alt Hacker News> And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
And there's less incentive to do this when you anticipate needing fewer employees.
His point is that the engineers wanting to opt for "not intern" isn't really a data point on whether interns are helpful. It may instead be a data point on the propensity for people to opt out of work when they have a good excuse.