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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.
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A salary that is comfy in Kansas will have you sleeping in a van in Silicon Valley.
Yet IT workers are supposedly out of work.
IT workers work less hard than a McDonalds worker yet they expect 10 times the salary.
Just wanted to note that the cost of living in the places where those companies are located are significantly higher than the cost of living at the location of the average American.
All those tech companies being in the highest cost of living areas, would it? In certain parts of SoCal 78,000 a year wouldn't even cover the basic expenses of life, let alone allow someone to feel like they are in the top 50% of wage earners.
Students are income tax exempt, too.
But it's an error to project an intern's monthly pay over the entire year. The amount they earn is for a small number of months, and has to last them the remaining 9 or 10 until the next time they can intern.
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.
Seems sane to me. When I was an intern (erm, 14 years ago...) I started at $12 an hour and ended at $15 an hour I think. Just barely enough to live off of in my area, if full time, but not if paying for classes at the same time.
"On an annualized basis", meaning that the number of hours worked, or earnings per hour, doesn't figure in.
Also cost of living in SV etc., which ought to be controlled for but isn't.
So... if you look at an internship that lasts 3 months and pays ~20,000 dollars, and multiply that by 4 regardless of the fact that the internship cannot actually be extended to be a year long, then in that hypothetical world (where nobody else's salary was also multiplied by 4, only the interns), interns would make $78,000 per year, and would therefore be making more than a lot of other people. But in the real world, where we all actually live, that person made a little less than $20,000 and is at the same time paying to attend college, so they're not actually all that wealthy.
Could I somehow counteract the article by pointing out that if you amortize the interns' salary over 12 months, they would be grossing about $2,150 per month, and that's a pretty low wage?
I was making that as an intern back in the eighties.
This must be in California, where supposedly you only need a laptop and a ponytail to get $100K. The rest of the world, you won't get $75K until you well into your IT career.
The recent Oakland warehouse fire of Dec 2, 2016. So far 33 found dead, 70% of the building remains to be searched. While having a place to do art, make things, play music, and hang out with like minded individuals sounds terribly romantic. Fire safety is no joke, and I really hope the cities in the Bay Area crack down hard on these sorts of artist colonies and either shut them down or ideally help them solve their code violations. (the latter option is doubtful, since it costs money)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I flew out to San Diego from the East Coast after graduating to interview for a high paying job in an expensive area of San Diego. Despite the good pay for that area I still turned the job down. There is more to consider then just what a job pays. Even in the case of a good or above-average salary for an area even. In my case I decided it was best to just turn the job down because my gut said they'd be out of business in 6-8 months and I could do better in the long term on my own. This is in spite of the employer being the only company I really wanted to go work for-explicitly because they were focused on an area that nobody else was (Desktop Linux). I had interned for the start-up two years earlier, but realized that while the company had potential in the direction they were going the dumb-ass at the top whose money funded the company was a moron. He had caused the one person (and the important people, like developers) who'd actually turned the company around and into something both profitable and more in line with the Free Software Movement (despite all the criticism from it, and the 'open source' camp in general) to quit. So at the end of the day I went back to the east coast to start a company of my own. It took six months to get a small business off the ground to actually fund the real business I was aiming to start (which basically was hitting the same market that the San Diego company was targeting). Anyway- I worked for $9 / hr part time for six months before I was making sufficient $$$ (a reliable source of significant income was the more important part) from the initial business and then I quit that low-pay job to work full time on the real business. Took 3 years to really get everything off the ground- but a few years later I moved the business from one of the most expensive areas in the USA to one of the less expensive well-to-do areas. I've got twice the home I could afford, multiple cars, a family, and I'm still pretty young successful CEO. It would be impossible for me to beat that had I taken the high paying job in San Diego. Make smarter choices and you won't be stuck at Mc Donalds begging for a pay raise nor living in a tiny apartment making six figure and being unable to afford rent.
The moral of the story is if you aren't doing well where you are now move! I know people who pay $300 month in rent and that includes all other utilities/heat/etc. If you can't find a part-time job that pays at least four times that you're probably got a mental handicap and should appeal to charity (or are a lazy fck who deserves little sympathy/are drug dependant/etc). Those who have children, etc. Well, you maybe should have thought about job security and putting away enough savings for a rainy day before having kids.
This just in - techie careers pay more.
By definition, half the people minus one are below average intelligence.
Nope. By definition, half the people minus one are below median intelligence.
Are those interns receiving benefits? Vacation, Sick, Retirement, etc...
On a separate note, as a temp worker I am not happy to see interns earning more than me, experience should be valued higher than education.
75K won't get you rent anywhere in SV that is livable, unless paying 2.5K a month for dorm style housing with 40 other guys in a shared living / bath arrangement. Until the VC's that fund SV corps ask for engineers in less affluent areas of California or in other states, the wage discrepancy gap will increase.
Try to find a 1BR place and do deposit, first, last rent on that.
Ha!
That's not even middle class.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When I accepted an QA internship for $10 per hour in 1997, I doubled my income from the minimum-wage restaurant job that I had for three years after college.
Just barely enough to live off of in my area, if full time, but not if paying for classes at the same time.
When I went back to school to learn computer programming at community college, my education was free thanks to a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law, I was working 60 hours per week as a lead video game tester and made the college president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in major. It really depends on how badly you want it.
As an engineering intern, I was paid more than friends that had already graduated college with other degrees (business/marketing/etc). If you took my hourly rate and ran it for a year, yeah it would have been in the 50K-60K range. Cost of living wasn't an issue. You could have all housing provided for you and have 3 roommates, or take a lump housing stipend at the beginning. The money I made and saved helped support me throughout the rest of the school year. And this WASN'T California.
The unfortunate truth is some careers make more than others. So much more so, in some cases, that even a low level peon (intern) can make more in that career than an experience person in another career. I'm an engineer, I think I make good money. But tell that to the Neurosurgeon who has enough in his bank account to pay off my entire mortgage if he wanted to (this is not hyperbole, I've seen it).
These internships are super elite so why is this surprising? Most techies are not starting out at Goldman or Google or Facebook or Twitter or even a Yelp. Getting a job at one of these place is like getting into Harvard or winning the lottery both in terms of difficulty and in terms of how it sets you up for the rest of your career. I went to a top 50 US university but no top 10 or 20. I graduated and got an internships at JPMorgan. I ended up doing 4 years at JPMorgan. That job, the ridiculously good pay, and the experience I got there basically set me up for life. I credit JPM more than my lackluster top 50 university with where I am now, but I have no illusion that a Tier 2 or Tier 3 graduate wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting that internship given how competitive it is. They never seriously interview at bad schools except for very bottom on the barrel back office jobs that are barely tech related. The people working at these places are easily the top 2-3% of the population in terms of education and ultimately income too.
San Jose:
40% above national average
San Francisco:
53% above national average
Source: http://cost-of-living.careertrends.com/
Annual Mean Wage for all Occupations in the U.S.: 48,320
Source: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
So interns are paid 78,000 if the numbers were to be annualized. If we take the two areas above and normalize them for cost of living differences we have this:
Average wage for all occupations in SF: 48,320 * 1.53 = 73,929 = 105%
Average wage for all occupations in SJ: 48,320 * 1.40 = 67,620 = 115%
On the surface this looks pretty good but we are not talking about interns for all occupations, we are talking about tech companies.
For this I refer to the Annual Mean Wage for Computer Occupations: 86,090
Source: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000
Let's normalize for cost of living:
Average wage for computer occupations in SF: 86,090 * 1.53 = 131,717 = 65%
Average wage for computer occupations in SJ: 86,090 * 1.40 = 120,526 = 71%
To summarize: Silicon Valley Interns are making slightly more than the average *for all occupations* when normalized for the area. They are making about 65%-71% of the average for all computer occupations when normalized for the area.
In other words, they are being paid commensurate to the cost of living and their experience level. Nothing to see here, move on.
tech internships are an end run around visa limitations, and that would explain the pay disparity more than anything else. I keep seeing this patter. The company brings in somebody from India on a student visa for an Internship. The "student" already knows how to do the job. There's no training involved, which is the point. The company gets a worker that needs zero training.
Back in my day before the visa programs we used to call people who did useful work 'employees' and they were paid as such...
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Want what? Those were the top intern wages in this area, which also has a very low cost of living. I'm doing just fine here thanks.
Also bear in mind that that "average of all occupations" figure they give there is the mean. The median is around half of that. Meaning more than half of all Americans are making $50-something thousand a year less than these interns are.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
An education. Paying rent or buying books was a huge problem during my first tour through college in the 1990's. That was before textbook publishers decided that books should cost more than the classes.
The average income of 10th through 70th percentile - in other words, most citizens - is $32,245 / year (source, EPI Data Library - Wages by percentile.csv, 2015 [latest] row).
Over 40 million (out of 319 million, or about 12%) of US citizens are going hungry (feedingamerica.org).
The social safety net isn't safe, nor particularly social.
I'm sure we can expect relief from the Trump administration (cough... choke.)
But hey, let's worry about tech interns. My blinders need a workout anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The last place I worked, interns did menial tasks. Mostly tasks that needed to be done, though.
At my current employer, at least on my team, interns are considered in-training for the full time position we'll offer when they are about to graduate. That has worked very well. It avoids wasting several months training and weeding out full-time hires at full-time pay.
At any decent engineering firm, interns are doing real work that is worth real pay so it is unsurprising that at companies where the full-time employees make a lot of money the interns make a lot too.
Forget about being a tech intern; a $150/hr escort makes an annualized $312,000 per year!
Being paid more than *most* American workers just means you earn more than the median. It's not hard to provide more value to a company than a median American worker. Many of them are completely fucking useless when it comes to technology.
Tech interns aren't the *go make coffee* interns you see in movies. They are high performing programmers and systems people that command a much better wage than most American workers. They also tend to put in long hours, have lots of energy, and are eager to learn and do new things.
Before people here bitch and moan about ageism, if you are making less than the tech intern, then you work at a shitty company and could do a lot better if you tried harder. If you claim that no one will hire you, then I suggest you start a company and do better.
What they do is find candidates graduating, from SMALL colleges, or schools that are not located in the New York, San Fran, Seattle areas. You know...flyover country. What sounds like a LOT of money for someone from the midwest, ISN'T really a lot of money, when you factor in what it costs in some of those cities to live. The rent for a tiny studio apartment in those cities, will rent you a VERY nice size 3-4 bedroom house out here in the midwest. Plus, the cost of auto insurance, food, travel etc are many times what it is in the midwest. So, a 70,000 salary in a LARGE city, it's really that much, compared to the cost of living.
The survey, conducted by Jesse Collins, a senior at Purdue University and former Yelp intern, asked interns and new graduates in the computer science community how much they were paid. Collins says he posted the survey in programmer-focused groups on Facebook, Reddit, and university listservs, though it was open to anyone. The purpose of the survey, Collins says, is to inform interns as they negotiate their internship offers.
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As with any small online survey, these results might not be fully representative. The sample size is tiny—for most companies, fewer than 10 people who said they had been offered internships responded—and some respondents obscured their employers’ identities (one entry is listed under “unicorn,” for instance). The survey did not ask for proof that respondents had received job offers at the companies
Emphasis mine. Kudos to the senior for their efforts with limited resources - but the results absolutely should be taken with a grain of salt and (IMHO) should not be worthy of Slashdot discussion.
In other news, water is wet, pigs still cannot fly, and we have yet to devise a way of testing hell's temperature.
He should become a highschool drama teacher with the Halifax Regional School Board and cash $91,970 (Canadian)/year... and that's just ranked 278th, so there are 277 better-paid jobs on the Halifax Regional School Board's payroll.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
this is pretty funny: "Intern Exploited for 35 years - CBC" - http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/...
"This is that" is a satire news radio show for those who don't pick up on it when listening.
What I "cherry-picked" was 70% of the population.
The whole point -- which you completely missed -- was that 70% of the people are not doing well.
But don't worry, you're in considerable company.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.