Make the intern do it. That’s a common refrain in many industries when taking on an internship is associated with tasks like getting coffee, filing papers, and otherwise putting in your time while working your way towards something better. Many internships are unpaid, which means that interns have to do all these unfulfilling things while earning nothing at all.
Not in Silicon Valley. According to a recent study by Glassdoor, a job-hunting company, many of the best internships in America are at tech companies in Silicon Valley. In keeping with the region’s sky-high cost of living, and even higher salaries, interns at some tech companies make nearly $10,000 per month or over $120k per year.
Roblox, a video game maker, had the honor of offering the highest intern salaries in 2022, with a median salary of $9,667 per month. Since that’s a median value, some Roblox interns are almost certainly exceeding $10k per month, or even more.
Other companies with high-paid internships include Uber, Capital One, Salesforce, Amazon, Meta (the company originally called Facebook), and Nvidia. With the exception of Capital One, a financial firm, all the top companies are tech companies, and many are located in Northern California.
Companies aren’t paying those kinds of prices for people to fetch coffee, either. Most of these highly paid roles are in fields like software engineering. Even brand new interns need some serious education and training to attain those kinds of salaries. If they succeed in their internship, though, many likely stand to earn even more if they got on to work in the same field.
If you have the tech chops to land one of these internships, you can make far more than the average American without even having a permanent job. For most interns, though, completing basic tasks for minimal pay is likely still the norm.
