Interns in tech make more than workers in most occupations | Hacker News Reader

Interns in tech make more than workers in most occupations

theatlas.com

55 pointsM_Grey63 comments

That's because workers in tech make more than workers in most occupations.

When you hire an intern, you pay them almost-entry-level rates because they are doing almost-entry-level work.

Interns are not slaves to be under-paid, and tech is a high paid industry. I'm not sure what's surprising about this.

Yup, agreed with this.

Call me a privileged asshole or whatever since I work in tech and I get paid well, but isn't that how supply and demand works? Once upon a time, you could get a really well-paying factory job or a well-paying job working in the coal mines since those jobs were in demand.

I feel like that's how it's kind of working in software. Factory jobs are going away because robotics are taking over, which creates a demand for engineers to maintain these robots. We're kind of going through a second industrial revolution, except it's a digital and robotics revolution. Unfortunately, that means we're also feeling the crunch of that which means there's a big demand for engineers that our workforce doesn't supply for... yet. So yes, tech interns are going to get paid more than most other places.

I kinda feel like if we were really going through a second Industrial Revolution, GDP and productivity growth rates would be a lot higher. Maybe we'll manage to unleash an Industrial Revolution if we break up monopolies, fund public infrastructure properly, and do other things to create space for really new enterprises.

Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy. You can reach millions of users several magnitudes cheaper than ever before. Even small companies owned and operated by a single person can have customers spread over the entire world.

Needless to say, most people are not able to participate.

>Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy.

Do we have any numerical evidence for this? Sure, it could explain Google's revenues, but monopoly rents from being the search-engine could explain that too. What about on a per-worker-hour basis, wit some official numbers?

I agree with what you are saying, but there is never a reason not to be a pedant: The Second Industrial Revolution already came and went about a century ago. The one we are currently in would be the third. It's unusual in that it seems to replace human intellect and decision-making almost as much as human physical labour.

By 'make' I'd like to point out that on average, workers in tech literally 'make more' (i.e produce more) value for their employers. Which is precisely why compensation is better.

Supply/demand is why compensation is better. Value created has very low correlation. The only rule for value is workers will always be paid less than the value they bring in.

Nope, that's only part of the equation. The other part is that we have the bargaining power to demand a cut, largely because of the current supply/demand balance in the tech labor market.

Besides, the economic notion of value is an incredibly slippery concept. Not only does it include bargaining power (so your value can decrease even if your economic productivity increases), it weights in the wealth of your customer too -- better to entertain a banker than to feed a poor. "Value" for the purpose of economics is typically quite far from "value" for the purposes of morality.

3rd reason not to be a dick about this: the wheel turns constantly, and we will not be on top of it forever. See: any mature engineering discipline, or even past performance of SW engineering.

From personal experience, interns actually end up doing more than their Senior counterparts.

And what we worked on would fall under computer vision / machine learning, so I wouldn't call it "almost-entry-level" work

> From personal experience, interns actually end up doing more than their Senior counterparts

Appearances can be deceiving - for senior positions (rather, for more experienced people) more is less. What is more work - writing 2000 new lines of code or writing/refactoring into 200 that do the same thing?

I was talking more about the fact that they were mostly stuck doing "administrative tasks," presentations, code reviews, data migrations. Things that don't exactly contribute to the progress of the project per se.

Edit: Actually the interns were doing the refactoring too. This project is a bit outlier however as the code base was completely new, like 3 days old when we joined.

> I was talking more about the fact that they were mostly stuck doing "administrative tasks," presentations, code reviews, data migrations. Things that don't exactly contribute to the progress of the project per se.

I see what you mean, but I disagree about those tasks not contributing to the project. A software project is more than just code alone: understanding the ever-changing problem space, creating a roadmap, budgets, meetings, schedules, handling conflicts (politics) are necessary for all non-trivial projects whether it's proprietary or Free/Open Source.

I do commend your seniors for shielding you from the boring (but very necessary) bits - I'm sure they made it look easy.

> When you hire an intern, you pay them almost-entry-level rates because they are doing almost-entry-level work.

That's the way it works in tech, but that's probably because there's plenty of money sloshing around, and plenty of job openings. Jobs in publishing get paid pretty well, but there's more competition for jobs and less money around, so their internships are often completely unpaid.

It's surprising for someone coming from an industry where an internship is a money-losing chance to learn and network (like going to school), to see that tech internships are for making money.

Also important to realize that no intern actually gets the full yearly salary -- these internships usually last around 3 months.

Not a huge fan of this site, presenting data without context seems like a great way to stir up trouble without doing any actual reporting.

I agree. Interns also generally receive no extended benefits like 401(k), stock, medical, and so on, so the comparison isn't very fair in terms of total comp.

But interns do get things like free housing and free cars which full times do not.

Never heard of free cars - who does that?

I mean free car rental. I got one at Oracle. I presume it's common as it's very hard to get around in the US without a car - often not much public transport.

I got a free rental car from Amazon in summer 2013. I don't think they do that anymore tho.

A classmate of mine interned at a Microsoft office in Sunnyvale and was provided a rental car for the duration of his internship.

yeah and that 20k we make during summer helps pay for our college which is ridiculous. meanwhile my mom worked her way through college part time

My parents also worked their way through college on part-time jobs. Meanwhile, I just graduated with almost $100k in student loans, and that's with the money I made interning.

Yeah, it's still a pretty high rate for a ~20-year-old, or at least that $2000 per week felt like an enormous amount. But mine was only 8 weeks.

Oh jeez, Facebook?

Interns in tech in the United States.

And interns in Canada. On my second internship, I got paid more per month than my mother who works in the public sector!

Yup... I'm in the wrong company.

Whereas I'm the wrong country...

Depends where in Canada. Many large software companies here will pay ~3k CAD per month or less.

That's super low pay. I would not work for that at any company; even as a student I am well aware that they are getting way more than 3k CAD from me in value.

No thank you.

Wait, really? I've never heard of Canadians from UW making $8K like they do in SV/SEA/NYC

A lot of Canadians from UW _are_ the ones working in SV/SEA/NYC.

Yeah, I was assuming the compensation in Canada is why they choose to do so.

It does sound like he means companies in Canada.

There's only about 5 companies in Canada that pay about 5k/month. Everything else pays 3k/month.

Wow, it's almost like supply and demand have an effect on wages.

Funny anecdote is that when I used to be intern from Poland on J1 (~5500 USD per month), savings from 3 months of internship in USA divided by 9 months were higher than average salary in Poland. We got most of taxes back. We also had free tuition and great scholarships from EU.

It was quite easy to get the internship. Back in my time, ~2011, ~1/3 of students from my alma mater, Warsaw University, did J1 internship in USA.

Do most students from your university stay in Poland, or do they move elsewhere after graduating?

Bay Area is definitely the most popular destination. Then Zurich (Big Google office), London and finally staying in Warsaw.

BLS data on pay by occupation http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000

While the graph in the OP seems a bit subjectively selective, the BLS data seems to support the argument and data from other sources seems to support the 74k number for software intern average salary.

Adjusted for length of employment (assuming about three months per year) that would be $19,500 / yr. Not entirely unexpected tbh.

There are some articles out there hint at the average seasonal salary being around $69k http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-seasonal-jobs.html

I wonder how it stacks up against law and banking internships.

I've had several big name tech internships, and I got an internship offer from a bank to do tech work. The bank offered around 2/3rd the comp with significantly worse benefits, which surprised me considering that a) they were in NYC b) they were a big name and c) they approached me, not the other way around. Not sure if they pay the trader type interns more...

It's pretty well known that top tech companies pay more than top banks. SWE interns at top tech companies will make more than trading interns at top banks and entry-level SWEs at top tech companies will make more than entry-level traders at top banks.

Is your top trading firm a bank? If not, I am confused which part of my comment is "not true at all".

Also, $120k pro-rated is about right for what top tech companies are paying so it sounds like you just happened to not get those offers.

You're right. I argued against something totally unrelated to what you said. The places I'm talking about are not banks.

Is there any way that I can privately chat with you? I will soon have to decide whether to get into HFT or traditional SWE work. I have a good idea of what a traditional SWE career path entails, but HFT is quite obfuscated (from my position).

Can you respond to this message with an email address or put one in your profile? Feel free to use a temporary email address, but I won't say anything controversial anyway as I'm not interested in losing my job.

[redacted]

Sent you an email. I'm not going to reveal anything proprietary, but happy to answer any general questions.

Which one was that? IIRC Goldman pays the same or more for Tech than for others, but I'm not sure.

I believe most banks pay tech interns the same as trading interns. I've heard that Capital One pays tech interns the most out of the big banks, but I have no personal experience with that one.

It was GS

For Junior interns salary is very competitive with even Big4. Total compensation lags because of no housing, though.

Yes, salaries in SV are high. But, you can bet your ass that that sample set is made of students who for the most part come from a handful top-notch schools.

I find the stats looks rather skewed? anyone else thinks so too ?

They're skewed by the fact that the top companies are in higher CoL areas. Then again there are lower paying companies in these locations too.

The tech intern data was a self-reported online survey distributed around tech-focused Facebook groups (eg: I definitely saw and participated in this survey last year, on Hackathon Hackers).

The other salary data was from "BLS May 2015 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates".

I found the survey useful to compare your offers to other offers at that company/ones nearby. It was way easier to use than glassdoor, especially because the offers increase a little every year and you want to be sure you're not getting screwed somehow.

Definitely should be used for any real analysis though, not even blog-post analysis.

Sample size for interns\graduate hires was 352 (57 female, 278 male). Which I don't suspect is a large enough sample.

Looking at their raw data, it looks like there was a total of 718 respondents (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Km9bsx0SWPDiOPMYvrem...).

Large enough sample to be ultra conclusive? Not really, but I think it gives you a taste for the data and it's unlikely that tech interns /do/ make more than most, but it's not really surprising.

The survey include a 50/50 mix of interns and full-time positions, so some of that data might be for FTE's.

Offers are pretty standard at companies, they're only differentiated by year (if that). Two of the companies I got offers from are on there and they are accurate outside of housing for one.

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