Tech companies offer big money to summer interns for in-person work

Tech companies are offering nearly $10,000 a month to summer interns for in-person office work in hopes of luring young people disillusioned by remote jobs.

Online gaming platform Roblox is paying $9,667 a month, ridesharing firm Uber and financial services company Capital One are each offering $8,333 a month, and software firm Salesforce is paying $8,167 to interns this summer, according to career website Glassdoor’s annual report on the 25 highest-paying internships.

Amazon and Facebook parent company Meta are each offering $8,000 a month.

The report, released this week, also found rising levels of discontent among interns with remote jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Zooming out to look at both review sentiment and frequency of mentions, it’s clear that remote work has become a major — and negative — part of interns’ experience,” Glassdoor said in a summary of the report.

While 58% of all interns gave Glassdoor negative reviews of remote internships during the summer of 2020, that share grew to 70% in 2021.

Those numbers were up from the 31% of interns who mentioned remote placements negatively in 2019.

Glassdoor reported that while many full-time workers prefer remote work, the pandemic has proven that interns do not.

“Internships are often packed full of engaging activities designed to immerse interns in a real-world work environment and attract them back to the company post-graduation,” the report stated. “But with the onset of COVID-19, many of these in-person events were suddenly no longer possible.”

Michael Curry, an assistant professor of economics at Aquinas College in Michigan, said the numbers suggest a disconnect between the preferences of full-time workers and interns as the job market recovers.

“Consistent with data regarding secondary and college learning environments, students prefer in-person over remote classroom engagement,” Mr. Curry said. “While veteran employees often opt to work from home because of childcare and lengthy commutes, for example, interns benefit much more from over the shoulder, hands-on learning opportunities.”

He added that inflation, continuing supply chain backlogs and growing uncertainty about future economic conditions could limit the number of interns at some companies this summer.

Economist Victor Claar, who teaches business at Florida Gulf Coast University, said that recovery will benefit young people who need the networking and social skills that face-to-face contact provides.

“It’s hard to learn how to navigate corporate culture or how to handle yourself at a cocktail party or work dinner if you are at home in your pajamas,” Mr. Claar said. “And it’s even harder to develop the professional contacts you might find at events like cocktail parties, especially contacts beyond your firm.”

But not all workplaces may be ready for in-person internships this summer.

Kastle Systems, which provides office swipe cards for many businesses in the United States, found in the latest analysis of its security systems that only 42% of workers had returned to the office in the top 10 markets as of March 30.

“This may lead to internships morphing into something closer to apprenticeships, where they are direct guidance of a specific individual, a scenario that would be more compatible with working remotely,” said Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Glassdoor’s report analyzed more than 130,000 internship reviews from current or former U.S. interns between Feb. 14, 2021, and Feb. 12, 2022.

All 25 employers on its list of top-paying internships are offering at least $6,000 a month this year. Google, at the bottom of that list, is offering an average monthly pay of $6,454.

Walter Block, a professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans, said the trend toward paying interns high salaries is a “gray area” that the pandemic has encouraged.

“Traditionally, internships were supposed to be non-paying jobs,” Mr. Block said. “The idea behind this initiative was that the young person would work for the company, to be sure, but, also, mainly, would learn from on-the-job training.”

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.