Good Morning!

🌊

maaning!

good morning

დილა მშვიდობის! I had an interesting discussion with fellow Georgian engineers yesterday. My nephew, 2nd year CS student received “an offer” from a tech company with a half of the wage of a regular student job and I got curious about Georgian practices regarding dealing with beginners - some of them insist that unpaid internships in software development are fine and even encourage it - people who apply for it “express genuine interest” in the field, and the employer spends so much resources already and shouldn’t pay a living wage. What does fellow Clojurians thinks about it?

I think unpaid internships aren't great and exclude people who can't cover the expenses of working, and therefore make our industry less diverse in lots of ways

Unpaid Internships == slave labour IMHO.

At a previous job, we had placement students doing a "year in industry" as part of their degree. I have no idea if we paid them or not. It would seem reasonable to pay people in that scenario, but not terrible not to

Unpaid internships outside of a program like that seems awful

I've heard one time of a woman who did an unpaid internship for web development at a company, because she had little to no experience and this turned into a full time job. I guess it can work out differently for different people and contexts.

Supervising an internship does take time and energy from a company so it's never 100% free.

At a consulting company I worked for there were always 1 or 2 interns (as part of their degree) and they probably got paid a few hundred euros but not much. They usually would not work on customer projects but rather on some internal or experimental tool.

Often these interns would return to become an employee later on, so that's the investment paying back itself rather soon.

How much mentoring/training were they given? Nowhere that I've worked would have had the time/resources for that

That’s the model we’re doing at Ardoq. First summer job, then possibly internship, then possibly employee. All paid, of course.

> How much mentoring/training were they given? Don't remember, maybe an hour or two a week?

I was also a lecturer in the past and visited many students from the university who did internships at companies, so I also could see how it worked from the other side.

In the UK there are a few laws around what is classed as a "worker". In most cases, all internships are legally entitled to the national minimum wage

there are a few exceptions (natch!), but for someone who is doing an internship at a company in the promise of future work (amongst other conditions), they would be legally entitled to having the minimum wage.

We had one placement student who was basically left to work by himself for the whole year (on a project no one else was working on) 😢

@dharrigan From the student's perspective there was no promise for a future job. It was a one time engagement which is required as part of their education program. A student should be lucky if they could find a nice company to spend 3 or 6 months. After that the student got his/her diploma and that's it. But in practice, because the student and the company already knew each other, often the student would come back.

There are other ways for companies to find out if a person is motivated or not. . imho It shows a lack of empathy for the trainee

It reads to me: “We are so awesome, that you have to sacrifice your time, for some minorities even suffer, because you want to work with us”.

i myself was an immigrant in Germany. I had a paid internship with a very low salary, but at least could pay my basic needs.

@pez regarding your talk(s) Check out this tweet from Alex Miller: https://twitter.com/puredanger/status/1387566420662304768

I think it's a basic human right. You exchange your time and effort for some financial reward. I don't see why companies (who, generally have far greater resources than their employees) feel the need not to honour that. It puzzles me.

and as pointed out above, unpaid internships are ripe for abuse and exploitation and causing less advantaged people to be put at a greater disadvantage.

Also, being paid brings a degree of dignity.

morning

Good morning! I now see that the recording of the meetup yesterday is already published in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M91VlKOa8jM Please don’t hesitate to give me feedback. This public speaking thing is important to me now, I want to get much much better at it. I have looked a bit at it now myself and it wasn’t the train crash it felt like yesterday, I think. Really a pity that my brain shut down so completely in the end so that I couldn’t fix the stupid bug on air. But other than that, I will stop beating myself up about this.

@dharrigan We have something similar to what @borkdude has described here in Denmark. In our case, students spend a whole semester where they have to have a specific project agreed to by both the school, the company, and the student - and they have to write a report about it at the end. They are funded by our universal education grant that everyone gets while studying since the internship replaces their academic work during that period.

I had one such intern last year. She spent 10 weeks with me.

seems more like work-experience rather than an internship, but semantics I suppose.

The amount of work she could produce in that time was not as much as the amount of work I could do myself if I didn’t have to also supervise her.

Maybe. We call it praktik. Same word for us here 😉

🙂 Cultural interpretations 😉

I agree with you about the exploitation of “real” internships. In Denmark, it seems to mostly be creative work that gets abused like that, but a lot of that is down to how getting paid creative jobs usually requires a portfolio. Many new graudates often lack such a thing, creating this need for them to go and do unpaid internships to build one.

For software development, the only people doing unpaid internships are those doing it to collect unemployment insurance (it allows you to skip some mandatory job-seeking classes).

And that is only for 4-6 weeks.

Just got done setting up an nginx reverse proxy with automatic SSL renewal and it was incredibly easy to integrate with my existing Dockerfile using https://github.com/JonasAlfredsson/Docker-nginx-certbot - hard recommend in case you need to do something similar.

Now I never need to worry about that again, just gonna copy-paste some lines from a Docker-compose.yml file

Oh

I would have recommended caddy

Caddy does it all, including automatic renewals

pretty darn sweet, caddy

Of course there is something even easier available... :face_with_rolling_eyes:

Did not know about caddy.

I use caddy extensively. A lot easier to setup that nginx (and haproxy)

and once configured, (just a few lines), you can forget all about it, it'll auto renew the TLS itself

Is caddy essentially a replacement for nginx?

I listened to a podcast episode about Caddy recently (https://syntax.fm/show/340/servers-with-matt-from-caddy), but I haven't used it

yes

it does reverse proxying, or it can also act as a file server

A simple caddyfile looks like this

 {
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
}

done

Goddammit

Gonna need to gzipping and rate limiting too, but I guess it's got something built in

https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/

gzipping is done via a directive, i.e., encode gzip

 {
encode gzip
reverse_proxy ......
}

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll definitely check it out for future projects, but this nginx stuff was pretty easy to do and I don't think I'll redo it now anyway.

No problemo! 🙂

Always good to know options for the future 🙂

Yeah, and I really hate this devops stuff so I appreciate recommendations that will further shorten the time I spend on it.

So that I can get back to writing s-expressions

🙂

i would love to be writing s-expressions but i seem to be having classloader issues instead 😬

at least I'm used to things being classpath or classloader issues

I feel strangely comforted when something blows up in the java (I don't really, pls don't tell my code)

morning

myself and my son were fiddling with some clojure and after cut n pasting some data this happened

(:x :y :z)
:z 

the default value

yeah

definitely fun to think through

this also tripped up @viebel with multimethods, see #clojure , it created a memory build-up in his production system since multi-methods cache dispatch return values

main problem was that that we were doing (rest (:x :y :z))

he used a keyword as the dispatch function

and CLJS said :z was not ISeqable

fun error

main reason was that the cut n paste was (:x :y :z) and not '(:x :y :z)

this is the complete summary of the session

(def x {:foo (:x :y :z)})
#'user/x
user=> (rest (:foo x))
Execution error (IllegalArgumentException) at user/eval9 (REPL:1).
user=> Don't know how to create ISeq from: clojure.lang.Keyword
(:x :y :z)
:z
user=> (:x :y)
nil
user=> (:w :x :y :z)
Execution error (IllegalArgumentException) at user/eval15 (REPL:1).
user=> Wrong number of args passed to keyword: :w

keywords are fun fn

IFn to be exact :)

thanks

YouFn

@pez Watching your talk, great work, nothing to be ashamed about. And you got an hour, which is quite long for a talk

Thanks! Yes, the time thing was to large parts a miss-communication. Threw me off balance, but watching the talk it doesn’t show very much how tough that hit me. Except for maybe there in the end… 😃