I remember sometime last year seeing (in Australia) a full-time (unpaid) internship advertised which (among other things) required expert knowledge of Max/MSP and programming Arduino....

Another field where this is common practice is architecture. I know the architecture scene of Rotterdam - home to a bunch of the Dutch hotshots - very well and it's just crazy what young architects will put up with. Some firms work close to 24/7, not allowing interns a single (weekend) day off in a 6 month internship. Being so locked-in and demanding, a sick internal social structure emerges that reinforces these processes. Maybe it's not even that they're not allowed to take a sunday off every once in a while. It's that they're afraid to be regarded as a traitor by the others if they do. And so these young architects not only agree to work like crazy for free or very little but they even make it worse on themselves and, not to forget, also the ones that will come after them. But afterwards they have the 'experience' and the 'CV'. Good for them...

I ahhhh . . . rather bad-temperedly and thoughtlessly reported this post as spam a few mornings ago. Still getting used to the forum layout and hadn't taken into account that actually, there is a Misc section and, yeah . . . totally relevant to a community such as this.

Humblest apologies to TR.

I could not agree more with the sentiments in the thread about this deplorable and symptomatic trend.

Student debt, of course . . . other more fundamental issues around educational financing, the public / private sector imbalance . . . all help to set this Old New Thing up as the status quo again.