In Case You Thought Tech Interns Were Abused: A Sample List of Salaries

You're home for Thanksgiving and a relative/neighbor/family friend who is either well meaning or insanely competitive feels compelled to ask what you are going to do for the summer/rest of your life.

And, oh by the way, he/she has a child, niece/nephew or has heard of someone (probably while evesdropping in the check out line at The Dollar Store...) who 'just graduated Harvard' and is making ten gazillion dollars a month doing something for one of those Google-like places.

The fact that ignorance would be an uptick for this person's intellectual capacity and that you couldn't care less about their opinion is still not sufficient to prevent you from feeling depressed and inadequate because a) you dont have a rejoinder and b) you actually have no idea what you are going to do in the near, medium or long term.

Don't despair! As a public service, we present the following article which contains a list of companies and the excessive/generous compensation they are paying to interns like the dude above (he would be the one on the right. The other guy dropped out of Harvard and then became a multi-billionaire). Armed with data from the interweb, you can now say you are thinking about applying for an internship that pays more than your interlocutor's lifetime peak annual earnings.

And you can then go get yourself some more of that spiked punch before it runs out and you have to face the rest of the day insufficiently buffered. JL

Jordan Weissmann reports in Slate:

Between salary and housing stipends, $9,000 to $10,000 a month isn't abnormal, apparently.

In case you were feeling a bit too content with your life and career choices today, here's a list of the pay packages that tech firms are apparently offering software engineering interns these days, which has been making the rounds thanks to Twitter. Between salary and housing stipends, $9,000 to $10,000 a month isn't abnormal, apparently. The lowest number on the list: $7,000 a month, which annualizes to $84,000 per year.

About the source: This is a list tweeted out by the friend of an anonymous intern-to-be. So, you know, it's not quite up to Woodward and Bernstein's standards. But the salaries aren't much more outrageously high than what's previously been published. Given the never-ending competition for top talent in the tech world, it's not surprising to see market rates escalating.

If you get rid of the word diminishing term "intern" and just say these are seasonal jobs filled by the top prospects from the top universities all over the world, it makes a bit more sense, right?  And aside from the slight sting of knowing a Fitbit intern is probably earning more than you, that's not such a terrible thing. There are lots of people in the world whose pay should be a matter of public concern. Corporate CEOs. Wall Street types who will risk blowing up the financial system in pursuit of a bonus. Unpaid interns who do real work for free while real entry-level jobs disappear. It's fine to fret about all of them. But if anything, we should celebrate the fact that tech companies are paying their interns in line with normal employees. And, as I've written before, it's not uncommon for summer recruits in other high-pay, high-competition industries like law and finance to make significant amounts of money. In fact, the highest paid internship on that list isn't at a traditional tech company at all; it's at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm. (Think of a hedge fund without clients. Instead, they just trade their own money.)

Anyway, not every intern is getting paid pennies to fetch coffee. And that's a good thing.