Interns At Tech Companies Are Better Paid Than Most American Workers (qz.com)

According to a survey conducted by Jesse Collins, a senior at Purdue University and former Yelp intern, interns at tech companies make much more money on an annualized basis than workers in the vast majority of other occupations. From a report on Quartz: About 300 of the nearly 600 people who responded to the survey said they had received internship offers from big companies like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Goldman Sachs for 2017. On average, the internship recipients said they would be paid $6,500 per month, the equivalent of $78,000 per year (the survey is still open, so results may change). Many also said they would receive more than $1,000 worth of stipends per month for housing and travel or signing bonuses. Internships typically run for a summer, but we've annualized the numbers. If the average intern who responded to Collins' survey were to work for a year, he would make $30,000 more than the average annual income for all occupations in the U.S., which is $48,000. Of the 1,088 occupation categories within which the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks average income, workers in only about 200 of them on average make more money in a year than the intern would.

Comments

Why should this be surprising?

[dlleigh]

Many of these tech companies are located in areas that have a very high cost of living, so it's unfair to compare their intern salaries with average workers in the rest of the country. Also, many of these interns are either in high-demand programs at prestigious universities or already have degrees from them, and are doing actual productive work. They are not spending their time fetching coffee or shadowing real employees.

In my experience, technical internship programs are a good deal for both the company and the intern. They provide competent labor at a good price for the company and give students excellent opportunities for learning and growth.

Re:Offshoring

[unixisc]

There is something called skill. When every Joe Blow can whip up C++/Java/Ruby/Python/ you name it and make all sorts of fixes and improvements to all sorts of things, then it'll make sense to pay them the same as your average McD gal behind the counter. Until then, since people w/ those skills are normally in short supply, they get to demand 10 times more. It's partly a function of supply/demand, and partly a function of the fact that most of these are in the Bay Area, where a shack is considered worth $1M if it's in the city

Re:Students are income tax exempt, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Students are income tax exempt, too.

Bullshit. https://www.irs.gov/help-resou...

Re:Students are income tax exempt, too

[DRJlaw]

Students are income tax exempt, too.

So, very, very wrong.

Internship income is earned income as surely as work income is earned income. You may be confusing this alleged student exemption with an exemption for dependents who earn less than the amount of the standard deduction in a year (currently $6300). Which these interns would blow past in the first month.

Re:Students are income tax exempt, too

[nitehawk214]

The income tax exemption is when you make under a certain amount after dependents adjustments.

And if you actually had no income at all, why would you think you would have to pay any taxes at all?