Interns At Twitter Make The Equivalent Of $81,000 A Year - And They're Not Even The Best-Paid Interns In Tech

Associated PressSome random tech interns who may or may not have been very well paid.

Interns at Twitter make the equivalent of $81,000-a-year salaries, according to Glassdoor, which surveys tech workers.

And Twitter isn't even the most generous tech company with a paid intern program. That honor belongs to Palantir, the somewhat secretive artificial intelligence and data analytics company. It pays interns the equivalent of an $84,000 salary. (Internships don't last a year; here's one that lasted 10 weeks.)

Bloomberg's Sarah Frier has a great deep-dive look at the intense - and lucrative - recruiting environment for tech interns.

Here are the top five paying companies, ranked by monthly intern wage, according to Glassdoor:

1. Palantir: $7,012
2. VMWare: $6,966
3. Twitter: $6,791
4. LinkedIn: $6230
5. Facebook:$6,213

Microsoft, Google and Apple are all on Bloomberg's list too, paying similar rates.

Interns can be in high school and start in their teens, Bloomberg says. But the rates of pay they get at tech companies make them richer - at least temporarily - than many of their parents, Bloomberg says:

It's become standard for engineering interns to snag free housing, transportation and salaries of more than $6,000 a month, according to job-search site Glassdoor Inc. That compares with the $4,280 average monthly income for U.S. households in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of the top 10 companies paying the most for interns, all are technology companies except for Exxon Mobil Corp.

Read the whole thing here.