Will they take someone with no IT degree at all?

Yes — a degree is almost never mandatory. What's assessed is what you can do and how you think. A relevant degree helps get past automated screening at very large companies, but even there it isn't a hard requirement.

How much do internships pay?

Anywhere from nothing to a real salary. Large companies usually pay; small firms and non-profits often don't. If there's no money at all, weigh honestly what you get instead: a mentor, real tasks and a reference — or unpaid labour with no teaching attached.

What if there are no internships in my city?

Look at remote ones. Plenty of companies hire interns without tying them to a location. In parallel, it's worth building experience through projects — geography doesn't matter there at all.

An IT internship with no experience: who actually hires and what they ask

Who hires without experience

An internship is close to the only door companies deliberately keep open for people with nothing on their employment record. But "no experience" in an employer's language doesn't mean "can't do anything" — it means "hasn't been employed". That's a big difference.

What they look at is whether you can solve problems and learn. Study projects, exercises from a course, your own website, a bot for friends — all of that is experience. It simply wasn't paid.

Who takes people:

Large companies with established programmes. They run internships in intakes, with mentors and a clear process. Competition is high, but the rules are transparent.
Mid-sized businesses that need hands. Less publicity, less competition, often more real work. These roles rarely sit in plain sight — people find them through contacts and specialist channels.
Non-profits and small studios. Little or no money, but they'll take almost anyone willing to work. As a first line on a CV, it does the job.

How selection works

At large companies the path usually runs: application, a test on logic and fundamentals, a technical interview, a conversation with the team. Weeks pass between stages, sometimes months. That's normal — plan ahead.

At smaller companies it's shorter: they read your CV, talk to you, give you a task, hire you.

Timing matters too. Large programmes recruit in waves, typically spring and autumn. Turn up in July and you'll be waiting until September. Don't waste that time.

What they ask

Nobody expects deep knowledge from an intern. They ask about fundamentals and how you think:

Algorithms at a basic level. Arrays, strings, loops, a rough sense of complexity. "Reverse this string", not competitive programming.
The language you listed. Put Python down and you'll be asked about data types, lists and dictionaries, what a function is. Put JavaScript and you'll get asynchrony and types.
Databases. Usually one or two simple queries with a filter and a join.
How you reason. This matters more than the right answer. Think out loud, ask clarifying questions, offer options.

The worst response is silence, or guessing. An honest "I don't know this, but here's how I'd reason about it" sounds far better.

What to show when you have nothing

The most common bind: someone studies for six months and then has nothing to answer when asked what they've built. Coursework doesn't count — thousands of people did the same exercise from the same handbook, and it shows.

What does work:

Your own project, finished. Small is fine. One completed tool someone can use via a link beats five abandoned starts.
A contribution to someone else's project. Even a small fix in an open-source project shows you can find your way around unfamiliar code and submit changes properly.
Working in a team. This is the thing self-taught people almost never have, and it's checked deliberately. Agreeing on scope, splitting work, having your code discussed — those are separate skills.

If you're turned down

A rejection is almost always a function of competition, not a verdict on you. Hundreds of applications arrive for a place on a large programme.

What to do:

Ask for feedback. Sometimes they answer, and it's the most useful information you can get for free.
Apply to several places at once. Waiting two months on a single company is time thrown away.
Keep building. The gap between attempts is the best moment to make something you can talk about at the next interview.

There's another route

An internship isn't the only way to get team experience. Working on a shared project with other people gives you the same things: tasks, code discussion, deadlines, the need to negotiate.

The difference is that an internship has to be won in a competition, while a team is something you can assemble yourself. And if the project owner confirms what you did — in their own words, describing your part — it reads at an interview no worse than a line about an internship. Especially with commits sitting next to it that anyone can open and check.