Seattle tech firms sweeten the deal for interns
Amazon.com, Microsoft and Boeing sweeten already-lucrative job offers in Seattle with subsidized, furnished housing. Transportation is covered from anywhere in the country, including airport food, baggage fees and taxis. There’s free breakfast and dinner, biweekly housekeeping, a private party with Macklemore and Deadmau5.
And that’s just for the interns.
“We are all competing for those top students,” said Heidi Dowling, intern-program manager for university recruiting at Microsoft, “and what can we do to make our program stand out and what is attractive for a college student to spend their summer with Microsoft?”
Their strategies are working. More than 3,000 students have brought their talents to Seattle this summer to work at those three companies.
Dan Masi, a computer science and mathematics junior hailing from a Boston suburb, worried about the challenge of moving across the country.
“I think the little things — finding my own housing, dealing with flights, dealing with relocation — would’ve just been really difficult,” Masi said.
But Amazon recruiters were clear: Relocation wouldn’t be an issue. Amazon and Microsoft contract with Aboda, a corporate housing company, to supply interns with apartments and hotel rooms. Aboda stocks rooms with televisions, bedding, towels, dishes, electronics and more. And it offers housekeeping and catering.
“It’s basically turnkey,” said Marci Abinanti, vice president of corporate housing at Aboda.
Lauren Kuan interned at Goldman Sachs in New York City last year. There, she said, she received a small housing stipend but very little help finding a place to stay.
“You were completely thrown in on your own,” Kuan said.
As a program manager intern at Microsoft, Kuan got corporate housing and a rental car courtesy of Microsoft.
“It shows that they really do care about employees and interns and so on,” Kuan said. “They want to make you very happy and make it very easy.”