These interns save $5K / month
(for 5 days, my Udemy course is 50% off! read on)
Every summer, companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, etc hire interns to work for them for 3 months.
These interns are usually students, and are hired to work on a well defined project during the summer.
Their compensation is straightforward:
Salary - ~ $8000-8500 (gross, per month, in US)
Free housing included - they don’t pay any rent
Free food included - 3 daily meals of high quality food in the office
After tax, this results in ~ $6000 / month. Let’s subtract ~ $1000 for food in the weekends and other expenses, and this results in:
An intern in big tech saves ~ $5000 / month.
Remember, we’re not talking about a senior engineer. We’re talking about someone in college.
In most of the cases, their only skill consists in being able to pass leetcode (whiteboard coding) interviews. No real-world software development experience. No architecture experience. No team-working experience.
Just leetcode allows them to get a role in which they save $5000 / month. While in college.
To make things even better (for them), if they earn a good rating at the end of their project, they receive a full time offer, and a sign-up bonus.
That’s right. Around ~$25K just for joining. On top of the ~190K/year compensation they receive, as an entry level (junior) engineer (E3).
If they are hard working, ambitious and serious, they will get promoted in 1-2 years to the next level (E4) which has a compensation of ~$310K/year.
Imagine being fresh out of college and earning already this amount of money.
While other engineers struggle with a much lower compensation. While doing more or less the same type of work.
This right here is the secret sauce of wealth creation for software engineers.
I could’ve taken advantage of this much earlier in my career when I was in college. But I didn’t.
Why? Because back then, I had no idea what’s possible. And even if I had, I had no ideea what to do to get such a role. There was not much public information about:
what are the salaries
what are the taxes
how much stock you receive
what is the cost of living in those locations
how hard (or actually, how accessible) is learning leetcode to pass the interviews
And this is the hardest thing in tech. Once you land in an environment, everything in your life and career is defined by that environment.
It is super hard to make changes, unless you have an extraordinary ambition.
Because the comfort zone will keep you there. You’ll do OK. Not great, not amazing. And the more time you spend in that comfort zone, the smaller the chances are to make a significant change.
And that’s a pity. Because there are so many software engineers out there who are talented, hard working and ambitious, but this doesn’t reflect in their compensation, net-worth and quality of life.
I’ve walked this exact path. Average tech jobs. Then got hired into Adobe. Then got hired at Meta in 2017. After that, got hired at Datadog (2021), and starting with 2022 I became fully remote contractor and digital nomad, contracting for a huge US company. This allowed me to live the life I want, on my terms, knowing I can pursue any different paths if I need in the future.
Along every step, I learned so many things and I compiled them into a unique Udemy course that helps ambitious software engineers increase their compensation, quality of life, and become top of the market engineer.
Since you are a subscriber of my newsletter, I am offering you a limited 50% off discount of the full price of my course, for the next 5 days!, on this link:
