Fog Creek's Intern Hiring Process
behindthescenesrecruiter.comAs someone who just went through the internship process with a few different companies, I find this fascinating. This is pretty much what I expected going into the experience (multiple interviews, at least 1-2 coding questions/examples to do, a test maybe). Out of the few companies I interviewed from, I had nothing as intense as this. The majority of them didn't even test coding/theory knowledge at all. They were just simple interviews that lasted 2-5 hours. The hardest part of any interview was a freaking mental acuity standardized test I took at the company who I'll be working for that wasn't hard, so take the term "hardest" lightly. Good news is I accepted an offer at that smaller engineering company! A good portion of my interviews were for engineering companies because of the employers my university attracts, so that could also have affected the technical parts of the interview.
I'm not sure how I feel about how many interviews and how long this process is. I know some of my fellow students would be completely blindsided by such a long process unless it was clearly laid out. The compensation seems nice from the companies that hire around here (I go to a predominately STEM university in the Mid-West and all the companies I interviewed with came to our career fair in February, which is pretty late in the process). I'll make just over half that much monthly, but it'll be June-December and in STL. The highest I've heard from my classmates is 7k/month, but that was from Exxon Mobile and there was very little technical parts of the interview. He did have to take a hair test for drugs though. Ideally, I believe most of the larger corporations, like Boeing, Monsanto, etc, (like the article said) start interviews after the fall career fair.
Another side note about compensation: Seems to be pretty wide spread between 13-30/hr (without adding in housing) at companies around the Midwest. I don't exactly have the greatest academic credentials though (3.0 gpa), so some of the more selective companies may pay more, especially for graduating seniors. Exxon-Mobile being the highest, Boeing right in the middle of that range, and a local ISP looking for a non-coding cs major on the low end for the curious.
edit: Just adding in details as I get time.
FORGOT THE MOST ANNOYING THING
I was given the offer on Friday and he needed an answer on Monday, else he was going to extend the offer to other candidates. This was pretty obnoxious to me, but I ended up taking the offer because I was interested in it more than my other potential offers, but seriously, recruiters, a weekend is not enough time to get back to you with an offer, especially when other companies are asking you to keep them notified with enough time that they can either speed things up or not waste time on a candidate.
> I was given the offer on Friday and he needed an answer on Monday, else he was going to extend the offer to other candidates.
This is known as an "exploding offer". In fact, Joel Spolsky (founder of Fog Creek, the company featured in this article) has a great post on this practice[0] (spoiler: he's against it).
Thanks for the link. I was tempted to make a post asking for advice before my search back in January or so, but I decided not to. It would've been nice to have some strategies against this kind of offer, but the nice thing was the company was my first choice, so it didn't end up being a huge deal.
> MOST ANNOYING THING
A weekend is plenty. You're an intern: there are many, many more of you to choose from. As you pointed out, nobody wants to waste time. The person that offered you the placement wants someone who wants to be there, not someone looking for an backup offer.
I am going to respectfully disagree. Just because the company can do it doesn't mean a weekend is plenty. You are given a weekend to decide where you might spend months of your life, potentially in a place you've never been. On top of that, who knows if that weekend was going to be extremely busy for you? Just because you take one week to decide on an offer doesn't mean you don't want to be there. It's also not at all an industry standard to give such a short timespan for the decision; if anything, it's a reflection of how little the company will care about the intern when he/she is there.
All in all, a weekend is certainly not "plenty". I sympathize with crazypyro.
Thank you for the respectful disagreement (vs. 'smug'.) You make good points and I have some sympathy too - I understand that it's not easy being forced to make a quick and major decision. That being said, you don't always get to set the pace, and being confident in making decisions on the basis of imperfect or incomplete information is a valuable life skill. I can think of no better time to make a low-risk, snap decision about where to spend a few months than in the middle of college.
With regards to the decision around where you might spend months of your life, it's not like the location of the internship was a secret before crazypyro interviewed. The question about whether the company will treat the intern well is more nuanced, and you'd have to go with your gut.
Given the competitive nature of the market for CS interns and the quick decisions needed, the Secretary Problem might offer a good solution for crazypyro and others in that situation.
Just to re-iterate how quick the turn around was, I interviewed on Thursday, got offered on Friday while I was at an interview for a different internship and then had to accept by that Monday.
> You are given a weekend to decide where you might spend months of your life, potentially in a place you've never been.
Well, I tend to think a bit about these matters before applying.
This is actually true, nothing smug about it. It's an internship, and a lot of companies look for people who might be interested in working for the company after school's over. If someone has that much to think about that they would need more time, then they clearly have no interest in the company itself- they're just looking to get the most money, regardless of who it's coming from.
The differences in compensation aren't that huge, and it's just a summer, and the interns themselves are usually still living off of their parents. So, usually anyone that's agonizing over nickel and dime stuff that early in their career likely has no enthusiasm for what they would be working on (which by itself is reason enough for not taking an intern), and might be super entitled on top of that, also not a good thing. Because, again, we're talking about mostly CS undergrads here. A very small number of them might have a big impact over the course of a summer, but for the majority of them it is practically charity for these companies to take them on- they're not getting anything out of it other than giving a potential future employee some hand-on experience.
And, it's an employer's market- there are plenty of equally qualified interns to choose from in many cases, as well as a small window of time in which they either have to pick an intern or not get one at all. If they gave everyone weeks to make a decision, they could easily end up taking so long to even find an intern that they would run out of time in which to do it.
There's a difference between being enthusiastic about working for a company and being so keen to work to them that you're not even going to consider alternate offers. But seriously, you think that someone is going to be a bad employee just because your company isn't their one true love in the world?
I don't really think there's a justification for exploding offers that prevent people from considering alternatives, it's mainly just a way for employers to attempt to get the upper hand. From what I've seen it's often a) arrogant employers who can't comprehend that they're not the only attractive place to work b) game-playing employers who know that most college-age people aren't going to stand up to unreasonable demands and that these sort of gambits can prevent them from having to actually compete directly with other employers c) employers who do have an urgent need to fill a position (i.e. who aren't hiring an intern).
That's simply not true. CS internships vary widely in compensation and often approach entry level wages. I know interns making 7500 a month at Palantir, 4800 at Intel, 6500 at Amazon,and others. All of them have different relocation, housing, and other benefits on top of salary. None of these interns are from where they are interning, they all are flying out to live in a different state off of their own dime. Some of them even had to fly in to interview (as a freaken intern!). The CS job market is weird right now.
Actually, the differences in compensation can be much more substantial than one might think. I spoke to a few interns last year who were entering the job market, and compensation ranged from fully paid housing and nearly 100K (annualized) to numbers less than half that in the same geography. For college students, the difference between earning 10K or 20K in a summer is likely a decision that could require more than a weekend if the 10K comes with external upside.
There aren't necessarily "many, many more" quality interns to chose from for these companies. There is labor shortage in the tech industry right now and some interns are quite capable of contributing real work. That makes them valuable and gives them leverage. It is not unheard of for interns to pit big companies against each other for a better offer these days.
I don't know if you haven't been on an internship search lately, but I'd say CS interns, especially ones that that are going to be seniors and with prior experience, are in high demand. Even with my less than stellar resume, I got a high offer rate from everywhere I interviewed.
The most annoying thing about internships are smug comments like this about interns.
Can't they atleast hire one person that didn't luck out by being born in a rich/middle class american family to go to ivy league universities.
What is such complicated product that Fog Creek makes that it needs graduates from top 10 universities? Serious question.
I'm a Fog Creek employee who is also an immigrant and did not go to an Ivy League school.
I also do a fair bit of interviewing at Fog Creek and we don't really care about which school you went to. We look for smart people who get things done. It's as simple as that.
"If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program."
That doesn't really jive with the not caring "about which school you went to" bit. If that's the criteria it eliminates all but 2 of the top 25 public universities which is flat out ridiculous.
Context is important. That was under "Where Should You Post Your Internship?" - yes, if you're limited (by budget, time, etc.), it makes sense to target people who are even marginally more likely to work out.
That doesn't mean you have to go to one of those schools to get in - which school you went to is treated as a weak signal in the resume reviews, and is ignored for the rest of the process. I went to a public school that falls outside of the 30% rule, for example, and another from my school will be joining us this summer.
We have never rejected anyone based on which school they went to, and conversely have never extended someone an offer based on the school they went to. The schools we actively recruit at all admit less than 30% of applicants because we have found that they tend to do better.
In an interview the school you go to doesn't really matter if you can't code.
A great github account would probably help you more in our interview process than a degree from MIT.
How did you get past 'must be eligible to work in us' restriction? Did they sponsor your visa?
Being an immigrant does not mean that you aren't allowed to work in the US. In fact, there are a ton of immigration visas built around the idea that you will in fact work in the US.
If you are on a student visa (which clearly a full time employ isn't), then there are some hoops to jump through in order to work, but I am not familiar with the necessary steps.
I have a green card, so no visa necessary.
This is an aside, but why do people use "ivy league" as synonymous with "top ten" in the world of software development?
At the graduate level, there are only two ivies in us news's top cs list
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
I couldn't find specific CS rankings at the undergraduate level, but for engineering in general, the same thing (this time, only one ivy on the list, Cornell)
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
I understand that there are problems with methodology here, and I have no doubt that many ivy programs are excellent, but it's still strange that people would use "ivy league" as shorthand for elite CS programs.
My guess is that Fog Creek's perspective is heavily influenced by its east coast location? Also, general education tends to matter more for undergraduates, so it could be that the general prestige of the "ivies" is a bigger factor than the specialized nature of departments where it comes to raking graduate programs or specific majors.
The phrasing in your second paragraph is a little off target: the truth is if you're doing anything nontrivial you always want better people because they'll get the job done faster and better even if less skilled people could have done it at all. The real question is, why does Fog Creek think it is to its advantage to only hire potlatch participants, when such discrimination is usually irrational as well as unethical?
The answer, I think, is because they are in the unique position of being able to get away with it. In the normal course of events you'll do worse looking for candidates from Ivy League universities than from people who haven't gone to college because you're fishing in a pool that has already been thoroughly fished by your competitors. But Fog Creek frankly doesn't have very many competitors in this regard, at least not ones remotely in the same league. They seem to be so much better at hiring interns than almost anyone else (in the sense of having a strong brand name to attract attention in the first place, a rigorous selection process and generous offers to those selected) that they will probably be able to pick the cream of the crop no matter where they look, so they have no need to look further afield.
So I think it's a case where the number one player can get away with something the rest of us couldn't.
Side question: in what sense are you saying Ivy league is like a potlatch? Song-and-dance-and-reciprocity? Or conspicuous gift-giving (like "purity potlatch")? Or slave exchange?
Signaling relative status by the destruction of valuable resources.
Fog Creek's sister company, Stack Exchange, has near zero full-time dev staff from Ivy League schools. It probably makes sense to look for the best interns there, but it may not be a requirement.
http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2012/07/15/rockstars-went-where/
Not that I went to anything approaching an Ivy League school, but I understand why they limited their search to that subset. They are more likely to find good matches, and given the low amount of time they probably allocated to this, it wouldn't make sense to canvas hundreds of universities.
I doubt that they met all of their applications at the Job fairs, and even if they did, it appears that Fog Creek also attended the SBU CS Fair (which is decidedly not an Ivy League).
I just want to point out that Rutgers is a large public state school, namely the state university of NJ.
The bias in hiring could be more regional than anything else, though they did say they targeted Princeton, Brown and Yale. 5 of the 8 are a few hours drive from NY, and 2 of the 3 that are not local were persistent (applied more than once).
Although Fog Creek definitely skews towards Ivy League hires, as a former FC intern from a tiny Midwest school I can say it's not a requirement.
On their website, they show a bug tracking app, a version control app, and some organizing app. Apart from the money, I don't see anything that would make me excited about working there. Do they work on anything else?
Yes, they make their own (awful) programming language, that spits out VBscript, PHP etc, to write their products in. I kid you not, it's called Wasabi -- though I'm not sure if they use it still.
For all the advice on hiring Joel has given (and its annoying tone for what is, basically, a very simple app company, and not even a very exciting one at that), you'd think they were coding for the space program or something.
Unlike most tech companies started these days, Fog Creek was not started with a product idea; rather, with the goal of being a great place to work (specifically, for software devs). Some people (myself included) find it quite fulfilling to work reasonable hours with great people on interesting tech stacks, even if we aren't making the hottest new app or chasing the next huge exit.
Jews that went to Ivy League schools tend to hire other jews that go to Ivy League schools
Oh go be a racist-troll somewhere else.
that style of bigotry does not belong here
As someone who did a summer internship last year at an amazing SF company, the pay-scale at fogcreek sounds pretty competitive (read amazing).
$6,000 a month comes to a shade less than $40/hour. Bear in mind that most full time students work only in summers so although considerable federal tax is deducted from this amount, the intern is likely to receive most of it back when filing taxes next year.
Also, catered lunches plus an apartment in NYC plus two amazing events in twice a week (which likely include dinner) means that the only money that needs to be spent is a handful of weekday dinners plus weekend fun, and I haven't even gotten to the thousand dollar signing bonus yet!
Being in college, I knew about 10-12 others who interned last summer in the Bay Area. With most companies in the SF Bay Area you're looking at about $27 to $34 at most large companies in the south bay and $35 to $40 in SF. Plus an hourly pay scale means that interns don't get paid on holidays like 4th of July, Labor Day, or when they get sick (didn't know anyone who got paid monthly instead of hourly in the Bay Area). I haven't heard of housing benefits in the south bay much and heard of only one company in SF that threw in free housing.
(Sorry about a long comment focusing only on the financial aspects of an internship program but it is an important factor that debt-ridden students take into account).
$6000 a month is more than what most senior software engineers earn here, before considering currency conversions. You guys are lucky man.
Google and Facebook both hire their interns on exempt positions, so they aren't hourly. They also pay around $6800-$7000/mo, not including benefits.
I did an hourly internship last summer and got 4th of July off, paid. It must depend on the company.
On behalf of a student who just finished up the internship search: Companies/recruiters, please note the advice put forth here.
A couple of points I'd like to touch on:
* Be sure to provide your interns with a ton of guidance, and promote this in during your recruitment process. Many of my fellow students are turned off by the bigger companies since they feel like they won't be able to make an impact. As a smaller company, this is your ace in the hole. Use it to your advantage.
* Personally, exploding offers leave a bad taste in my mouth. Everyone knows how long the recruitment process takes, and you should give the intern the common courtesy to make an informed decision. The last thing you want is a disgruntled intern on your payroll for a few months.
* You should consider internships as an investment. Build a relationship with your intern, and it will pay numerous dividends in the long run. They might return for a full-time position or they may refer a friend that they respect. A good way to support your intern during the school year is to sponsor a hackathon or an interview workshop at their school. This gets you face-to-face with some of the most motivated hackers at any school, where you can begin the courting process.
Just some quick thoughts from the student's side of the table.
> If you don’t know where to begin here’s a good rule: only target colleges that admit less than 30% of applicants. That will give you a head start on being selective, especially if you have limited spots available in your program.
I personally think this is silly. If you want to be selective just focus on applicants who actually build things. If you look at collegiate hackathons at places like university of michigan, UIUC, or Purdue it's clear that there is a lot of talent in the midwest. Just because someone wasn't born on a coast or with a connection to an ivy league school doesn't mean they don't make a cut for selectiveness.
I agree! Thankfully, that's not actually what Fog Creek does. Let's separate two aspects of this process, because they deserve different treatment:I personally think this is silly.
So yes, only recruiting students at selective schools is stupid. But that's not what Fog Creek does.1. *Going to recruiting sessions.* Going to recruiting sessions is expensive and time-consuming, as Liz noted. To go to recruiting sessions, therefore, you have to optimize your bang for the buck, and *that's* where the selective schools show up: Fog Creek simply did get a better pool of applications when going to selective institutions. There are other things that Fog Creek can do to optimize for candidates who actually build things, and it turns out they do those things, too (sponsoring intern events, sponsoring OUTC, and so on). But career fairs at selective schools can be enormously effective, and are a bit easier to come by. 2. *Evaluating applicants.* When Fog Creek does résumé screening, a whopping *one out of seven points* is awarded for going to a selective institution. Everything else--having a portfolio, having passion, demonstrating follow-through, etc.--has absolutely nothing to do with where you went to school. And that's *only* used for the résumé screening. Once you get your foot in the door and talk to a human, it never comes up ever again, in any context. (When I joined, Fog Creek even did double-blind interviews to enforce that!)Fog Creek dev, here - we, too, have had absolutely great hires from less-selective colleges and with not-so-great resumes. But if you're pressed for time and resources and you have to use a heuristic for where to put recruiting efforts, this can be a good one.
Speaking as someone who has done several career fairs (as an employer), they've almost always went better at more selective schools. That's just the truth. Keep in mind it doesn't have to be a hyper-selective school, and it certainly doesn't need to be Harvard.
Outside of that, school selectivity has been only a mediocre predictor for individual candidates. You shouldn't ignore it outright, but you shouldn't be entranced by it. We've had MIT candidates who couldn't really program and a guy whose school I don't even remember who killed it.
Upvoted. There are tons of hardworking poor kids at less prestigious schools, and tons of grade-grubbing slacks and practice field All-Americans at the selective ones.
If you have zero time to weed a large pile down to a small one and thus no other choice, I can see this being a logical step. However, if you're hiring for any engineering position and the application form doesn't ask for a link to something the candidate has built (be it on Github, Sourceforge, or just on the web in general), you're likely missing out on the most important metric.
I never thought of Fog Creek that way before. In fact, I've always gotten the impression they were down-to-earth. But, that one shot of a spreadsheet in this post listing Brown, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, etc. changed my mind.
The other turnoff in this was the weeding out of candidates based on resumes. We hired an excellent employee out of a batch of horrid resumes- what a great hire, though.
I'm glad that you put Rutgers with the likes of Princeton et al, but it is the state university of NJ. So not everyone came from a prestigious school.
Rutgers is one of the seven members of the ivy league. I'm guessing it's pretty selective. If it's not at least eliteish like UC Berkeley or U Michigan something went badly wrong.
I hate to burst you bubble, and I am glad that you believe that Rutgers is a part of the Ivy League[1], but I assure you it isn't. Rutgers admits nearly 61% of applicants in, and based on a cursory google search, UMich accepts about 37% and UC Berkeley accepts 18%.
Rutgers is The State University of NJ[2]. It is a very old institution (8th oldest), and that may be where the confusion comes from, since all the other Ivy's came from that time period.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Members [2] http://www.rutgers.edu/
I sit corrected.
As a former Fog Creek intern (2010), I can tell you that Fog Creek's internship program is one of the best built out programs I've seen in the industry. It rivals and exceeds those of software firms with 10-100x resources. The talent they attract is top-notch too.
I have to say the pay is by no way "spoiling". It is no where near the top tier pay (for interns) seen in the industry.
A furnished apartment in NYC probably adds a lot to that salary. The unfortunate part is that the cost of that benefit is also considered income and the taxes for it would come out of the $6K. I interned at Microsoft years ago with similar benefits (good salary, furnished apartment, prepaid rental car, relocation costs & 2 gym memberships) but they paid extra cash to cover the taxes on the non-monetary benefits.
There's no way I would've turned down the Fog Creek opportunity back then, though, it sounds like a very well planned program at an awesome company. There were many internships in the Philadelphia area, for developers, that paid half that salary with no perks on top of the pay at all. On the other hand, the interview process at nearly all the companies consisted of sending a resume and sitting down for 30 minutes to talk about past experience. I interviewed at 4-6 companies a year to get my 3 internships, with a ~75% acceptance rate (offered the internship), and not one involved multiple interviews or a single code screen. The west coast interview process just doesn't exist out here.
I had the exact same experience with interviews in the Midwest. Nothing rigorous at all, very high offer rate, and about half the compensation. I made a more in-depth comment, but just wanted to note that.
I lived in the same place they put their interns for a summer, it's decent and costs ~4,000 for the entire summer, which definitely adds to the cost.
It's not that far off the top tier pay for tech companies. Glassdoor compiled their list for 2014, and it's not too inaccurate [1]. Speaking from personal experience, the numbers for SWE undergrads for some of the companies on the list this year:
Palantir - 7,500 - 1,200 for housing if you choose
Facebook - 6,200 + free housing
Salesforce - Varies per year, 34.50/hr for rising junior, housing.
Cisco - 22/hr
Quora and Dropbox are both missing from this list but they both have higher salaries than Palantir, but not by too much.
[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/25-highest-paying-companies-in...
Jane St and a few other finance firms are paying interns ~100k/y annualised. That's the highest I've heard barring grad students with sweetheart deals.
As covi mentioned, Palantir, Quora, Dropbox all pay about roughly the same but are very willing to negotiate and pay more if necessary.
Yes, that figure is about right for the few finance technology films.
Wow... this sounds kind of irrational. I mean, these are close to senior salaries annualized - Sales force is around 70K, while a senior gets about 100K across most of the US.
Are 4 interns really more useful than 3 seniors? Really?
"Get 'em while they're young" is as valid for recruiting as it is brand preferences ;)
Those interns will turn into salaried FTEs whose first three year's annual compensation – amortised signing bonus, stock grants, and performance bonus included – will be ~150k. Compared to new graduate FTEs, interns are positively cheap!
The ~6.5k, housing inclusive, perks out the wazoo also all come from highly profitable, competitive companies falling over each other to recruit from a highly constrained pool. There are only so many Stanford, MIT, and CMU graduates a year, and an even smaller number of hackathon winners, open source contributors, inveterate interns, etc. For many, this is the last time they'll ever openly be on the job market.
Salaries in SF/NYC are much higher than elsewhere, which is where most of those salaries are from. 100k is typical for a dev with 0-3 years of experience in those areas.
You're paying for more than the intern's time - you also get first crack at hiring them full time (with a 3 month interview to decide who you want). In the current job market, that's worth quite a bit.
I'd say Quora and Dropbox can pay much higher, from my personal experience.
Also, there are other places in the industry that pay even higher. But I'd include those with Quora and Dropbox as Tier 1.
In short, Fog Creek is at most Tier 2, along with Google / Facebook, etc.
How's the cost of living in new york? I'm an intern in michigan and I'm getting way less than 6k a month but I definitely feel spoiled.
NYU has a program where college students doing internships in NYC can live in an NYU dorm for ~$360/week.
I didn't find the groceries/food to be all that expensive.
(Manhattan prices) A good studio apartment will be $2000-2500 a month. A one bedroom would be $3000+.
Manhattan prices may $2k -$3k +, but you can get a reasonable apartment and commute for $1300 or less depending how far you want to commute daily
Wow, yea now I see why they get payed so much. A solid 2 bedroom around me is like 500-800.
Please do note that Fog Creek provides an apartment to interns for exactly that reason. You would not being paying New York rent as a student.
How much are you making if you don't mind me asking? I just accepted an internship in STL and curious where the compensation is around there.
You're correct. While not common, top interns at Amazon A9 can pull ~$35k for the summer.
Are you including the housing stipend in that math? That seems awfully high. I'm @ amazon, getting 6700 / mo, plus 2.5k / mo housing stipend and suddenly feel insecure :-p.
There was a whole movie about interns at Fog Creek.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
I admit it could have been edited a bit better (read: more interesting), but it was still fun to get a bit more of an inside view of a process like this.
This sounds like a great program, I just wish it was offered year-round. Even though I think Northeastern University and Waterloo are the only schools with a completely integrated, well defined Co-op program, it seems like its a growing trend.
I'd assume having year round interns and a continuous recruitment process would be less disruptive to the team's work velocity and give you a bit bigger reach for students too.
Plus, I'm a bit jealous of some of the summer-only internships at a lot of interesting companies. Can't complain about graduating with 18+ months of interesting work experience pretty much guaranteed though.
Fog Creek has frequently had co-ops; they just don't advertise it very much, for two reasons: they can't offer the same outings/bonding experience, and they can't take as many students at the same time. That said, if you're interested, apply. They've had some amazing co-ops over the years, and I promise they'll take your application seriously.
Fog Creek actually does occasionally do co-op classes during the fall/spring, but there is rarely (never?) more than one at a time and we don't really advertise it.
At my university, we get a lot of co-ops because of the engineering nature of majority of the students. I've found that engineering companies that make physical things are more likely to do co-ops and companies that focus on a completely coded product/companies that have a traditionally CS focus tend to do interns. Just my experience here though.
Second this - I think companies that offer year-round internships set themselves way ahead of the pack and get to choose from a very qualified and talented pool.
I didn't attend the Rochester Institute of Technology, but friends of mine who go there tell me that co-ops are a mandatory part of the CS program there.
Waterloo's "co-op" system is quite different. The whole undergraduate co-op program lasts about 5 years, and you alternate between 4 months in school and 4 months working throughout (i.e., you don't get summers "off"). This allows the students to try many different companies of varying size and culture.
All of this sounds extremely exhausting for a simple internship. About 30 times more effort than I've ever had to put to land a job as a freelancer.
I'll take my standard $50/hour rate and avoid these rat-races. 400 applicants and only 8 hires!? YIKES. Are these fellas going to the moon?
Remember that this is New York City. $6000 is great money to begin with. Add $2000/month minimum for rent. (And imagine digging up a security deposit too...) This is investment banking money for a software firm with a much more respectable work-life balance.
(I have no connection to the firm, though I have read pretty much everything that Joel has written)
Am I the only one flabbergasted by the comp #'s thrown around in the article and in these threads?
Does anyone know how much one would make in a Finance Internship at a hedge-fund, prop firm and investment bank?
I think an internship in a top tier bank in London pays about 3000 pounds/month for a summer analyst and 5000 pounds/month. My data are outdated though, maybe the salaries have gone down after the crisis, but I doubt it and would rather think they decreased the number of interns.
I've heard the hours are much longer though for that field. Correct me if I'm wrong.