Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern? | Hacker News Reader

Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern?

bloomberg.com

69 pointsOsiris3062 comments

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.

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

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.

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

That's not really relevant to the point about re-scaling the pay. If I'm willing for various reasons to pay you $X for 3 months doing a job does not mean I am willing to pay you 4 x $X for a year of the same job (or whatever numbers the term works out to)

I suspect many successful interns are offered in excess of the "annualized" intern pay, but not for the same job so it is still apples to oranges.

These companies have co-ops year-round, how is that not effectively the same thing as paying an annualized salary for that work?

Being paid and paying someone aren't the same thing.

Paying someone for a whole year gives you one chance of finding a full-time employee. Paying four different people for 3 months each gives you four chances.

Because the time on that particular job is not the only thing the company is paying for (with interns/co-ops). In fact, it's usually not the primary thing.

It's pretty rare that intern positions make sense in a strict dollar for time sense, you are better off thinking of them as an investment in the future. Accordingly, the pay rate is not directly and easily comparably to most jobs.

I have. It happens.

There isn't always a position open, you can't assume that every company had unlimited funds to hire unlimited engineers.

For example at my company we keeep several slots a year open for co-ops but not that many full-time positions open up. But we aren't in SV so I guess it may be different for huge SV companies who churn through employees.

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.

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

To interns? ... Which ones?

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?

It's a recruiting scheme.

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

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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".

"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.

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.

The number of interns->hires I've seen that, once they got an offer, didn't even bother interviewing elsewhere is astounding. Then they stick around for 5 or 10 years.

I've told many of them that they are doing themselves a disservice. I see many carry intern shenanigan baggage with them for years, limiting opportunity because they aren't taken seriously.

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.

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.

Agree that in theory internship programs can be a great demonstration of the lack of credentialism.

Having gone through the internship gauntlet myself with an AmaGooFaceSoft company in my undergrad years, though, I could count the number of interns from non-top schools on one hand, out of a total cohort of ~300 interns.

The internship mechanism would be more convincingly meritocratic if its ranks weren't almost exclusively stacked with MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/CMU/other-top-school students.

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."

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A lot of companies will have at least a subsidy.

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?

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

lmao this sounds like some soviet union nightmare

"the laws say this, but secretly these are the real laws"

It's actually more like "Legally I can't seek retribution... but you know that what you did pissed me off."

I'd say that if you are relying on the law to protect you from your employer then you have a toxic working relationship. This is, of course, just categorically true of many minimum wage jobs where the employer views employees as disposable. So of course these laws are important and valuable and many people DO rely on them.

However, in a "career" job, you generally want to create a rapport with management, not tension or conflict.

> I'd say that if you are relying on the law to protect you from your employer then you have a toxic working relationship.

All the kid did is publicize their salary. They're not even working yet, and people are suggesting that this perfectly legal and inoffensive action may be a career-ending move. And we're on the opposite context of minimum-wage workers- these are seemingly the most valuable interns in the country.

It seems positively dystopian, like one of those states where you are always on the hook for an infraction, since it doesn't matter what's on the books because you have to consider "party mentality" always anyway.

I was speaking generally. You're response to whether or not he was going to get in a little hot water over this blog post was to jump immediately to the "he's legally allowed to!" which is a tenuous argument at best when it comes to maintaining interpersonal relationships.

In this specific case (salary info sharing) sure it is legal and protected, but he may or may not be doing his employer any favours. That's between him and his employer and honestly immaterial to the principles I'm trying to communicate here.

It's not "dystopian" to realize that you probably don't want to be pissing off your boss, even if they cannot legally punish you for it. Whether or not a specific action would piss off your boss is obviously something to be considered on a case by case basis.

It's because companies hate it when people discuss salaries, because it erodes the advantage they have in negotiations. And it's because they have so much power, and so many are afraid to stand up to them.

> All the kid did is publicize their salary

He didn't just publicize his salary, he organized the publication of a lot of people's salaries.

Fortunately for these interns, if this does "piss off" their managers at Yelp, they'll have many opportunities available at companies that are a little less punitive.

Well, the penalty for unfair dismissal over wage discussion is "reinstatement or salary compensation", and the charge is ridiculously hard to prove. So it's a case of "what're they gonna do, make me un-fire him?"

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.

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

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

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

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.

You can also just walk away from a job?

The key phrase is "no strings attached." You don't have to worry about burning any bridges at the end of an internship.

For sure, but there's generally an expectation that you'll stay at a job longer than three months. It's harder to take the "sample platter" approach to full time jobs.

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