To me, an unpaid internship can make sense if you're making coffee and hoping to absorb some experience/wisdom from the bankers/lawyers/whoever you're working for. But if you're someone with actual skills (e.g. " a UI/UX guru and/or a strong coder with PHP, Java, Flex, .NET, Ruby/Rails, or Javascript skills"), making an actual contribution, you should be paid.
I agree with you 100%, and my reply nearly included that if one believes in free markets then one can't call it unethical. The only thing that gives me pause is that interns are often young and inexperienced and may not realize that their skills have value. While the burden of such education is on the interns (intern candidates, young 'uns, hackstars, whatever), it still seems morally questionable to me for companies to intentionally exploit that inexperience.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, however I think the intention (if not the wording) of the gp is that hackers should skip past this opportunity if they actually have marketable skills or that hackers should expect compensation/equity if they are "gurus and/or strong coders."
I agree to an extent. But what if you just want to learn and you DON'T have skills. I realize most people just teach themselves. Fine. I did that too. But there is a definite benefit to working with teams on programming projects that you wouldn't get otherwise unless you worked at a company...and most companies wouldn't pay you outright unless you had skills. So in this scenario, I think the unpaid internship idea makes sense.
I started clocking real money, admining unix systems, when I was pimple-faced and fresh out of high school. The trick is to run your own 5k shell-account service and drop a heavy resume on someone's desk :-)
You can always do your own things and "get experience", fuck these pricks man. That shows more initiative to real entrepreneurs who want to hire you later. IMO, internship just tells me you did your time being someone's in-house rookie.
There's a big difference between working for no money and working for any amount of money (or for equity). Even if they agree to pay you minimum wage you at least have a job to point to -- and a starting point for future negotiations. There is no raise so difficult as the one from "free" to "$x".
Another point I'd make is that working cheap like this is a deal that might make sense for a few hours, but which will make exponentially less sense as you do more and more work. And you'll know it, too. The first three hours of free work you do for someone can feel great, but eventually it will rankle.
[ I've moved the rest of this post to a separate comment. ]
Seems like a similar thing but specifically orientated around startups. They should get (a slither) of equity, maybe..