Interns

Interns - they're like real people, but not quite.

— Managers Secret Manual - Chapter 4: How To Care For and Exploit Your Interns

Interns are pseudo-people, citizens of some kind still in the process of becoming a real, productive employees. They're often used for boring, dangerous, routine, or otherwise unpleasant tasks that people with actual incomes would rather not do. And interns, having no income and no power, have very little to say in the matter - in their quest to be the ones that become employees, no deed is too dirty, no task too foul. When they're not working, they're all but invisible to Megacorpolis at large, safely ignored by everyone.
Interns are spawned from the various schools and work-experience programs across Megacorpolis, either in the form of the young, hopeful who haven't had their souls crushed out of them yet, or older citizens recovering from unemployment (who have). There are even internship-prep schools known as intern-mills, where would-be-interns are specifically tutored in the hard-scrabble 6 months that await them.
Legions of them toil every day in Megacorpolis with the hope of ascension to real employees and an actual paycheck. Until then, they'll have to make do with whatever scraps are left in the breakroom and "experience/exposure." It's a great opportunity, you'd be a fool to pass it up, or so they say.

Interns And The Corps

So you've been assigned an intern - now what?

— Managers Secret Manual - Chapter 4: How To Care For and Exploit Your Interns

by Midjourney

For corporations, interns are theoretically an invaluable part of the recruiting machine. It's a program intended to take raw recruits and fashion them into perfect corporate drones. In reality, that sounds expensive and complicated though, so most corporations go for a more 'trial by fire' approach. Interns are thrown into the mix, and employees take bets on who will sink and who will swim. Other corporations use their interns as guinea pigs, testing new products (mostly non-lethal ones) on them or making them clean up afterward. Interns are sometimes referred to as D-Class personnel, which should be a hint of things to come.
Despite the abuse, interns are an important part of the corporate structure. If not for them, executives and managers might even have to go get Java themselves, or corps would have to send expensive robots or experts in to clean out misfiring fusion-chambers. When you want to save money on a difficult problem, there's no better way than throwing enough interns at the problem. If they really want the job, they'll be happy to jump right to it.

Interns are often "encouraged" to accept various performance enhancing cybernetics. Sometimes even with a discount as high as -2%!

On the less lethal end of the intern spectrum, interns are sometimes adopted by teams or even individual employees as pets or mascots. Clever interns use this to their advantage and can even get a taste of things to come by bossing other interns around from their privileged state.
For all interns, the goal is to reach the end of their internship alive and get hired in that order. Failures either wash out or are put on extended internship programs to iron out any remaining "issues" the Corp might have with them (the most common being 'we'd like to still not pay you'). Some interns have been stuck in their internship programs for years with no way out - corporations have long since agreed that quitting an internship program is probably a bad sign and a black mark against an intern trying their luck elsewhere.
With all this going on, it isn't unusual for interns to become a little unhinged. The goal of reaching employment takes on something of a religious significance; finding shrines built for managers or product leads are not uncommon. Human sacrifice, while rare, does improve the chances of an intern through a combination of culling the competition and really showing the office that they have that can-do, never-say-die attitude. More than one sacrifice, and they're positively management material.
Most interns recover after becoming employees, but all wear the scars of their experience, whether physical or not. Reconstructive surgery is sometimes included as a recruitment perk, but missing limbs have to be replaced by cyberware at full price.

by Midjourney

Interns And Interns

Make them hate each other more than they hate you.

— Managers Secret Manual - Chapter 4: How To Care For and Exploit Your Interns

All internships are complicated by one fact - other interns. There are always more interns than there are open positions, all according to a calculated corporate plan to ensure "healthy competition." As a result, office politics between interns can get pretty intense. Rivalries develop over anything, from compliments paid by management, to who leaves or arrives first or last. A pecking order always seems to develop, and it's never good to be the intern at the bottom.
The more lucrative the contract at the end of the internship, the more ruthless the competition becomes. Showing weakness is like jumping into a pool full of sharks after rolling around in blood - mercy is for others; all that matters is the goal. Empathy is weaned out of these corporate recruits until it is little more than a faint memory. So that's nice. That's not to say interns don't sometimes team up - though 'forming gangs' might be more accurate. These are usually lead by especially charismatic interns, often Corpers slumming it, and tend to implode spectacularly.
Corporations don't really care what happens between interns, for the most part. As long as no damage is done to the office or to real people, there are always more interns waiting in the wings, desperate for their chance.

Some interns turn feral after failure. They take to living in the office, sleeping where they can, and scavenging what they need. They nest in air ducts or long-unused broom closets, creeping out when it is safe to take what they need from the office to survive.

by Midjourney