^ this.
The whole notion of forcing companies by government fiat to pay a full salary too someone "learning the trade" in the best scenario and in the worse case to someone just sitting there figuring out "this career path is not for me" to me is one of those bloody typical and absurd millenial-marxist pipe dreams that just isn't going to work, nor should it.
The 3 weeks scale up system seems, out of all the one's available, actually quite fair to me, both ethically and practically.
And I would agree, but in the US:
i) Interns are generally paid lower than FT employees. Chemical engineers can expect to make anywhere from $70k to $100k, but as an R&D intern I made about $20/hr (which is on the lower end for chemical engineers). That annualizes to about $42k or so. Not a bad deal.
ii) In every job, there's always going to be a couple of weeks or even a month of
just training. Usually that involves getting the software licenses, reading through standard operating procedures, and you are supposed to be paid in full.
That being said, Serbia is not the US. Gagi's work arrangement is interesting in that he can "try things out" for 3 weeks. This arrangement
can work if everything takes place remotely and the company is relatively local. Personally, I wouldn't move hundreds of miles for a 3 week "try out period." 1-2 year contract with a solid salary and ok benefits, sure, but not a 3 week tryout period just to see if they like me. Then again, Serbia is not the US. In the US, software engineering interns are almost always paid - and companies that don't here are usually very shady. Points i) and ii) made entering the job market fairly competitive, so there are lots of unemployed/underemployed engineering graduates.
You only really saw entire classes getting jobs during the fracking boom and nowadays during the solid COVID job market.
Yup. I wouldn't say the argument for the poorer being given less of a chance is invalid, but it's 2021, most people can work from home nowadays. And 3-4 weeks really isn't a lot.
It's very easy to just demand money, but we also have to take into account the companies' point of view.
That said, maybe the state can do better in those cases, but that's a different (and much longer) discussion.
Yeah, in your case just stick it out. I don't know what the working atmosphere is like in Serbia, but around the 6 months - 1 year mark you can start looking around and see if anyone will pay you better / has better working conditions. Once you have a couple years of professional exp as a dev you can pretty much write your own ticket and demand however much you'd like.
It's business, and you gotta look after yourself. If you think this is going to get you where you want, that's fine. If you feel unhappy or underpaid, nothing wrong with looking elsewhere once you have some experience.