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That's because workers in tech make more than workers in most occupations.

When you hire an intern, you pay them almost-entry-level rates because they are doing almost-entry-level work.

Interns are not slaves to be under-paid, and tech is a high paid industry. I'm not sure what's surprising about this.

4 comments

Yup, agreed with this.

Call me a privileged asshole or whatever since I work in tech and I get paid well, but isn't that how supply and demand works? Once upon a time, you could get a really well-paying factory job or a well-paying job working in the coal mines since those jobs were in demand.

I feel like that's how it's kind of working in software. Factory jobs are going away because robotics are taking over, which creates a demand for engineers to maintain these robots. We're kind of going through a second industrial revolution, except it's a digital and robotics revolution. Unfortunately, that means we're also feeling the crunch of that which means there's a big demand for engineers that our workforce doesn't supply for... yet. So yes, tech interns are going to get paid more than most other places.

I agree with what you are saying, but there is never a reason not to be a pedant: The Second Industrial Revolution already came and went about a century ago. The one we are currently in would be the third. It's unusual in that it seems to replace human intellect and decision-making almost as much as human physical labour.

I kinda feel like if we were really going through a second Industrial Revolution, GDP and productivity growth rates would be a lot higher. Maybe we'll manage to unleash an Industrial Revolution if we break up monopolies, fund public infrastructure properly, and do other things to create space for really new enterprises.

Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy. You can reach millions of users several magnitudes cheaper than ever before. Even small companies owned and operated by a single person can have customers spread over the entire world.

Needless to say, most people are not able to participate.

>Productivity is up, massively, for those who are able to participate in the "new" economy.

Do we have any numerical evidence for this? Sure, it could explain Google's revenues, but monopoly rents from being the search-engine could explain that too. What about on a per-worker-hour basis, wit some official numbers?

> When you hire an intern, you pay them almost-entry-level rates because they are doing almost-entry-level work.

That's the way it works in tech, but that's probably because there's plenty of money sloshing around, and plenty of job openings. Jobs in publishing get paid pretty well, but there's more competition for jobs and less money around, so their internships are often completely unpaid.

It's surprising for someone coming from an industry where an internship is a money-losing chance to learn and network (like going to school), to see that tech internships are for making money.

By 'make' I'd like to point out that on average, workers in tech literally 'make more' (i.e produce more) value for their employers. Which is precisely why compensation is better.

Nope, that's only part of the equation. The other part is that we have the bargaining power to demand a cut, largely because of the current supply/demand balance in the tech labor market.

Besides, the economic notion of value is an incredibly slippery concept. Not only does it include bargaining power (so your value can decrease even if your economic productivity increases), it weights in the wealth of your customer too -- better to entertain a banker than to feed a poor. "Value" for the purpose of economics is typically quite far from "value" for the purposes of morality.

3rd reason not to be a dick about this: the wheel turns constantly, and we will not be on top of it forever. See: any mature engineering discipline, or even past performance of SW engineering.

Supply/demand is why compensation is better. Value created has very low correlation. The only rule for value is workers will always be paid less than the value they bring in.

From personal experience, interns actually end up doing more than their Senior counterparts.

And what we worked on would fall under computer vision / machine learning, so I wouldn't call it "almost-entry-level" work

> From personal experience, interns actually end up doing more than their Senior counterparts

Appearances can be deceiving - for senior positions (rather, for more experienced people) more is less. What is more work - writing 2000 new lines of code or writing/refactoring into 200 that do the same thing?

I was talking more about the fact that they were mostly stuck doing "administrative tasks," presentations, code reviews, data migrations. Things that don't exactly contribute to the progress of the project per se.

Edit: Actually the interns were doing the refactoring too. This project is a bit outlier however as the code base was completely new, like 3 days old when we joined.

> I was talking more about the fact that they were mostly stuck doing "administrative tasks," presentations, code reviews, data migrations. Things that don't exactly contribute to the progress of the project per se.

I see what you mean, but I disagree about those tasks not contributing to the project. A software project is more than just code alone: understanding the ever-changing problem space, creating a roadmap, budgets, meetings, schedules, handling conflicts (politics) are necessary for all non-trivial projects whether it's proprietary or Free/Open Source.

I do commend your seniors for shielding you from the boring (but very necessary) bits - I'm sure they made it look easy.