Talented young people can now make real money despite not working an actual full-time job as Silicon Valley companies compete for their technical abilities and to get them as interns.
Facebook's high school interns would clearly 'like' the job they landed, where they earn about $6,213 a month, amounting to $74,556 a year -- $21,000 more than the average annual median income.
Michael Sayman, 17, was recruited by the social media company for a summer internship that began last month, which included flying him in to meet the great Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Sayman, he couldn't believe it when he received the e-mail that said Zuckerberg wanted to meet him. The recent high school graduate, who lives in Miami, thought it was a prank and found it incredible that he was able to meet the world famous CEO.
This is not a new move since other Silicon Valley companies have already started hiring high school graduate interns as early as two years ago.
The competition for recruits has become so tough that companies have begun giving incentives to their hires even before they enter their freshman year in college. LinkedIn Corp., for example, opened the summer internship program to high schoolers a couple of years ago, while Airbnb Inc. and other startups have gotten interns as young as 16 years old.
However, it's not hard to understand why these top tech companies are competing to gain the services of teenagers since technology and social media heavily focus on the youth-oriented culture. Nowadays, the technically inclined youth are even encouraged to create their own start-ups instead of the usual path of joining large organizations. Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's first investors, even pays $100,000 to people under 20 years old who have high potential to quit school in order to pursue their passions.
More and more young programmers have taken the lead of starting up their own enterprises or are going straight to Silicon Valley to provide their expertise.
