This is why you shouldn’t take that start-up internship…

A week ago I wrote a post called 5 reasons business students shouldn’t intern at a start-up. The TL:DR was that just because start-ups are ‘cool’, business students shouldn’t settle for terrible internships which they wouldn’t accept at bigco, just because it is at a start-up.

It got over 15k reads, 100's of shares, likes & upvotes… And a lot of angry abuse. Most of it generic name-calling and anonymous personal attacks or just people who didn’t properly read the article.

More worrying (yet in a sense also gratifying as it validated my argument) were the arguments of those founders and ‘experts’ who contacted me to tell me why they think I’m wrong. Below you can find my response to one commenter whose arguments were pretty indicative of the general negative feedback I received…

Here is what Mr Alain Portant, self-proclaimed expert and start-up CEO had to say about my original article:

This is retarded.
Who do you think you are ? Interns should be exploited and indeed are a source of cheap labour, that’s how the world goes.
It doesnt make any sense for a student to think they are entitled to a fat paycheck or even stock-options, or that they should only “learn skills from the best experts” as a startup ceo i would not reccomend pulling that shit up during an interview”

You are a student, basically your opinion doesn’t matter, your brain isn’t even fully developped and yet you think you deserve to be treated like you have accomplished something with your life ? Guess what ; you don’t.

What about learning humility and hard work ? That would be a start.

I’ll give you a second for that to sink in. Below, I’ve broken down Mr Portant’s ludicrousy into managable chunks and addressed each point directly :-

Interns should be exploited and indeed are a source of cheap labour, that’s how the world goes.

→ No. Interns can be exploited and indeed are a source of cheap labour. The two are mutually exclusive. My advice for business students was not to avoid being a source of cheap labour — that’s pretty much impossible. But being paid a low wage doesn’t mean you’re being exploited.

At an internship it should be your main goal to learn and network — if your chosen start-up enables you to learn relevant things from experts, by all means work for low wages. That’s not being exploited, instead you’re trading your time & limited skill set for access to valuable knowledge and mentorship which you couldn’t find anywhere else.

On the other hand, an ‘internship’ at a start-up where it’s your main job to iron customers’ shirts full-time, deliver food to customers or answer SMS messages as a virtual butler (all real internship jobs) for less than minimum wage IS exploitation and you shouldn’t do it!

It doesnt make any sense for a student to think they are entitled to a fat paycheck or even stock-options, or that they should only “learn skills from the best experts”

→ True. But then I didn’t say that. What I did propose, is that if you’re set on taking an internship at a company that A) isn’t teaching you anything that will help your career, B) hasn’t given you a serious shot at a better full-time position with them after the internship and C) is making you do menial jobs because they are too cheap to hire a full-time employee and know they can ‘con’ gullable students into doing it for lower wages, you should at least make sure they are paying you a commensurate amount to waste your time.

This is how bigco gets talented people to work for them instead of on the projects they’d like to work on. See also: Banking

as a startup ceo i would not reccomend pulling that shit up during an interview”

→ Recommendation noted. In fact, I’d go one step further and advise anybody interviewing with Mr Portant to follow these steps taken from HBO’s Silicon Valley show. Probably for the best if you don’t even make it to the interview.

You are a student, basically your opinion doesn’t matter, your brain isn’t even fully developped and yet you think you deserve to be treated like you have accomplished something with your life ? Guess what ; you don’t.

→ standard personal insults to hammer home the soundness of the other arguments. Bonus points for poor grammar and not having looked me up beforehand — some commentors were a lot more thorough.

What about learning humility and hard work ? That would be a start.

→ Yes I agree. Business students: Learn humility, learn hard work. Please!

But either do it at your own start-up, at a big company paying you enough to numb your creative muscle, or an exciting start-up internship where you are learning great things from great people.

Don’t sell yourselves short.