Got absolutely f****** lowballed for an internship

Oh it's gonna be a long story gadies and lentlemen.

A couple days ago I put my resume for review in a sub as I was not getting any internship calls (bohot dukh hai). Anyway, an HR guy approached me for a full stack role,the company was based out of India, standard tech consultancy startup, good clients, sold.

I had a call with the CEO and CTO of the company , they asked me about standard dev question, pretty easy to answer, I did also providing examples from the previous projects I worked with. Now they told me that they will provide me with a task and based on that they will evaluate and give me a paid role or put me in something called "upskilling period" for a month and give me another task for evaluation, I was like okay fair.

A couple days after that I got the task, it was a standard education based ai-agent app, api calls with Openrouter and all that jazz. Time constraint was 6 hours so I took our good old hackathon approach, made a .env , slapped the endpoints within the frontend and gave that hosted in vercel. I started at 11 pm after doing my daily DSA as I had classes in the day , pulled an all-nighter, done it till 5 in the morning and went to bed as I had classes the next day as well.

It took them 4 days to review the code, weekend gone, now since I focussed more on functionality , I didn't make a designated backend for that app. Boy they got my ass in review for that, it was a whole page just saying that the endpoints were exposed and there was no backend. They offered me 3 months of the supposed " upskilling period" here.I told them my approach was oriented towards functionality and 3 months is a long time to work unpaid and doesn't even guarantee me an internship here. If you want a backend, I can make it for you.

They said if i implement it today (it was 11:30 at night) , they can revaluate it and revise the offer. I was like fine and there went my another night, again finished till 5, sent for review, the code was perfect, a simple typeError issue, which didn't affect the production and did work well. Error handling, rate limiting, I implemented it all. I treated gpt and grok like a ringmaster the whole night. It was done, went to bed again to wake up after 3 hours cuz fuck 75 percent criteria.

Now , these dimwits, lowered the the upskilling period to ......wait for it........

2.5 months 😐, now I can crack faang in those extra two weeks.

All of the work gone to hell. I also talked to a guy who worked there on LinkedIn and he did unpaid work for 4 months there and will get his first stipend at the end of March , IF he does another task. Dude, if you u want free labour just say it man. Why would you want to make desperate undergrad kids chase that 10k a month stipend like our life depends on it. Why give hope.

So guys, if you re applying for internships, talk to the employees of that corp before doing something about it, don't let desperation blind you.

Stay safe, peace out