Thread: Question Regarding Appropriate Pay

A little life story here. I'm 18 years old, attending UCF for a degree in Computer Science, and currently working as an intern for a Passenger Airline that will remain unnamed. I was hired by a friend of mine, who I coached Pop Warner football alongside last year, to fill a temporary summer position in the Scheduling Department. While there, I got annoyed with the tedious work and decided to code some programs to do the bulk of my work. Needless to say, my department was impressed and I have done about 8 or so programs to build reports and run analysis on data. My work has been primarily within my department.

Two weeks ago a guy in my department asked me if I could build a program. Basically, it is a data sorting and filtering program. This program was designed to be distributed to two of the US leading vacation companies and to our own SOC (System Operations Control), each with their own unique features and data specified by us. After a week of testing, yesterday the program was distributed to about 100 people to be used (70 of which are internal). Today I was answering feedback (all good feedback) and making additions. My boss later came into my cubical and told me the IT Department wanted to meet with me next week.

There may be the possibility of advancement and I may have the opportunity to work in the IT Department (means more programming and less data analysis). Now, I am currently working as a Part-Time Intern (about 12 hours a week) for the shit pay of $10/hour. Considering I have automated my analysis job to the point where I only have to do about 5 minutes of actual work a week and considering I'm an 18 year old part-time intern, I haven't been able to justify to myself to even bring up the subject of a pay rise. However, if I will be working as a programmer in the IT Department, I will be asking for more money, as I will be working constantly and much more rigorously.

To give an idea of my limited programming experience:
I've known JAVA for 2 years now, mostly self taught (lots of thanks to this forum)
I've written several programs for the company I'm with now
I've placed in the UCF High School Programming Competition both years I was in it
I won 1st place in the Florida Latin State Forum for the Computer Program Category last year for my interactive JAVA program about Hannibal and the Second Punic War.
I spent about 24 total hours writing and debugging the 7500 or so lines of code in this most recent program (I use JCreator because I prefer to program my own stuff)

The doors have opened for me in the past few days. Several companies have suddenly taken notice of me and I am actively discussing the program with people in the companies that are receiving the program (it's always good to network). Obviously, all in a hope to get another job once this one inevitably comes to an end.

I have friends that work for Lockheed Martin as programming interns and they make about $12-$15 per hour and work more hours per week. If the opportunity presents itself for advancement, I'm unsure as to what a respectable pay for someone in my position would be and I was hoping for some of the experienced programmers on this forum to give me an idea of what to expect.

Thanks to anyone who actually read all that. I will be very impressed if this keeps anyone's attention.

For the position they hired you into, it sounds like $10/hour isn't bad. I would probably suspect that someone in your kind of position if you were to advance into some sort of an IT role, something in the range $12/hour to $15/hour actually sounds pretty good while you're in college. I know a quite few people who work as technical interns (me included) and we make stuff in the $10-15/hour range, with most clumping around 12-13 ish range. If you work at a smaller place, you might get less (particularly when it comes to benefits).