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Someone on my timeline retweeted a series of tweets that @sarahkendzior made on what she called the internship scam. I believe she was responding to an article on unpaid internships.  I’m putting all the tweets together here.

Here is how the internship scam works. It’s not about a “skills” gap. It’s about a morality gap.
1) Make higher education worthless by redefining “skill” as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.
2) With “skill” irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.
3) End on the job training for entry level jobs. Educated told skills are irrelevant. Uneducated told they have no way to obtain skills.
4) As wealthy progress on professional career path, middle and lower class youth take service jobs to pay off massive educational debt.
5) Make these part-time jobs not “count” on resume. Hire on prestige, not skill or education. Punish those who need to work to survive.
6) Punish young people who never found any kind of work the hardest. Make them untouchables — unhireable.
7) Tell wealthy young people they are “privileged” to be working 40 hrs/week for free. Don’t tell them what kind of “privileged” it is.
8) Make status quo commentary written by unpaid interns or people hiring unpaid interns. They will tell you it’s your fault.
9) Young people, it is not your fault. Speak out. Fight back. Bankrupt the prestige economy.

I’m not sure I agree with everything. Some of her points hit on what I was faced with in my last job search a few years ago and a little bit on this one.

A lot of companies don’t care about work you did in your classes or part-time work you did while you were in school. I think I gained some valuable knowledge in school. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken to several people who didn’t understand that I worked for Mississippi State University for 5.5 years after I graduated. They think that work was part of my studies, so it doesn’t count. I don’t know how to make it clearer on my resume. I wonder how many have seen my resume and not called back because they thought I only had 1.5 years of full-time experience instead of 7+ years.

I’m not applying for entry level jobs, but a few years ago, I would’’ve been happy to take one. Why do so many entry level jobs ask for a couple of years of experience? What ever happened to finding a bright person and training them on how to do their job?

It’s good that some can afford to take a paid internship, but I don’t think I could have done that. Yes, being out of work does hurt you.

Software engineering is such a broad field, it’s hard to know everything. You can have many years of experience, but if you’re missing one specific skill you can be overlooked. So what if your past experience makes it easy to pick up on new technologies.

Anyway, my job search continues. I’ve had some good interviews and some not so good ones where I didn’t really connect with the interviewer. I’ve been told that I needed more experience in one skill and I’ve been told that I’m overqualified. I’ve also been told that I’m a good fit for the company, but they don’t have anywhere to put me yet. Hopefully, something will turn up soon.