Unpaid Internships
This year we’ve received 4 requests for unpaid developer internships. There is strong demand for people to come work at AccelerEyes and learn excellence in GPU and parallel computing. Initially we were very excited about these opportunities. What could be better than free labor, right?
However, as we’ve recently been expanding our team, we now acutely feel the weight of on-boarding and training new hires. The biggest bottleneck we face right now as a company is being able to bring new hires up-to-speed with our products and way of doing things.
Unpaid internships have a very real cost in terms of the required training and overhead incurred merely by having someone that needs supervision and a place to work. We have decided to screen unpaid interns with nearly the same process that we use to vet fulltime employees. In other words, unpaid interns must:
- fit the AccelerEyes culture
- be ace developers of C++ and capable of contributing value during the internship
- be fluent in English and have excellent critical thinking and technical writing skills
- have a strong likelihood of joining AccelerEyes fulltime upon graduation, assuming their internship works out well
- there is no need to have previous GPU/parallel computing experience; the reason they are willing to go unpaid is to learn these skills on-the-job by working at AccelerEyes
I’m not sure if we will actually bring aboard any unpaid interns as I don’t know if any will be able to pass those requirements. But the number that are applying is revealing for how much people want to learn heterogeneous computing and ride the wave of this big trend in computer processing.
Have you noticed an uptick in the demand for unpaid internships? How do you handle unpaid intern applicants?