for an intern to work on, and spec them out.
Edit: Also, interns are always paid. Generally the large companies don't do unpaid internships.
I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.
The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.
I think an important detail is likely missing. My experience as a software engineer intern included getting paid well and full benefits as an employee. So legally I was an hourly employee and I think the label of "intern" was to set expectations work/performance/responsibility.
Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.
The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.
This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.
The university I went to told us not to bother with unpaid internships, because it's just a sign the company doesn't care about you. Paid internships pretty much always still give college credit.
Yup, we only do paid internships, but they don't get full-time benefits, only whatever is required for part-time employees (because they are part-time, we only have them for 20-ish hours/week).
Yeah, same at the company I work at - interns are paid and have benefits, including housing provided by the company.