Report: Facebook Interns Make $96K - Nearly Twice America's Median Salary

A recent report from CNBC provides some insight into the sort of money that young interns are being paid at major tech firms, including the fact that Facebook interns make $96,000 a year, nearly double the median salary in America.

In an article titled “You May be Earning Less Than a 20-year-old Silicon Valley Intern,” CNBC reports that the average American worker may be earning less than young interns and workers in Silicon Valley. The article describes the current situation of Madeline Wolf, a young intern at cloud computing service ServiceNow who says that her current wage is more competitive than almost every internship in Boston and New York.
CNBC writes:

“I was ready to challenge myself professionally and personally while having fun along the way, and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to do so,” said Wolf, a fourth-year student at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-Mckim School of Business. She immediately applied through her college’s career center and landed the internship.

Now in the third month of her six-month-long stint, Wolf said she is thriving. “My manager understands I am here to learn and develop skills, and she made sure to set those in our initial one-on-one. [She] trusts me working on higher-level projects that go to top leadership — no filing papers here. In fact, coffee runs are extremely frowned upon by intern program coordinators.”

Besides her hourly wage — “It is more competitive than almost every internship and co-op in Boston and New York and was a huge selling point,” said Wolf — she’s enjoying the vitality reverberating throughout ServiceNow’s modern campus, which features, among other things, fire pits, a game room, gym and meditation rooms. “It’s also dog-friendly, so there’s always wagging tails,” she said.

According to Glassdoor.com, the median monthly wage for interns at major tech firms such as Microsoft and Amazon is between $6,000 and $7,000 a month, but Facebook pays $8,000 a month, or $96,000 a year:

Today all bets are off when it comes to recruiting Gen Zers, and nowhere is the frenzy so pronounced as in Silicon Valley, where tech companies are offering astronomical salaries and benefits packages to woo young interns. At Facebook, for example, the median monthly pay for interns is $8,000, or $96,000 annually, according to Glassdoor. That’s nearly double the average annual base salary for the American worker, which is $52,943, reveals Local Pay Reports.

That doesn’t even include the bevy of benefits some companies are offering — from paying off student loans to subsidizing rent for housing. Facebook has taken this to a whole new level: Besides giving interns housing, it also gives them access to many of the benefits of full-time employees, including a laundry service, on-site gym, access to company shuttles for transportation around the Bay Area and complimentary breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks on the company’s campus.

High pay scales are becoming more the norm in the Valley. Median monthly pay for interns at Microsoft is $7,100 and $6,400 at Amazon, Glassdoor.com reveals. At Google and Apple the median monthly pay is $6,400.

Internships are apparently no longer what they used to be — a chance for companies to get cheap or free assistance while students learn about their industry. Instead they’re treated as full time positions:

They no longer are just “a part-time job with a fancy name,” said Robert Shindell, Ph.D., and president and CEO of Intern Bridge in Austin, Texas, a research and consulting firm that helps companies like Best Buy, Johnson & Johnson and Verizon create meaningful internship programs. “Companies are spending much more time on the front end thinking about what the overall experience for the student is going to be.”

“[Internships are no longer] a part-time job with a fancy name. Companies are spending much more time on the front end thinking about what the overall experience for the student is going to be.” -Robert Shindell, president and CEO of Intern BridgeIt’s now about giving Gen Zers the “full package — a more well-rounded experience that includes interactions with senior leadership, social opportunities, soft skills training and philanthropy, all which showcase the company’s culture,” said Courtney Freaney, a member of the Society for Human Resource Management and head of University Recruiting at Edwards Lifesciences, a medical device company in Irvine, California.

Read the full report from CNBC here.