9 ms·

Don't take your highest-paying internship offer

39 points by AlexeyMK 14y ago

jmduke 14y ago
I'm confused. I think most people in the position to receive internship offers from multiple reputable companies are intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money. Raw salary, too, isn't an indicator so much of 'how valuable the company perceives you to be' as it is a function of competition and cost of living. $10K a month working for a quant firm in New York sounds great, but your living expenses are going to be much higher than, say, Seattle or Boston -- and your per hour is likely to be much lower as well, as you're likely spending upwards of sixty hours a week in the office.
- tessr 14y ago
  You might be surprised.
- larsberg 14y ago
  > intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money Depending on their background, these kids are often looking at more money than they have had in their lives and, for many, a larger salary rate than their parents. While there are certainly some students I see for whom the internship is just an experience exercise and the money is for fun, most of them are facing what seems to them a crippling debt load post-graduation and so terrified of it that the prospect of a few thousand more dollars is very hard to pass up.
  - AlexeyMK 14y ago
    Precisely. Thank you for stating this concisely. I'll need to add it in at some point.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Where did you dream up the idea that interns work 60hrs a week?
  - jmduke 14y ago
    It's admittedly anecdotal, but every finance/quant intern I've talked to works/worked 50hrs+ a week.
nickbarnwell 14y ago
While the article has a fair point it really would be better phrasing to say "Take the highest yield internship offer." This summer I had the opportunity to choose between a couple of YC-backed companies at different stages, a Founders Fund/500 Startups-backed company and Google. I chose the latter - not because of the pay, but because it was the only offer that would be a truly novel experience. As one of the rising freshmen the post mentions, experiences include: - A startup that didn't gain traction and went under - A startup that had its Series A and a liquidity event within 18 months - A startup that had turned into a scalable, profitable business While I love the camaraderie with the team and the impact on the product it's possible to have as an intern at a company where the only difference between you and a fulltime engineer is age, it's possible, albeit unlikely, I may enjoy working at a large company and would still be unaware of it had I passed on the opportunity. More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat.
- jimboyoungblood 14y ago
  More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat. The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful. I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees (some of whom are probably ex-Googlers) than one full of present day Googlers.
  - batista 14y ago
    >I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees Tons of random startup employees (not to mention founders) are of very lame technical and scientific skills, and the problems they work on are ho-hum, me-too at best (front-end trivialities for social media, or variations of scaling a web-stack, basically all been there done that problems...).
socratic 14y ago
Is there a better signal than high-pay for choosing a technical internship? Looking at Alexey's list, with the exception of hedge funds, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox would be my top choices for where to do a technical internship, and they're also the highest paying. I suspect this is because a good engineering culture leads to engineers that cost more and get better equipment which eventually filters down to interns. (Obviously, there are exceptions, though.) More broadly, is interning at a startup a good place to learn technical skills (rather than marketing, networking, funding, etc.)? Most of the information on running common web stacks, for example (nginx, rails, django, node.js, varnish, postgres, mysql, redis, etc.), is either freely available on the web or even can be bought as a service (heroku, app engine, aws). By contrast, the only way to find out how engineers have solved problems (web serving, analytics, etc.) at truly huge scale (e.g., 10+% of the human population) is to actually see the solutions at a big company (though sometimes companies will publish details of 3+ year old infrastructure). Big companies also tend to have stricter code review cultures, while small companies tend to just need code written now. All of this seems to point to learning significantly more at a (technically excellent) big company, even though the "output" of the intern might appear to be less. In fact, doing a startup seems like it might be more like resume stuffing than working at Google or Facebook these days. Working at a small startup, you get to talk about your impact, how you built a mission critical piece of infrastructure, whereas at a big company you're probably only trusted to write some small features that are not in the critical path of full time engineers. What's more, you get to say that you worked at a startup, which everyone pretty much respects around California, even if the startup dies or wasn't very technically interesting. But the potential for learning quality engineering through code review and understanding the existing infrastructure seems a lot higher at the big company.
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  Note that Google Summer of Code is probably "better" than the amount it pays would indicate.
  - grogs 14y ago
    Is this true? It's good resume filler, but you won't "meet" many people through it; your mentor, although probably a member of a big corp (most OS stuff has corp sponsors), is just one person. So the networking opportunities are limited, a lot of the work is the "easier" (less-critical) stuff for projects (although on the other hand - maybe the more interesting projects). It will definitely look good on your CV, but any better than getting a good internship elsewhere?
parasitius 14y ago
Is there any way to "hack" your way into internships once you've already graduated and worked 3-4 years? For example taking 1 course to become a "student" again? All the developers at our company often complain that they made significantly higher salaries $$ (sometimes as much as $20~25 per hour) back when they had internships in college. (This is the way things go in Ohio I guess)
michaelbwang 14y ago
This is definitely an interesting post. I'm curious how non-technical positions measure up in terms of summer pay per month.
- Volscio 14y ago
  Outside of finance and tech, what other internships even pay anything?
robert_mygengo 14y ago
This is not necessarily bad advice. However it's kind of arrogant. While "the point of an internship is [...] to learn what kind of work or industry you want to be in once you graduate, to try things out and live in cool places." is partly true (especially in the current economy) it's a pretty naive way of looking at yourself. If you're doing an internship, you're probably not a fully-fledged and employable person yet. You probably aren't ready to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The internship is there to teach you some of the other aspects of working with others in a real company (not a college project) that you simply can't get from college. Most 25 year olds don't have those skills. Don't forget that. It's a lovely job market right now in Silicon Valley, but it won't be forever. The individuals that have a bit of humility respect the fact they need to learn throughout their career, and in the long run will do better.

39 points by AlexeyMK 14y ago

I'm confused. I think most people in the position to receive internship offers from multiple reputable companies are intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money. Raw salary, too, isn't an indicator so much of 'how valuable the company perceives you to be' as it is a function of competition and cost of living. $10K a month working for a quant firm in New York sounds great, but your living expenses are going to be much higher than, say, Seattle or Boston -- and your per hour is likely to be much lower as well, as you're likely spending upwards of sixty hours a week in the office.

tessr 14y ago
You might be surprised.
larsberg 14y ago
> intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money Depending on their background, these kids are often looking at more money than they have had in their lives and, for many, a larger salary rate than their parents. While there are certainly some students I see for whom the internship is just an experience exercise and the money is for fun, most of them are facing what seems to them a crippling debt load post-graduation and so terrified of it that the prospect of a few thousand more dollars is very hard to pass up.
- AlexeyMK 14y ago
  Precisely. Thank you for stating this concisely. I'll need to add it in at some point.
Drbble 14y ago
Where did you dream up the idea that interns work 60hrs a week?
- jmduke 14y ago
  It's admittedly anecdotal, but every finance/quant intern I've talked to works/worked 50hrs+ a week.

nickbarnwell 14y ago

While the article has a fair point it really would be better phrasing to say "Take the highest yield internship offer." This summer I had the opportunity to choose between a couple of YC-backed companies at different stages, a Founders Fund/500 Startups-backed company and Google. I chose the latter - not because of the pay, but because it was the only offer that would be a truly novel experience. As one of the rising freshmen the post mentions, experiences include: - A startup that didn't gain traction and went under - A startup that had its Series A and a liquidity event within 18 months - A startup that had turned into a scalable, profitable business While I love the camaraderie with the team and the impact on the product it's possible to have as an intern at a company where the only difference between you and a fulltime engineer is age, it's possible, albeit unlikely, I may enjoy working at a large company and would still be unaware of it had I passed on the opportunity. More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat.

jimboyoungblood 14y ago
More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat. The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful. I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees (some of whom are probably ex-Googlers) than one full of present day Googlers.
- batista 14y ago
  >I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of random startup employees Tons of random startup employees (not to mention founders) are of very lame technical and scientific skills, and the problems they work on are ho-hum, me-too at best (front-end trivialities for social media, or variations of scaling a web-stack, basically all been there done that problems...).

socratic 14y ago

Is there a better signal than high-pay for choosing a technical internship? Looking at Alexey's list, with the exception of hedge funds, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox would be my top choices for where to do a technical internship, and they're also the highest paying. I suspect this is because a good engineering culture leads to engineers that cost more and get better equipment which eventually filters down to interns. (Obviously, there are exceptions, though.) More broadly, is interning at a startup a good place to learn technical skills (rather than marketing, networking, funding, etc.)? Most of the information on running common web stacks, for example (nginx, rails, django, node.js, varnish, postgres, mysql, redis, etc.), is either freely available on the web or even can be bought as a service (heroku, app engine, aws). By contrast, the only way to find out how engineers have solved problems (web serving, analytics, etc.) at truly huge scale (e.g., 10+% of the human population) is to actually see the solutions at a big company (though sometimes companies will publish details of 3+ year old infrastructure). Big companies also tend to have stricter code review cultures, while small companies tend to just need code written now. All of this seems to point to learning significantly more at a (technically excellent) big company, even though the "output" of the intern might appear to be less. In fact, doing a startup seems like it might be more like resume stuffing than working at Google or Facebook these days. Working at a small startup, you get to talk about your impact, how you built a mission critical piece of infrastructure, whereas at a big company you're probably only trusted to write some small features that are not in the critical path of full time engineers. What's more, you get to say that you worked at a startup, which everyone pretty much respects around California, even if the startup dies or wasn't very technically interesting. But the potential for learning quality engineering through code review and understanding the existing infrastructure seems a lot higher at the big company.

JoachimSchipper 14y ago
Note that Google Summer of Code is probably "better" than the amount it pays would indicate.
- grogs 14y ago
  Is this true? It's good resume filler, but you won't "meet" many people through it; your mentor, although probably a member of a big corp (most OS stuff has corp sponsors), is just one person. So the networking opportunities are limited, a lot of the work is the "easier" (less-critical) stuff for projects (although on the other hand - maybe the more interesting projects). It will definitely look good on your CV, but any better than getting a good internship elsewhere?

parasitius 14y ago

Is there any way to "hack" your way into internships once you've already graduated and worked 3-4 years? For example taking 1 course to become a "student" again? All the developers at our company often complain that they made significantly higher salaries $$ (sometimes as much as $20~25 per hour) back when they had internships in college. (This is the way things go in Ohio I guess)

michaelbwang 14y ago

This is definitely an interesting post. I'm curious how non-technical positions measure up in terms of summer pay per month.

Volscio 14y ago
Outside of finance and tech, what other internships even pay anything?

robert_mygengo 14y ago

This is not necessarily bad advice. However it's kind of arrogant. While "the point of an internship is [...] to learn what kind of work or industry you want to be in once you graduate, to try things out and live in cool places." is partly true (especially in the current economy) it's a pretty naive way of looking at yourself. If you're doing an internship, you're probably not a fully-fledged and employable person yet. You probably aren't ready to take on a huge amount of responsibility. The internship is there to teach you some of the other aspects of working with others in a real company (not a college project) that you simply can't get from college. Most 25 year olds don't have those skills. Don't forget that. It's a lovely job market right now in Silicon Valley, but it won't be forever. The individuals that have a bit of humility respect the fact they need to learn throughout their career, and in the long run will do better.