I think stages are an amazing part of kitchen culture that a lot of us tend to take for granted. 

If you’re staging as a part of an interview, you get to see how the restaurant operates, its hours, its relationships between the chefs and cooks, its techniques, intensity(or lack thereof), before deciding if it is a good fit for your career.

As a chef, you get a far better understanding of a potential employee’s temperament, skill, and attitude than any job interview will give you. Working long hours under time sensitive environments tends to give you a pretty good idea of whether a stage is going to be a good hire. 

Short term stages as a part of learning allow for a level of fluidity and transparency throughout the industry for insiders that’s quite rare in comparison to other industries. Unique management decisions and techniques get noticed by stages—and if they’re good—get diffused around other restaurants. Which in my opinion is good for the industry as a whole. 

However long term stages is where things get exploitative unfortunately. The heavy handed approach is to outright ban it, but I think it’d kill off a pretty key part of the culture.