Slashdot Mirror
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.
Film at 11
A salary that is comfy in Kansas will have you sleeping in a van in Silicon Valley.
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.
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
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?
Students are income tax exempt, too.
Bullshit. https://www.irs.gov/help-resou...
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.
That is within perfectly reasonable bounds. IT workers are more like a Doctor or Lawyer than a McDonalds worker in term of the intelligence level required to succeed in the field.
Also see the last story for why CEOs think it is worth it. IT workers are expected to be working toward putting other workers, including themselves out of the job. They don't succeed all at once but they do the shrink the pool a group at a time and eventually all the pieces will have been developed to accomplish this.
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
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.
Off shoring won't happen to me since they need my warm ass in the chair in case something in the warehouse goes down, only then can I leave the chair - fix it, and go back to warming that chair with my ass.
Oh, and coding an EDI system. As well as the new order process system, and writing ETL maps.
But the latter part any burger flipper can do...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
By definition, half the people minus one are below average intelligence.
Nope. By definition, half the people minus one are below median intelligence.
CEO earns 10x what I do but does he work 10 times as hard?
When I worked at Cisco in October 2013, my contract came up during an announced layoff period and my boss was prevented from renewing my contract. The CEO got a 60% raise for having a lousy fiscal year. I was unemployed for eight months, had 60 job interviews, and had three job offers pending when I accepted my current position in government IT.
I do remember claiming an exempt status on my taxes one year because I was a full time student and had no income. It was right on the 1040 form which is how I knew to claim it...
If that was wrong, I have never heard about it from the IRS...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
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.
Where did you get this? Intern money is not designed to support someone for the entire year. It's designed to give them a little bit of experience and maybe a little bit of pocket change. Some interns don't even get paid. They are not paying you more because it's only a short time. Projecting it over a full year seems perfectly reasonable. Also, how many people actually do more than one intern? Most people I know do one their Junior year and that was it.
And you get 20% of the product you wanted. If you think outsourcing guarantees you the same product but for 20% of the cost, you're going to be surprised. 'Poor quality at a great price is no bargain' - Japanese saying.
Yet IT workers are supposedly out of work.
Uhh ... no. Tech unemployment has been 3% or less for years.
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.
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?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
During my first tour through college, I typically worked 30 hours per week at the college bookstore. I probably made no more than $10K per year and paid zero in income taxes. Mostly because the county never took out taxes from the monthly paycheck (a huge problem for the regular staff as they needed to sit aside money for taxes) and the amount fell below the threshold for taxable income.
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 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.
These tend to be very highly qualified interns, though. Landing an internship that pays this well requires a grueling interview process. And most applicants have advanced degrees (typically PhD's from the more well-known universities). It is generally a good way to enter the work force. In fact, without any other job experience to show for, this is often the only way to enter the work force. And at the end of the internship, most interns will be offered a full time position.
So, if you think of the type of internship you did in highschool, when you helped restock the shelves in your local supermarket, then you are thoroughly misunderstanding the scope of these positions. A more accurate view would be that this is an extended job interview. The candidate already passed all the other requirements (i.e. great resume, multiple phone screens, multiple in-house interviews, ...), but the company isn't quite ready to extend an offer, or the candidate has stated that they still need to go back to school for another year before finally graduating.
Excuse me, but what planet are you on? I cannot speak for outside of the US, but this is a US centric article I assure you I paid taxes whilst I was a student
Every time I do that, it grows more heads!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
I think he might be mixing up the fact that most internships often make below the income threshold for taxes. I had a paid internship for all 6 years I spent in college. It was basically full time over the summer and 15-20 hours a week during the semester. I'd have to look through my tax forms to be sure, but from memory even earning something like 14-16k/year I was basically paying very little to nothing in income tax.
Forget about being a tech intern; a $150/hr escort makes an annualized $312,000 per year!
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.
Some interns don't even get paid.
In America, unpaid internships are illegal.
Planet 1991, apparently.
The exemption expired at the end of 1991. Apparently congress didn't renew it.
You can view historical IRS forms here:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pr...
Looks like students can no longer check "exempt" on their W4.
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.
Sounds like a head leak. Do you have a backtrace?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think the US system is different, but in the UK you don't pay tax on the first part of your income and a student stipend is non-taxable. This means that you can live very comfortably as a PhD student: the stipend covers your cost of living and then you can earn roughly as much as someone working a full-time minimum-wage job on top of that before you start paying taxes. When I did mine, I was coming close to the tax-free allowance from consulting work, so at the end of it I'd saved enough for a deposit on a house (not a massive achievement: I was living somewhere with very low housing costs).
This also leads to some unfortunate unintended consequences: the main funding body has made it very hard to fund PhD studentships from grants, so the work around is to hire PhD students as research assistants and enrol them as self-funded PhD students. This means that the university charges overhead and the student pays tax, so it ends up costing 2-3 times as much as a funded studentship for about the same level of take-home pay for the student. Worse, they're then above the tax-free income threshold, so they pay tax on top of any other earnings, so PhD students funded on a grant get a much worse deal than ones funded from a scholarship or other award.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
In the US, low income citizens pay negative tax. We call it Earned Income Tax Credit. If you live alone and make no money (and therefore pay no income taxes), you get back a few hundred at tax return time. If you have kids, you get several thousand.
Also, the first ten thousand or so of income is non-taxable. Combined with the Earned Income Tax Credit, families with children usually don't pay taxes on the first twenty to thirty thousand dollars of income. 45 percent of the US pays no federal income tax.
In America, unpaid internships are illegal.
No they are not. But in the USA, in order to not have to pay them minimum wage you do have to meet certain criteria:
http://smallbusiness.findlaw.c...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...
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.
The moderators clearly agree, lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
in order to not have to pay them minimum wage you do have to meet certain criteria:
The criteria are that the "intern" can't do any useful work. Which means they are a student, not an intern.
In the US, if you actually work for a living, you get hit by FICA taxes. Income taxes are generally the most progressive out there, so it's disingenuous to look at them alone.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Because of EITC, the negative federal tax rate offsets FICA for incomes under $10,000. So, even factoring in FICA, most students pay no net income tax.