Eye-watering salaries of Silicon Valley tech interns revealed in online survey

Interns at Snapchat get paid $10,000 a month - and that's not even the highest salary on the list

Doug Bolton
Tuesday 26 April 2016 17:55 BST
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A Google employee rides through the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California in 2010
A Google employee rides through the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California in 2010

The wages of interns at top Silicon Valley companies have been revealed, and they're pretty high.

A list of some of America's biggest tech companies and their interns' salaries has been created by Rodney Folz, a student at UC Berkeley and soon-to-be employee of review site Yelp.

By creating an anonymous online survey for people with internship offers and passing it to friends, contacts, and online programmer communities, he managed to build up a solid picture of how much a Silicon Valley student intern can expect to make.

An average intern at messaging app Snapchat, for example, will reportedly earn around $10,000 (£6,800) a month. That's not including the monthly $1,500 (£1,000) housing bonus, meant to help interns pay San Francisco's notoriously high rents. On its own, the base wage is equivalent to an £82,000 yearly salary.

Snapchat isn't even the highest-paying company on the list - that honour goes to Two Sigma, a hedge fund which pays interns around $10,400 (£7,100) a month, as well as a $5,000 (£3,400) relocation fee and another $5,000 housing bonus.

More well-known companies seem cheap by comparison - Amazon's interns get $6,000 (£4,100) a month, including a few thousand extra in benefits, while Facebook offers $8,000 (£4,500).

Some companies, such as Apple, Pinterest and Airbnb also offer interns corporate housing, usually at discounted rents.

While some of the salaries seem incredibly high, the internships are obviously temporary - American students who take them up can usually expect to spend three months in the job, according to Folz.

However, at a company like Snapchat, that still means they're making $30,000 (£20,500) for a summer's work.

Naturally, the survey was self-reported by the soon-to-be interns, so all the answers may not have been entirely accurate. However, the figures match up with previously reported intern salaries at top companies.

If you're considering dropping it all to start a computer science degree at a California university, you should pick your target company wisely. Many smaller and younger firms may take on tens of interns every summer, while giants like Facebook will recruit closer to 1,000.

There is a catch, however - many salaried interns can be expected to work gruellingly long hours, and dealing with Silicon Valley's housing market and public transport may leave you wondering whether it's all worth it.

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