It's called "open source".

True, but you don't get the experience of being in the working environment of another company. Things like...

* Exposure to thier culture

* Viewing and understanding thier office setup and why

* Hardware/software setup

* Working practices they use

* The fun of coding with others in person

* Social interaction

* Social interaction (x2 as I think it is very important)

...are important and really beneficial to appreciate first hand.

Then it's called:

Consulting.

You should get paid for that, too. Please don't do it for free and destroy the market for the rest of us who have to make a living at it.

Daniel

Consulting is sharing your own expertise with someone else. I'm looking for someone else to share their expertise with me.

That aside, short-term stages would not destroy the market. Chefs have been doing it for years. They come out of it as better chefs and then have more earning power.

You get better social interaction when working on open source projects. The people you're interacting with actually want to spend their free time working on software. So instead of "interacting" with some dude off the street that needs some money, you interact with people who you can learn from.

And yes, you can work on open source in 'real life'.

I'm self-employed since 1996 and did and do this from time to time. And I learned a lot of useful things about both the topic and the different business cultures. And got valueable contacts. I do this especially when I enter a (more or less) new discipline for my next big project. Often I feel my knowledge from lifelong ongoing university education (distant teaching) is not enough and I need a kind of an "internship" to know "how they do it".

So my advice is: Be well prepared (know at least the basics so you can get the advanced stuff out of it) and do it only between projects of any kind (development, education, ...) so you're not distracted by parallel duties.

If you want to dive into a budding rails ecommerce startup drop me a line (see my past posts for some hints about who we are / what we do!)

You would gain a wealth of experience in every aspect of business / being a startup... at this point everyone wears a bit of every hat (which is fun!)

We are definitely interested too if you want to dive into Lisp. (No prior Lisp knowledge needed)

My team has a pretty cool new data project... if anyone is curious about staging with us, just send an email. We would pay you of course, I've never heard of a technical employee doing an unpaid internship at a for-profit company.

This might work for a developer but definitely not for 'aspiring executives.'

Knowledge work looks a lot like volunteer work, assisting a non-profit in organizing volunteer labor is a reasonable proxy for organizing work in a startup.

If people are really interested in doing this, I'm sure there are some companies on this board that would love volunteers. I know mine would :)

Is anyone in the UK offering this?

I assume you feed them the left-over corn?