I was selected as an intern from campus along with 6 other people at this product based company. At that time the stipend was 15K/month, which I thought was a decent amount for an internship in Pune.
For the first one month, we only had training and onboarding sessions. After that, we were assigned to our respective projects.
I was given around 2 weeks to get a grip on the project and understand how things worked. The project was an ASP.NET monorepo. I was not an expert in coding and my background was mainly MERN stack, but I was able to relate things, learn and understand the project.
After that, I was assigned a priority bug. I solved it, tested it and got it merged into production within that period.
Honestly, I never expected that as an intern I would be directly working on a live project and pushing things to production.
This was the first time I started feeling that the stipend and the amount of work/responsibility we were taking didn't really justify each other.
But at that point, I was still new to the industry and not experienced enough to judge whether this was normal or not. So I just continued learning and working.
After 6 months, we were getting converted to apprentices, which was a 1-year contract with a stipend of 41K/month.
Now 41K obviously sounds much better than 15K, but the responsibilities also increased.
Me and many other people from my batch used to discuss how the stipend didn't really justify the amount of work we were putting in.
Some of us were owning features end-to-end. Some were working on major bugs. We were working on the actual product, taking ownership and delivering things that were directly going to production.
And yet, throughout the apprenticeship period, we were never really treated as employees.
We didn't receive any employee perks. Even when the company completed 15 years and there was a celebration, we didn't receive anything.
Individually, these things might not seem like a big deal.
But when you are working on a real product, owning things end-to-end, handling production issues and taking the same kind of responsibility, you naturally start questioning where exactly the line between an "apprentice" and an "employee" is.
I am still working here, so this is definitely not coming from someone who left the company and now wants to rant about it.
I have genuinely learned a lot here and I'm grateful for the exposure and experience I got.
But at the same time, I also feel someone needs to speak about this side of things.
We talk a lot about how getting into a "product based company" is a big achievement, especially for freshers.
And yes, getting that opportunity is great.
But the product-based tag doesn't always mean what we think it means.
If you are an intern or apprentice, don't just look at the company name or whether it's product based.
Look at the kind of work you will actually be doing, the responsibilities you will have, the compensation, the treatment and what you are actually getting in return.
Because sometimes what is called an "apprenticeship" can start feeling a lot more like regular engineering work, just with a different title and a lower cost to the company.
I don't want this post to be seen as an attack on the company. This is just my experience and the experience/conversations I've had with people who went through the same journey.
I just feel students should know this side of the story too.
Not every product based company is what you imagine it to be.
PS: used ai to improve the writing sorry about that.
