2016 Intern & New Grad Offers

Data on what interns and new grads are making in tech next summer.

Data for 2017 is out. More info can be found here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-05/do-you-earn-less-than-a-new-silicon-valley-employee

I hate it when articles make me scan the whole thing to find the link to the raw data, so here it is: http://bit.ly/1SlIdwM
If you’d like to submit your offer details, do so here: http://goo.gl/forms/ZvQgIhqo4L

This time last year Dan Zhang compiled data from the Hackathon Hackers Facebook group regarding internship offers. Hoping for some insight with year over year salary growth, I recently compiled similar data by posting a similar survey (available here). Only, this time I also included data from newly graduated candidates as well as interns. My reasons behind doing this is threefold; I think open data regarding salary levels the playing field between employees and employers (as some tech companies have recently conducted behavior that negates this), sexual discrimination in salary becomes abundantly clear, and just out of pure curiousity. I’ll try not to bore you, but I’ll explain a bit as I go how tech offers usually work for those unfamiliar with the industry. The data isn’t perfectly raw, and was modified slightly when appropriate, but I’ll talk about that later.

Intern Offers

Tech internship renumerations generally consist of two components; base salary as well as a housing stipend. Corporate housing will sometimes be offered in lieu of a stipend. The stipend or corporate housing is by no means universal; not all companies offer them. It is far more common amongst later stage publicly traded companies and is generally only offered in locations with high housing costs (SF, NYC, and etc).

2014 to 2015 Offers

Because we have intern data from last year, we are able to see any year over year growth, which turned out to be quite substantial; the YoY growth for average intern base salary was 18.1% and rent stipends decreased by 12.5%. However, that decrease seems to be due to errors in the data (Some 2014 data showed stipends/bonuses to be higher than salary; probably misunderstanding in data collection stage).

Compiled from my survey data as well as last year’s data from Dan Zhang. Tabular form by company available here.

Top 2015 Offers

The top 10 internships by average reported salary + rent stipend per month for 2015 are:

1. Two Sigma Investments: salary $10,400, stipend $2,267
2. Pinterest: salary $9,000, stipend $2,250
3. Cisco Meraki: salary $7,000, stipend $4,000
4. Jane Street: salary $10,400, no stipend
5. Cloudera: salary $9,533, no stipend
6. Google: salary $6,195, stipend $3,250
7. Facebook: salary $8,086 stipend $1,270
8. Intentional Software: salary $7,280, stipend $2,000
9. MongoDB: salary $6,933, stipend $2,273
10. Amazon: salary $6,100, stipend $2,750

Pay by Gender

Unfortunately, there did seem to be some discrepancy in pay by gender, where females earned slightly less than males. However, this wasn’t conducted at what year level, or education level interns operated at. It may be the case that we have a sample bias where the males are further in their education than the corresponding females. The data does show male and females who work for the same company earning similar pay.

Tabular data available here. n=95

New Grad Offers

New Grads generally get offers based on three components; base salary, stock offers or some form of company equity, and a sign on bonus and/or a relocation bonus. Akin to rent stipends in internships, the latter two components are by no means universal or mandatory, rather they are common benefits. First year employees can also recieve cash bonuses throughout the year, but this isn’t a known figure before commencing employment. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any data for 2014 so I wasn’t able to look at YoY growth. The average New Grad offer, as of writing this, was $97,356 in salary, $16,493 in stock per year, and $27,886 in sign-on bonus/relocation assistance. Its also worth noting, that some companies, such as Facebook had quite a large variance in stock offers. However, the mode stock offered at Facebook was $37,500 a year. Some of these offers do not reflect standard offers and have been negotiated. For instance, LinkedIn’s offer was a negotiated offer with only 1 data point and may not reflect what most new grad hires receive there. Furthermore, some of these companies are in the financial sector, which usually don’t provide equity or stock, rather hefty year-end performance bonuses that unfortunately aren’t always available to employees ahead of time.

Top 2015 Offers

Top 5 offers based on average salary and stock per year:

1. LinkedIn:
   salary $123,000, stock $37,500
2. Twitter:
   salary $120,000, stock $37,500
3. Google:
   salary $109,167, stock $46,875
4. Salesforce:
   salary $125,000, stock $12,500
5. Facebook:
   salary $105,000, stock $28,750

Top 5 average sign on bonuses and relocation packages:

1. Facebook: $72,500
2. LinkedIn: $35,000
3. Salesforce: $30,000
4. Amazon: $28,500
5. Microsoft: $22,500

Pay by Gender

The data showed that women out-earned men, in both base salary, and in stock options. On average, men did recieve a slightly higher signing bonus, but the total income over their first year still was lower than women’s.

Tabular data available here. n=49

Megan Ruthven has kindly taken it a step further, and conducted a thorough statistical analysis on the data, available here: http://bit.ly/1XzviZv

Disclaimers

Some disclaimers about my findings and the data present. I did modify the data slightly, but as this is of little to no scientific value, I figured it would be best to get an broad overview of where the industry is at. Some of the data provided was based on few points and in more specific insights, the comparison may not be entirely accurate. A few assumptions I made were with what seemed to be data input errors:

• Some rent stipends seemed to be a lump sum value instead of per month, so I assumed any stipends unresonably high for their location was an error and divided by 3. (e.g. $4000 a month stipend for Seattle)
• Removed junk entries, some inputs were just randomized letters and numbers.
• Some stock bonuses were clearly number of units instead of cash value. These were excluded from any insights.
• I also calculated stock by year. If details were left blank, I assumed the vesting schedule was over 4 years. Otherwise, I calculated per vesting schedule mentioned.
• If stock units were given instead of their monetary value, they were valued at the approximate market price at the time of writing (e.g. Google’s standard 250 RSU’s were valued at $187,500).

If any of my modifications were wrong or you have any questions about the data, feel free to reach out to me.

Edit: A previous version of this article stated that Monsato Company offered more. This was a clerical error from the data collection stage and was rectified.

Edit 2: Some more New Grad data became available with a previous survey conducted by Connie Shi. I amended New Grad section to reflect the improved data appropriately.