
Do You Earn Less Than a Silicon Valley Intern? - Osiris30
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/do-you-earn-less-than-a-silicon-valley-intern
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artimaeis
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.

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

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

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ska
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.

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

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TheCoelacanth
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.

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pmiller2
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.

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

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ethanbond
To interns? ... Which ones?

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EliRivers
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?

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bobbyi_settv
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.

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treehau5
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.)

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netforay
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).

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vthallam
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.

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netforay
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.

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tedmiston
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.

~~~
goda90
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.

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tedmiston
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.

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b123400
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?

~~~
mchahn
> 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.

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Zombieball
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.

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

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

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mfoy_
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.

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RodericDay
lmao this sounds like some soviet union nightmare

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

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mfoy_
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.

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RodericDay
> 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.

~~~
mfoy_
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.

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

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

~~~
wcrichton
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.

~~~
cortesoft
You can also just walk away from a job?

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pmiller2
The key phrase is "no strings attached." You don't have to worry about burning
any bridges at the end of an internship.

