A furnished apartment in NYC probably adds a lot to that salary. The unfortunate part is that the cost of that benefit is also considered income and the taxes for it would come out of the $6K. I interned at Microsoft years ago with similar benefits (good salary, furnished apartment, prepaid rental car, relocation costs & 2 gym memberships) but they paid extra cash to cover the taxes on the non-monetary benefits.
There's no way I would've turned down the Fog Creek opportunity back then, though, it sounds like a very well planned program at an awesome company. There were many internships in the Philadelphia area, for developers, that paid half that salary with no perks on top of the pay at all. On the other hand, the interview process at nearly all the companies consisted of sending a resume and sitting down for 30 minutes to talk about past experience. I interviewed at 4-6 companies a year to get my 3 internships, with a ~75% acceptance rate (offered the internship), and not one involved multiple interviews or a single code screen. The west coast interview process just doesn't exist out here.
I had the exact same experience with interviews in the Midwest. Nothing rigorous at all, very high offer rate, and about half the compensation. I made a more in-depth comment, but just wanted to note that.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
Are you including the housing stipend in that math? That seems awfully high. I'm @ amazon, getting 6700 / mo, plus 2.5k / mo housing stipend and suddenly feel insecure :-p.
