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Comment by 1a2a3a4a | Hacker News Reader

It's not that far off the top tier pay for tech companies. Glassdoor compiled their list for 2014, and it's not too inaccurate [1]. Speaking from personal experience, the numbers for SWE undergrads for some of the companies on the list this year:

Palantir - 7,500 - 1,200 for housing if you choose

Facebook - 6,200 + free housing

Salesforce - Varies per year, 34.50/hr for rising junior, housing.

Cisco - 22/hr

Quora and Dropbox are both missing from this list but they both have higher salaries than Palantir, but not by too much.

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/25-highest-paying-companies-in...

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Jane St and a few other finance firms are paying interns ~100k/y annualised. That's the highest I've heard barring grad students with sweetheart deals.

As covi mentioned, Palantir, Quora, Dropbox all pay about roughly the same but are very willing to negotiate and pay more if necessary.

Yes, that figure is about right for the few finance technology films.

Wow... this sounds kind of irrational. I mean, these are close to senior salaries annualized - Sales force is around 70K, while a senior gets about 100K across most of the US.

Are 4 interns really more useful than 3 seniors? Really?

Salaries in SF/NYC are much higher than elsewhere, which is where most of those salaries are from. 100k is typical for a dev with 0-3 years of experience in those areas.

You're paying for more than the intern's time - you also get first crack at hiring them full time (with a 3 month interview to decide who you want). In the current job market, that's worth quite a bit.

"Get 'em while they're young" is as valid for recruiting as it is brand preferences ;)

Those interns will turn into salaried FTEs whose first three year's annual compensation – amortised signing bonus, stock grants, and performance bonus included – will be ~150k. Compared to new graduate FTEs, interns are positively cheap!

The ~6.5k, housing inclusive, perks out the wazoo also all come from highly profitable, competitive companies falling over each other to recruit from a highly constrained pool. There are only so many Stanford, MIT, and CMU graduates a year, and an even smaller number of hackathon winners, open source contributors, inveterate interns, etc. For many, this is the last time they'll ever openly be on the job market.

I'd say Quora and Dropbox can pay much higher, from my personal experience.

Also, there are other places in the industry that pay even higher. But I'd include those with Quora and Dropbox as Tier 1.

In short, Fog Creek is at most Tier 2, along with Google / Facebook, etc.

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