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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

$45/hr is about what I was paid as a grad-student intern at Apple ... 15 years ago.

Salaries on HN are the new penis sizes on Reddit.

Everyone is 15+ inches and making six figures minimum and if you're not, you're pathetic and are getting taken advantage of.

Well, if you live in SFBA the interns are making six figures (equivalent per hour). Everyone's still living in a studio apartment though.

Six figures, 10+ hours a day (including all meals at the FAANGPlex) but having to live in bunk beds if they want a rent under 4 digits.

Not a very healthy situation, even now with everybody WFH

Nobody is forcing you to eat at work, nor should you be working 10+ hours a day if you don't want to (it's an easy way to get overtime, though).

I know Apple pays for intern housing; I would think that most of the other large companies would too?

Well, if you subscribe to the idea that at least some of those jobs could be done remotely then it would not be that far from the truth.

I have an MSEE working as an engineer on a cutting edge physics project making the salaried equivalent of... $31/hr.

HN is great, but it really is not an accurate sample of real world wages.

I’m not an EE and I think that’s an underrepresented group on HN, but... you are surely underpaid

Oh I know. Paying off student loans or owning a house aren’t in the cards, but the work is stimulating and the colleagues are smart and open minded.

I have a salary that would work our to less than $45/hr, with extra hours dragging it down further.

Most people do - but don't hesitate to put more value in your labour and look for other career opportunities. The world is pretty unjust at a basic level and if you're waiting for someone to acknowledge your excellence and land a big payday in your lap you'll be waiting for a long time.

A big piece of career advice I have for any folks that feel like they're in dead-ends or are just getting started is that, in modern society, you should be constantly expending time and energy to ensure you're in the most personally rewarding position - the world is a cruel place where the socially awkward and introverted have a constant uphill battle to not be exploited.

Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.

> A big piece of career advice I have for any folks that feel like they're in dead-ends or are just getting started is that, in modern society, you should be constantly expending time and energy to ensure you're in the most personally rewarding position - the world is a cruel place where the socially awkward and introverted have a constant uphill battle to not be exploited.

This was both uplifting and an apt commentary on how to survive in the modern age.

Well said.

> Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.

I feel like this is a pretty cynical take. Really, what's happening is that more and more jobs are becoming tech jobs. It may not be as glamorous as going to stand-ups each morning, but there's plenty of opportunity out there and we're just in an awkward transition period where societies are trying to play catch-up with, historically-speaking, a lot of changes in a short amount of time.

Whether that transition ends with peace or chaos is going to depend on how easy the transition is made for everyone

> It may not be as glamorous as going to stand-ups each morning

I must have extremely different definition of glamorous to you.

Agreed- we don't even turn on the webcams for those

>Most people do - but don't hesitate to put more value in your labour and look for other career opportunities. The world is pretty unjust at a basic level and if you're waiting for someone to acknowledge your excellence and land a big payday in your lap you'll be waiting for a long time.

It is also economically inefficient. If you are worth $100k/y and you sell yourself for $50k/y then you are basically doing charity for your company. If you really cared about charity you would ask for the higher salary and then donate the money yourself. What really happens is that you are keeping an economically inefficient company alive. That's not just bad for you but also for the economy as a whole because your "talents" are being wasted.

>Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.

It's the opposite. Low skill jobs are drying up. Most of them are going overseas. Getting a high skilled job is not luck, developed countries are restructuring their economies to specialize in high skilled jobs.

I mean that is a great salary all in all, be happy with what you have.

If you make that while trying to live in SF/SV area, then it's probably hard to do. If you make that, and you live in nearly any where else, your money suddenly goes further. If you take it one step further, and make the same money but live in a state without state income taxes, your money goes even further. Keeping up with the Jones in the SF/SV area is quite expensive.

Just a bunch of sentences to say that $/hr isn't the end all, but a decent at-a-glance way of comparing.

Nah, you can live very comfortably in SFBA on that even now. You’re not going to own the big house in the suburbs or the penthouse apartment, but you’ll still be better off than most people, can have a nice car, go out when you like, have nice clothes and lots of books, etc.

On $45/hour? I can see not starving on that, but you're probably going to be sharing an apartment…

$45/hr full-time is $90k pre-tax, $65k after tax in CA. That’s $5400/month. If you have to pay for daycare or similar expenses, that’ll be a stretch, but you can definitely have your own pretty nice apartment and plenty left over for expenses and saving with that.

It's also about what a Mozilla intern would get paid ten years ago.

This is also around what an Apple intern would get today as an upperclassman in college. (Without including benefits, of course.)

Tell me if I'm calculating this incorrectly.

$45 * 8 (hours a day) * 22 (days a month) * 12 (months) = $95k

You were getting paid the equivalent of $95k/year as an intern??

Fun fact you can approximate hourly rate to yearly salary roughly just by multiplying by two. $45/hr roughly 90k ish

Silicon Valley salaries are something else. ARM in Cambridge paid their interns something like £20-22K around 5 years ago. No wonder almost none of them stayed on as graduates.

Interns don't stay for a whole year, but yeah, this is typical internship salary (it might have gone to 55+ now) at FAANG.

Yes, that’s correct. Of course, interns don’t generally work 40 hour weeks for a full year, so in practice my W2 income was more like $55k.

I was originally hired for the summer at $35/hr or so, and then got a raise at the end of the summer when they asked me to stay on part-time during the school year.

It's way less than I made working in the IT departments of medium-size non-tech companies.

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