What an internship should cost you, and what it should give back
Unpaid, paid, certificate-only, project-based. An honest look at what Indian tech internships actually offer graduates — including ours.
I have interviewed enough graduates to notice a pattern. A CV arrives with three internship certificates on it. I ask what they built. There is a pause.
It is not the candidate’s fault. A large part of the Indian internship market sells a certificate, delivers a set of recorded videos, and calls it experience. The student pays — sometimes several thousand rupees — and receives a PDF that no interviewer reads past the logo.
So here is what I think an internship owes you, and what it is fair to ask in return.
What it should give you
Evidence. Something at a URL. A repository with your commits in it. A thing you can open during an interview and say: I built this part, here is why it works this way, here is what I would do differently now.
Review from someone better than you. This is the entire value. Writing code alone teaches you your own habits. Having an experienced engineer tell you, in writing, why your function does too much — that is the part that compounds.
Honest assessment. Including the unflattering version. If you are not ready for a backend role, the useful thing is to hear it in week six with a list of what to fix, not to receive a certificate that implies otherwise.
A reference from a named human. Someone who will pick up the phone.
What it is fair to ask of you
Real hours. Fifteen to twenty a week, consistently. Interns who vanish for a fortnight almost never recover the thread, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time — mostly theirs.
Tolerance for being corrected. The first two weeks of code review are uncomfortable for everybody. Then it stops being personal and starts being the reason you improve faster than your classmates.
Finishing. An unfinished capstone teaches you less than a small finished one.
On money, plainly
Our first month is unpaid, and I would rather write that here than bury it in a terms page. That month is genuinely training — mentor time, review time, setup — and it costs us more than it earns us.
From month two, interns meeting the cohort review bar receive a performance-based stipend. Where a role is open, strong interns are considered before external candidates, and a meaningful share of our engineering team arrived that way.
What we do not do is charge for the internship. If a programme asks a student for a fee and offers a certificate in return, that is a course. It may be a good course. It is not an internship, and the two should not be described with the same word.
How to judge any programme, including this one
Ask three questions before you accept a place anywhere:
- What will I have built by the end, and where will it be running? If the answer is vague, the work is vague.
- Who reviews my code, and how often? A name and a cadence, or it is not happening.
- What percentage of your interns finish? A programme where everyone finishes is not assessing anyone.
Ask us those. We will answer them.