by JULIA CARRIE WONG
Interns at Internapalooza PHOTO/Internapalooza
Internapalooza provides an inside look at the peculiar cultural initiation to the tech industry: coding, entrepreneurship and a certain amount of privilege
There were piles of free stuff at Internapalooza, the annual gathering of thousands of tech industry summer interns. In the club level at the San Francisco Giants’ stadium on Monday evening, name-tag-sporting millennials travelled in packs of three and four as they scooped up branded T-shirts, tote bags, water bottles, Moleskin notebooks, sunglasses, argyle socks from Zillow, mobile device charge pads from eBay, winter caps from Google, flip flops from Andreessen Horowitz, and – the overall favorite – selfie sticks and throw pillows from YouTube.
Almost everything was free. Everything except the popcorn.
“They’re taking things that don’t belong to them,” said Billie Feliciano, 68, who has worked concessions at Giants baseball games since 1976 and was manning the Doggie Diner, where a hotdog could be obtained with a voucher but a bag of popcorn would set you back a few bucks.
“They don’t even ask,” she added.
Internapalooza, which is touted by its organizers as “the largest gathering of interns in the world”, provides an inside look at the peculiar cultural initiation to the tech industry that thousands of computer science college students receive each year: an education in coding, entrepreneurship, and – unlike the grunt work and drudgery of other industries’ internships – a certain amount of privilege.
Summer interns at major tech companies make astonishingly high salaries. According to an anonymous survey by a former University of California Berkeley student, Snapchat interns earn $9,000 a month, plus a $1,500 housing stipend. Monthly salaries at Pinterest ($9,000), Twitter ($8,400), Facebook ($8,000), Slack ($7,700), Uber ($7,300), Apple ($6,700) and Google ($6,600) are not far behind, and many companies offer generous housing, relocation and benefit payments.
“Most people in tech internships are more talented than the employees at their companies,” speaker Keith Rabois told the crowd. (A member of the PayPal mafia and successful tech investor, Rabois recounted his unusual path to tech via Stanford law school, but omitted the incident in 1992 when he shouted “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of Aids!” outside the home of one his instructors, which he later said was intended to provoke discussion about free speech.)
“A lot of interns here don’t just fetch coffee,” said Terry, an intern from Canada who was interested in getting a job after school at Palantir. “We actually do the same work as software engineers but get paid less than them.”
“There’s a lot of inequality, but a lot of opportunity,” said one Google intern, a rising senior at Harvard. “I was in an Uber the other day, and my driver was thrilled to be in Silicon Valley. It’s like the American dream. Anyone can teach themselves to code and make an app.”
Swetha Revanur, an intern at HP who will start at Stanford as a freshman this fall, worried that she might face ageism.
“They tend to look for upperclassmen, and I’m trying to push those boundaries,” the 18-year-old said.
(Revanur’s fears are likely unfounded. Rabois warned attendees that, like elite athletes, they were already close to the “prime of [their] careers”.)
Guardian for more