Shortage of skilled labor is good news for teenagers.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Becoming a summer intern has become one of the most popular ways to not only fill the time between school terms by doing something productive, but to earn some spare cash, too. Silicon Valley has become something of a Mecca for those seeking internships that give them both valuable experience and a good name to put on a resume, but not all IT internships are created equally, it seems.
A new report from Business Insider has ranked the twelve Silicon Valley companies that pay their interns the most, revealing some surprising numbers. Giants like Cisco, IBM, Apple, Google, and Facebook all made the cut, but the order in which they appear is something of a surprise – not to mention what they pay their interns, who often work around 40 hours per week, for a duration of two to three months.
Google is the #1 highest paying place for an internship in Silicon Valley, doling out a monthly salary of $6,874 per internship. They’re followed, somewhat surprisingly, by Twitter, which pays its interns $6,539 per month. Facebook is #3, with a monthly intern salary of $6,229, Yahoo is #4 with $6,035, Microsoft is #5 with $5,705, and social gaming platform Zynga rounds out the top half of the list with $5,612.
The rest of the top 12 highest-paying internships go to some of the biggest IT-hiring companies in the country, which is a bit of surprise considering that convention wisdom would say that larger and older companies would probably be able to pay more. Interns are also getting younger, as some as young as 16 years old are working at top tech firms. Amazon (#7, $5,561 per month), Apple (#8, $5,510), Oracle (#9, $5,080), LinkedIn (#10, $4,892), IBM (#11, $4,072), and finally, Cisco Systems (#12, $3,803) fill out the rest of the list.
With a range going from the high $3,000s to just below $7,000, internships are certainly proving to be a lucrative proposition for college students. A similar story by PC Magazine claims that Palantir, another IT firm, pays interns as much as $7,000 per month, which is nearly $3,000 higher than the national monthly salary average of $4,280.
“If an intern worked the entire year at Palantir, he or she would have a salary of more than $80,000, itself quite a bit higher than the median U.S. household income of $53,046,” says PC Magazine.
IT firms aren’t the only ones making internships a big business, as other non-tech firms are also paying large amounts of money for good, young talent. ExxonMobil, as a matter of fact, pays top dollar, according to GlassDoor.com, but is the only non-tech firm in the Top 10 nationwide (the Business Insider piece is just for Silicon Valley).