Almost $7,000 in pay monthly for interns? Yes, at companies like VMware and Twitter, in line with a Glassdoor survey on 25 best-paid internships.

In many industries, interns work without pay, a situation that has prompted a chain of lawsuits and a reconsideration of paid internships by many organizations. Unpaid internships are allowed, so long as organizations conform to six criteria set forth by the dep. of work. However, these rules are difficult to interpret because they’re poorly defined.

For example, the dept of work rules state that an internship should benefit the intern and require that the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern.” Merely fetching coffee for a film star on a movie set is arguably advantageous to the production company, since anything that makes the talent happy keeps the production running and charges down.

But within the tech industry, where there’s considerable competition for engineering talent, interns could be paid well. Of the 25 highest-paying companies for interns, 19 are technology companies, per Glassdoor, an employment community website.

[Hiring prospects may be promising for interns in IT. Read IT Jobs: Best-Paying Titles Of 2014.]

Among interns reporting their salaries through Glassdoor, the typical range is $2,400 to $3,100 per thirty days. The very best paid make greater than $7,000 per 30 days, considerably greater than the $4,251.42 monthly required to arrive the median annual US household income of $51,017. These figures are in line with companies listed on Glassdoor that experience had a minimum of 20 intern salary reports shared between January 24, 2012 and January 23, 2014.

Which company among these is essentially the mostsome of the most generous toward its interns? That could be Palantir Technologies, a CIA-funded maker of information management and information analysis software, where the common monthly base pay for interns is $7,012, or $84,144 for people who be ready to stick around for an entire year.

That’s about four times the salary of somebody in San Francisco working 40 hours every week, 52 weeks per year, for the $10.55 minimum wage set by the town. This will help explain why Google buses are getting focal points for protests.

Virtualization company VMware is available in second in Glassdoor’s ranking. It pays interns a mean of $6,966. Twitter takes third place, paying its interns a mean of $6,791 monthly.

Generous pay appears to contribute to positive reviews on Glassdoor’s website. Calling the experience “the most effective internship I’ve ever had,” one Twitter intern last summer gushed, “You are going to ship code utilized in production, you could have a say in virtually all company decisions, you’ll be generously compensated, one could learn a ton.”

Glassdoor’s intern salary list continues: 4) LinkedIn, $6,230; 5) Facebook, $6,213; 6) Microsoft, $6,138; and seven) eBay, $6,126. At position 8), the primary non-tech company appears: ExxonMobil, at $5,972. Then come 9) Google at $5,969 and 10) Apple at $5,723.

An Apple intern celebrates the provision of free housing or a $1,000 housing stipend, together with perks like free meals and access to employee benefits, including medical health insurance, a gym membership, and product discounts.

The intern salary list continues: 11) Amazon, $5,631; 12) NVIDIA, $5,446; 13) another oil company, Chevron, $5,424; 14) Adobe, $5,409; 15) yet one more oil company, ConocoPhillips, $5,357; 16) Salesforce, $5,158; 17) financial company BlackRock, $5,049; 18) Yahoo, $5,039; 19) a second financial company, Capital One, $4,850; 20) Qualcomm, $4,850; 21) NetApp, $4,691; 22) Autodesk, $4,684; 23) Intel, $4,648; 24) Juniper Networks, $4,648; and 25) oil services company Schlumberger, $4,634.

Nice work for those who can get it. And maybe you could: Coding boot camps have sprung up within the San Francisco Bay Area to sell that dream, on the cost of thousands or tens of thousands of greenbacks and some months of in depth classwork. To avoid abuse, the California Bureau for personal Postsecondary Education recently ordered some of these boot camps to close down in the event that they cannot meet required educational standards. But that’s unlikely to dim the appeal of gold-plated internships.

Engage with Oracle president Mark Hurd, NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle, General Motors CIO Randy Mott, Box founder Aaron Levie, UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh, GE Power CIO Jim Fowler, and other leaders of the Digital Business movement on the InformationWeek Conference and Elite 100 Awards Ceremony, to be held at the side of Interop in Las Vegas, March 31 to April 1, 2014. See the total agenda here.

Thomas Claburn was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications resembling New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

More Insights