Ask HN: Average summer intern salary? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Average summer intern salary?

2 pointswylie3 comments

This is my first time applying to summer internships, and it's very hard to find concrete salary numbers on internships. For example, I have anecdotal evidence of Google and Facebook paying $18-20k for a 12-week internship.

To make it more specific, I'm applying as a software developer to Silicon Valley startups. I'm a college sophomore.

What is an average salary for an intern at such a company? Are internship salaries negotiable? Should I expect an internship salary to be equivalent to a starting salary at a company?

And finally, why are such numbers so hard to find?

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18-20k seems high. I suppose in the case of someone with great experience relevant to a particular team that might be possible, though. At MSFT the specific interns were usually chosen by HR, or at most a team of people that HR wrangled into volunteering. They were then sent around to teams where it seemed they would fit best.

In that situation there's probably fairly little room for negotiation. If you're dealing directly with the hiring manager, or at a smaller company where the wall of HR is not so impenetrable, probably there's more room. I wouldn't think of it as equivalent to starting full-time salary, though, because a full third to a half of your internship may be largely coming-up-to-speed time.

In general, you get hired as an hourly employee for summer internships instead of a salaried full-timer. Hence, salaries will vary from company to company depending on their valuation of intern's work so getting a bead on what's "average" will be quite difficult.

Once place to look is glassdoor.com. See if the companies you are applying to have listings there and what people have said about them, and any average salaries. For instance, search for Intern in the jobs category and you should see listings showing average salaries for posted companies, if people provided the info.

Thanks for the link, that's the best data I've seen so far.

Should I rephrase the title to be "average intern wage?"

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