Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/do-you-earn-less-than-a-silicon-valley-intern

by Osiris30 • 10 years ago

69 62 10 years ago

I would kill to be an intern. Good pay, fun projects, and everyone has to be nice to me.

wcrichton3• 10 years ago

For me, the best feature of an internship is that you can simply walk away at the end, no strings attached. If you want to explore working a particular industry but don't want to commit to a full-time job, an internship gives you great exposure not just to the company but to the area. I took an internship in finance just to see what it was like, and although I wouldn't work on financial products full time, it was a great eye-opening experience.

cortesoft• 10 years ago

You can also just walk away from a job?

umanwizard3• 10 years ago

Sharing this salary data publicly sounds like something Yelp might frown upon. Hope this intern doesn't lose his job before it starts.

RodericDay3• 10 years ago

AFAIK, it's illegal to punish people for discussing their salary publicly.

mfoy_4• 10 years ago

Hiding behind legalities won't save your career from a pissed off employer...

They not may be able to outright dismiss you for that, but they can surely find other ways to make your life uncomfortable.

umanwizard3• 10 years ago

I think that's only true w.r.t. employees at a firm discussing salary with each other, not with sharing it publicly. Let me know if you have a source that suggest otherwise, as I'm not sure whether this is settled law.

mfoy_4• 10 years ago

It would be more than a bit ironic if that happens.

artimaeis• 10 years ago

Eh, I earn less pay than an SV intern but I don't have to pay SV prices for everything or commute a ridiculous distance to get to an area that's more normally priced. I'm okay with this.

impy• 10 years ago

This, and they are also staying for a short period. Don't think it's fair to annualize the wage they get for this.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

This is key. Law firm interns can out-earn new associates, but it's a short-term incentive that isn't going to be annualized.

aianus2• 10 years ago

I've never heard of a classmate not getting a return offer for the next co-op term or fulltime (if they were graduating).

EliRivers• 10 years ago

What's the benefit to these companies of having interns? Traditionally, an intern was paid a pittance because they weren't expected to produce (or at least, to produce significantly less); the intern learns things and gets a little cash, the company gets a cheap dogsbody in exchange for ensuring said dogsbody does get some useful knowledge and experience.

But with this kind of payment to interns, why not just spend the money on someone who already has knowledge and experience and will produce?

bweitzman• 10 years ago

It's a recruiting scheme.

davidgay• 10 years ago

What's the benefit to these companies of having interns?

Think of it as a long-term interview and/or cheap test-hire.

wcrichton3• 10 years ago

It's an investment in the future. There's a lot of competition for the top developers coming out of college, and if any of these devs had an internship at your company, they're much more likely to pick you for their first job.

bobbyi_settv• 10 years ago

It's a recruiting program. The point is that you have someone work for you the summer before their senior year and then if they like it, they join you full time after graduation.

It's way cheaper to pay someone $6k or whatever for a summer to recruit them and then pay them a new-hire salary than to recruit someone "who already has knowledge and experience" and pay them the appropriate salary.

It's also more scalable and repeatable because you have an internship program that provides potential hires in batches funneled through colleges, whereas the experienced people you are talking about generally need to be found, courted and recruited individually.

treehau5• 10 years ago

It's also brand awareness and marketing. Said student goes back to their university and starts spreading the word on campus about "how awesome my summer was working for X!" and how many "interesting" problems they got to solve.

Many places will set aside specific, "interesting" side projects solely for the interns (while the rest of us engineers wish we could work on these projects, but are busy with the mundane tasks of keeping the lights on, which I imagine if you gave an intern this task they wouldn't be so thrilled to go spread the word when they go back, so yeah there's definitely marketing involved.)

ihsw• 10 years ago

It's a pipeline, essentially. It has been established that the cost of baiting these college seniors is comparable to having recruiters attempt to woo them after they graduate, and as such.

Interestingly, this contrasts heavily with the school-to-prison pipeline[1] increasingly occurring -- kids ending up in prison immediately after finishing their schooling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison-pipeline

chrisseaton2• 10 years ago

It sounds like you may be confusing work experience for internships.

Interns often produce the best work in a group because they have fresh ideas and have the time and space to focus hard on a single hard problem, while the normal members of staff have to make things happen day to day.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

I definitely see a lot of companies where internships are used to handle "nice-to-haves" that the main team is too busy for. It's a good balance of "we can't let this person touch our core product" and "this person is free to spend three months working on something totally outside our normal workflow".

kragen• 10 years ago

"why not just spend the money on someone who already has knowledge and experience and will produce?"

Those people already have jobs, and they're tired of clueless tech recruiters trying to contact them. To hire them, you need to wait for their company to go out of business, or for some kind of management debacle to happen inside of it, or you need to know them personally.

It doesn't really matter whether you're hypothetically willing to pay them $120k or $240k or $480k a year if they don't answer your emails because they're already quite happy where they are.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

There's a pretty noticeable pattern where good devs with little interest in advancement will hole up at one company for decades - usually the first company they enjoy working at.

As you say, bidding hard on interns is worthwhile for the chance to snap up a few long-term winners.

potatolicious2• 10 years ago

Like others have said, it's a recruitment scheme. It should also be noted that the top SV companies recruit interns primarily (and in some cases, exclusively) from top schools.

Ultimately it comes down to the belief that investing heavily in a Stanford/MIT/Berkeley/CMU undergrad with no other job experience is a smarter bet than finding a less-pedigreed graduate who is already in the work force.

The existence of this whole recruitment scheme - while not exactly evil in and of itself - suggest a level of credentialism that we like to pretend doesn't exist in our industry.

Bartweiss5• 10 years ago

In an odd way, it's also a consequence of how little credentialism there is elsewhere in the industry. People have little faith that an arbitrary candidate (even one with prior experience) is competent, and the basic interview process is widely agreed to be inadequate.

Given all that, it suddenly starts looking worthwhile to spend 3 months and $30k vetting promising recruits.

rayiner• 10 years ago

It's recruiting. When there is high competition for desirable candidates, one way to make sure they accept a full time offer with your company instead of a competitor is to pay them $30k + extravagant lunches for a summer of often worthless work product. And if it becomes a trend industry-wide to have these internships and extend full-time offers to interns, then it becomes hard not to play along, because then your pool of recruits at graduation will consist mostly of people who didn't get a full-time offer through an internship, plus a handful of people looking to "trade up."

ejcx• 10 years ago

Many have pointed out that it's a recruiting effort, which it is.

But it's also an easy way to get rid of people who don't work out. If it's clear an intern is not performing well or not cut out, it's easier to weed them out as an intern at the end of the summer, than firing them later on.

pmiller23• 10 years ago

That depends. Do we factor in that (for example) our interns get to live in SF and have their rent paid by the company? What about my fully paid health insurance? If you take the top of the intern salary numbers from the article and add an SF housing stipend on top of it, then yes, they're out earning me. If you factor health insurance back in, then I don't know.

huac2• 10 years ago

Some listed firms offer 'full benefits,' including medical/dental/vision.

ethanbond2• 10 years ago

To interns? ... Which ones?

netforay2• 10 years ago

My entire company of 10+ developers combined earn less than those interns :-) It is okey, telling only for comparison. (BTW it is not like we are kids, we have multiple products which are like quickbooks and netsuite ERP).

vthallam• 10 years ago

You must not be in USA, isn't it? If that's the case, then the currency conversions come into play and you may very well earn less.

netforay2• 10 years ago

Yes, Hyderabad India. But still very less compared to market. Also because we are a money loosing product company :-).

At least in Indian market what most developers make is just based on luck. Mostly on what stupid interview question you can answer, and how long you are in job, how many times you switched jobs etc.

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

Internships with housing stipends? Is that a standard SF perk now?

I hadn't seen anything like that in the midwest. Interns pay to rent apartments just like anyone else.

chrisseaton2• 10 years ago

When I did an internship at Oracle I got an apartment and a car, for six months, on top of a senior engineer's salary, which is the grade interns were paid on.

With most interns having no family to support or other commitments, everyone jokes that the people taking home the most money are the interns.

goda90• 10 years ago

I interned at a large software(around 10,000 employees) company in the Midwest and they housed us together in small apartments that were usually occupied by university students during the school year. They provided a housing stipend to interns with families too.

tedmiston2• 10 years ago

Was it a summer internship specifically? And did you come from out of town, say 100+ miles away? Perhaps it is really based on short-term relocation requirements and I haven't seen that because I haven't had to relocate for an internship.

huac2• 10 years ago

Investment banks on the West Coast (definitely LA at least) give interns housing and a car.

ethanbond2• 10 years ago

Facebook paid for my (ridiculously nice and fantastically located) apartment in full in Seattle.

A lot of companies will have at least a subsidy.

Zombieball• 10 years ago

Article should really be "Do you earn less than a Seattle intern?" since wages are essentially the same but many of the living cost arguments can be thrown out the window.

b123400• 10 years ago

I joined an internship in San Francisco last year, and surprised that they are only willing to pay me $1.5k per month, I later realized it's even lower than the minimum wage of SF. It is a small but funded company with less than 10 people.

A friend of mine even got an unpaid internship, because the J1 internship visa was considered as a return, and he "earned" the experience to work in SV.

I wonder how are the salaries distributed? How much do small startups like this usually pay? Standard deviation?

mchahn• 10 years ago

A friend of mine even got an unpaid internship

Until I read this I thought all internships were unpaid. My children did several each with no pay.

J_Darnley• 10 years ago

I thought interns were unpaid. If that was the case then I would earn exactly the same.

Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern?

Related Stories