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.
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
"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.
Students are income tax exempt, too.
Bullshit. https://www.irs.gov/help-resou...
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.
By definition, half the people minus one are below average intelligence.
Nope. By definition, half the people minus one are below median intelligence.
The recent Oakland warehouse fire of Dec 2, 2016. So far 33 found dead
Those people weren't living in the warehouse. They were attending an overcrowded concert there. The venue was in blatant violation of the fire code.
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.
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
That it was filled with large quantities of what amounts to tinder didn't help matters, but it's not much different than the infamous club fire from over a decade ago when the Great White were playing that killed 100 people because it was over capacity and didn't follow the fire code. Maybe people are more prone to laugh at it happening to hipsters instead of hard rock fans because of generational reasons, but this could have happened to almost anyone playing in an unsafe venue.
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.