Ask HN: How do you negotiate an internship salary? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you negotiate an internship salary?

4 pointspaidintern3 comments

During community college, I did part-time PHP/MySQL web development for a local web dev company. I was making $16/hr when I quit after two and a half years when I graduated and moved on to a state university. Two years ago, I got an internship doing C#/ASP.net development where they kept me at that $16/hr rate (although they provided housing, utilities, and a light breakfast).

Today I'm applying for a co-op. The application asks for past salaries and expected salary. Do I leave the past salaries blank and put down "Negotiable" for the expected salary? Based on my relevant experience and the amount of schooling that I have completed, I believe I'm worth at least $20/hr, if not more (24-26?). How do I get the best possible offer from HR without coming across too strong? How and when do I approach this subject during the interview process?

Edit: For context on the salaries, I'm in the Midwest and applying to a local job, where I expect to commute 45 miles each way.

Yes, but with an internship one assumes that "pay" = financial remuneration + learning + experience

You don't say what your major is but if it was, say, robotics and the iRobot Corporation or JPL wanted to offer you an internship you might decide that a free/no pay internship was worth it due to the experience alone.

Thus without knowing the degree of learning and experience you will get it is hard to know what is a fair $ salary.

You should leave the salary fields blank. There's usually no need to fill those in, unless it's explicitly stated.

Most large companies have set scales on internship salaries based on your seniority in college (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior). There's usually not too much wiggle room, if any. You shouldn't really discuss salary with HR until you get a formal offer in writing. Get the job first, then worry about how much you're going to get paid.

High range for software dev internship salaries this year is probably around $34/hr in the bay area. It depends on what you'll be doing though.

In my experience, those fields are often quite extraneous - not too relevant for interns, since many internships aren't really negotiable. This being said, the high end of your range is the low end of what I know internships pay on an hourly basis at top companies; $20/hour is certainly entirely reasonable. I think that given the likelihood this field will largely be disregarded anyway, you run little risk at putting in figures on the high end - if they are otherwise interested, they'll still talk to you, attributing your figures to your lack of knowledge about the local job market, etc.

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