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Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern?
- kelukelugames 11y agoI would kill to be an intern. Good pay, fun projects, and everyone has to be nice to me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wcrichton 11y agoFor me, the best feature of an internship is that you can simply walk away at the end, no strings attached. If you want to explore working a particular industry but don't want to commit to a full-time job, an internship gives you great exposure not just to the company but to the area. I took an internship in finance just to see what it was like, and although I wouldn't work on financial products full time, it was a great eye-opening experience.
- cortesoft 11y agoYou can also just walk away from a job?
- pmiller2 11y agoThe key phrase is "no strings attached." You don't have to worry about burning any bridges at the end of an internship.
- wcrichton 11y agoFor sure, but there's generally an expectation that you'll stay at a job longer than three months. It's harder to take the "sample platter" approach to full time jobs.
- umanwizard 11y agoSharing this salary data publicly sounds like something Yelp might frown upon. Hope this intern doesn't lose his job before it starts.
- RodericDay 11y agoAFAIK, it's illegal to punish people for discussing their salary publicly.
- mfoy_ 11y agoHiding behind legalities won't save your career from a pissed off employer... They not may be able to outright dismiss you for that, but they can surely find other ways to make your life uncomfortable.
- RodericDay 11y agolmao this sounds like some soviet union nightmare "the laws say this, but secretly these are the real laws"
- mfoy_ 11y agoIt's actually more like "Legally I can't seek retribution... but you know that what you did pissed me off." I'd say that if you are relying on the law to protect you from your employer then you have a toxic working relationship. This is, of course, just categorically true of many minimum wage jobs where the employer views employees as disposable. So of course these laws are important and valuable and many people DO rely on them. However, in a "career" job, you generally want to create a rapport with management, not tension or conflict.
- RodericDay 11y ago> I'd say that if you are relying on the law to protect you from your employer then you have a toxic working relationship. All the kid did is publicize their salary. They're not even working yet, and people are suggesting that this perfectly legal and inoffensive action may be a career-ending move. And we're on the opposite context of minimum-wage workers- these are seemingly the most valuable interns in the country. It seems positively dystopian, like one of those states where you are always on the hook for an infraction, since it doesn't matter what's on the books because you have to consider "party mentality" always anyway.
- artimaeis 11y agoEh, I earn less pay than an SV intern but I don't have to pay SV prices for everything or commute a ridiculous distance to get to an area that's more normally priced. I'm okay with this.
- impy 11y agoThis, and they are also staying for a short period. Don't think it's fair to annualize the wage they get for this.
- Bartweiss 11y agoThis is key. Law firm interns can out-earn new associates, but it's a short-term incentive that isn't going to be annualized.
- aianus 11y agoI've never heard of a classmate not getting a return offer for the next co-op term or fulltime (if they were graduating).
- ska 11y agoThat's not really relevant to the point about re-scaling the pay. If I'm willing for various reasons to pay you $X for 3 months doing a job does not mean I am willing to pay you 4 x $X for a year of the same job (or whatever numbers the term works out to) I suspect many successful interns are offered in excess of the "annualized" intern pay, but not for the same job so it is still apples to oranges.
- aianus 11y agoThese companies have co-ops year-round, how is that not effectively the same thing as paying an annualized salary for that work?
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
- EliRivers 11y agoWhat's the benefit to these companies of having interns? Traditionally, an intern was paid a pittance because they weren't expected to produce (or at least, to produce significantly less); the intern learns things and gets a little cash, the company gets a cheap dogsbody in exchange for ensuring said dogsbody does get some useful knowledge and experience. But with this kind of payment to interns, why not just spend the money on someone who already has knowledge and experience and will produce?
- bweitzman 11y agoIt's a recruiting scheme.
- davidgay 11y ago> What's the benefit to these companies of having interns? Think of it as a long-term interview and/or cheap test-hire.
- wcrichton 11y agoIt's an investment in the future. There's a lot of competition for the top developers coming out of college, and if any of these devs had an internship at your company, they're much more likely to pick you for their first job.
- potatolicious 11y agoLike others have said, it's a recruitment scheme. It should also be noted that the top SV companies recruit interns primarily (and in some cases, exclusively) from top schools. Ultimately it comes down to the belief that investing heavily in a Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/CMU undergrad with no other job experience is a smarter bet than finding a less-pedigreed graduate who is already in the work force. The existence of this whole recruitment scheme - while not exactly evil in and of itself - suggest a level of credentialism that we like to pretend doesn't exist in our industry.
- Bartweiss 11y agoIn an odd way, it's also a consequence of how little credentialism there is elsewhere in the industry. People have little faith that an arbitrary candidate (even one with prior experience) is competent, and the basic interview process is widely agreed to be inadequate. Given all that, it suddenly starts looking worthwhile to spend 3 months and $30k vetting promising recruits.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 11y agoThat depends. Do we factor in that (for example) our interns get to live in SF and have their rent paid by the company? What about my fully paid health insurance? If you take the top of the intern salary numbers from the article and add an SF housing stipend on top of it, then yes, they're out earning me. If you factor health insurance back in, then I don't know.
- netforay 11y agoMy entire company of 10+ developers combined earn less than those interns :-) It is okey, telling only for comparison. (BTW it is not like we are kids, we have multiple products which are like quickbooks and netsuite ERP).
- vthallam 11y agoYou must not be in USA, isn't it? If that's the case, then the currency conversions come into play and you may very well earn less.
- netforay 11y agoYes, Hyderabad India. But still very less compared to market. Also because we are a money loosing product company :-). At least in Indian market what most developers make is just based on luck. Mostly on what stupid interview question you can answer, and how long you are in job, how many times you switched jobs etc.
- tedmiston 11y agoInternships with housing stipends? Is that a standard SF perk now? I hadn't seen anything like that in the midwest. Interns pay to rent apartments just like anyone else.
- chrisseaton 11y agoWhen I did an internship at Oracle I got an apartment and a car, for six months, on top of a senior engineer's salary, which is the grade interns were paid on. With most interns having no family to support or other commitments, everyone jokes that the people taking home the most money are the interns.
- goda90 11y agoI interned at a large software(around 10,000 employees) company in the Midwest and they housed us together in small apartments that were usually occupied by university students during the school year. They provided a housing stipend to interns with families too.
- tedmiston 11y agoWas it a summer internship specifically? And did you come from out of town, say 100+ miles away? Perhaps it is really based on short-term relocation requirements and I haven't seen that because I haven't had to relocate for an internship.
- huac 11y agoInvestment banks on the West Coast (definitely LA at least) give interns housing and a car.
- ethanbond 11y agoFacebook paid for my (ridiculously nice and fantastically located) apartment in full in Seattle. A lot of companies will have at least a subsidy.
- Zombieball 11y agoArticle should really be "Do you earn less than a Seattle intern?" since wages are essentially the same but many of the living cost arguments can be thrown out the window.
- b123400 11y agoI joined an internship in San Francisco last year, and surprised that they are only willing to pay me $1.5k per month, I later realized it's even lower than the minimum wage of SF. It is a small but funded company with less than 10 people. A friend of mine even got an unpaid internship, because the J1 internship visa was considered as a return, and he "earned" the experience to work in SV. I wonder how are the salaries distributed? How much do small startups like this usually pay? Standard deviation?
- mchahn 11y ago> A friend of mine even got an unpaid internship Until I read this I thought all internships were unpaid. My children did several each with no pay.
- J_Darnley 11y agoI thought interns were unpaid. If that was the case then I would earn exactly the same.