If you needed any confirmation that you are probably in the wrong business, then look no further than what tech interns are getting paid these days:
Friend made a list of top internship offers pic.twitter.com/faEonGfjwd
— Tiffany Zhong (@tzhongg) November 23, 2014
If you extrapolate the numbers (originally posted by a woman named Jessica Shu in a Facebook group called Hackathon Hackers), a Quora intern is making over $100,000 a year (though, interns don't usually work the full year) when you add in the housing stipend. And I don't even want to do the math on FitBit. We've always heard whispers (Business Insider reported in June that tech internships have salaries that top out at $7,000; Bloomberg reported similar numbers in July) about these mythic internships, but there's something staggering about seeing all those salaries lined up side by side. Companies don't usually divulge tech internship salaries, and what we know comes by way of former interns or current interns who post salaries to sites like Glassdoor.
You have to remember that these aren't even "real" jobs yet, and they are already paid bundles more than the average national salary (around $44,000).
Zhong, the co-founder of Glimpse, an app that allows you to share private photos with friends, explained that these, unless otherwise noted, are undergraduate internships. Which basically means that we should just all learn how to code:
@MarshallOsborne @pandemona basically, yeah!
— Tiffany Zhong (@tzhongg) November 23, 2014
Update: Of course, these companies don't usually release salary information, so there's no way to know if these numbers are exactly accurate. But given previous reporting and rumors, they seem entirely plausible — and that's even more depressing.