Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year 170
Jim_Austin writes: The first report on the class of 2015 from the respected National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which conducts surveys of employers' hiring intentions throughout the year, projects a 9% drop in the salaries of new computer science bachelor's degree graduates, from $67,300 in 2014 to $61,287 this year.
Reader phantomfive sends this news on a related subject:
The Brookings Institute has released a report showing where the tech jobs are in the United States. Of course, San Jose comes in first, but Kansas is high up in the list. Michigan and Utah also were surprisingly high. On the other hand, if you live in Minnesota and you think there are no tech jobs, you are probably right.
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They will keep coming until the crumbs that are left after offshoring become a minimum wage job, and even then, H-1Bs have extreme loyalty because they get deported back to the -stan that they came from after they get fired, so even at minimum wage, they will still be there.
Honestly, as a CS major, can I recommend it for other people? Hard to say. A previous /. article yesterday had someone stating that there isn't such thing as an unemployed lawyer. I probably would agree, assuming a state other than CA
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Once you've paid your dues doing this awhile....incorporate yourself and contract. Especially if you can get into Federal Contracting, the money is good, you often can get on LONG term projects, the bill rate is much better, and it also helps discriminate in favor of being a US citizen, especially if there is a clearance required, no H1B's or other foreigners allowed in many of those positions.
That is where the money is at these days.
But, incorporate yourself so you can work corp-to-corp and they won't be scared of you having to be a W2 employee. I myself prefer the S-Corp, saves you a fortune of employment taxes (SS/Medicare) in that you don't have to pay that on all money billed, only a portion of it.
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get in a job with a clearance. Any job, even if it is cleaning the urinals. Once you have that clearance you are golden. The jobs come to you.
I never worry about my current job, my inbox is full of offers that I can step in to on a moment's notice.
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> get in a job with a clearance.
Then you often cannot publish, nor can you discuss details of your work with the best non-military people in the field. You can also wind up ordered to commit illegal or unconstitutional acts with no safe legal or political recourse. Do remember that Edward Snowden was a contractor and reported illegal activity to his superiors, and was told to "shut up" before he want to the press with very solid proof of illegal and abusive and unconstitutional activity by parts of the f
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Clearance jobs
How do I shot network? (Score:2)
If you're in CS...out of school, take the jobs you can get, learn, get resume experience and NETWORK with people.
I don't think a CCNA certification would help with the kind of networking you're thinking of. So what resources would you recommend for someone just getting started with this "networking"? Searching for networking returns a bunch of irrelevant results about computer networks, and social networking has become the cesspool known as Facebook.
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Your search-fu [google.com] is weak, tepples-san.
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Hell, I'm not even on Facebook or twitter, or linked in, but yet, I still have a treasure trove of folks I've worked with in the past and keep up with (phone, email) and when I need a job, I reach out to them and they usually have leads for me and recommend me.
All this was done WAY prior to social networks you know. Maybe that's the problem, kids today don't know how to connect with and ga
Building people skills (Score:2)
Err...I guess I'm talking about the old fashioned people skills, and networking to make and keep contacts with people.
I figured as much. It's hard for some people to build the necessary people skills from scratch, especially people who tend toward the systemizing end of the spectrum [wikipedia.org].
I still have a treasure trove of folks I've worked with in the past and keep up with (phone, email) [...] Maybe that's the problem, kids today don't know how to connect with and gather people connections
Perhaps you're right. I don't remember having been taught how to keep up with past contacts in high school. And that's why I don't even know where to start.
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Especially if you can get into Federal Contracting, the money is good
This is an interesting perspective. I just interviewed someone in the DC area who is looking to get out of Federal contracting because their perception is that it is getting harder to find stable work.
Now granted, I ended up passing on the person because their skills were not up to par and that might very well explain their challenge with finding work.
Is there a specific skill set that you find is in demand among Federal contractors?
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, I don't get where all this doom and gloom about software engineering career opportunities is coming from all over slashdot.
It is called "selection bias". The people gainfully employed are too busy to post.
Re: Good (Score:2)
There are tons of unemployed and underemployed lawyers. The profession is saturated and many never work in the field.
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So much for the law of supply and demand.
Re: Good (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Go go law school, get an awful job for 30k a year, making 50k after nearly 4 years of trial experience."
That's odd. A personal anecdote: I have two friends who are lawyers. Both are in their early thirties. Both passed the bar exam about 4 years ago. Both started making above 100k after 3 years. Both said all the lawyers they knew who had worked in the field for more than 5-6 years made above 150k. Contract/civil procedure/corporate law. Also, according to them, public defenders make about 80k.
PS. Looks li
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....welcome to the real world. It's not so cushy.
Insourcing (Score:3, Informative)
The vast majority of CS grads are coming out of state and public colleges in areas with a cheaper cost of living than your typical NY/LA/SF setup. Companies are taking advantage of this. I may make $10k less than someone on the coast, but my net income is higher.
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someone in Texas or North Carolina or wherever makes 10k MORE than someone on the coast
North Carolina is on the East Coast.
East Coast vs. the South (Score:2)
North Carolina is on the East Coast.
That's true geographically. But economically, I thought the "East Coast" started at Virginia and continued north to New England, and everything south of Virginia (Carolinas, Georgia, Florida) was "the South". I include Virginia in the East Coast because of its ties to DC and AOL's headquarters prior to 2007.
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Hasn't been the case here in South Carolina. I graduated back in 2003 and its taken 12 years to work my way up to $62k per year - I started at $27k. I do have excellent benefits though - fully employer covered healthy insurance and an actual pension plan (I retire in 17 more years).
There just aren't a lot of companies here looking for programmers or tech talent, so you kinda take what you can get. I could make more money if I was willing to relocate to say, Atlanta, but realistically my friends and famil
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Hasn't been the case here in South Carolina. I graduated back in 2003 and its taken 12 years to work my way up to $62k per year - I started at $27k.
What? I started at $23k in 1987 in Virginia Beach with just a BSCS from ODU. I still live here, still with just the BSCS, and now make (about) $126k - I also have annuity and investment income, am completely debt-free and could quit/retire at will, but that's another story.
Have worked for a small SW developer, (2) contractors at NASA Langley, The New York Times (in Norfolk) and now a large defense contractor since 2001. All here in Hampton Roads.
That should be hard to overlook. (Score:2)
If that were driving a large part of the change, it should only take a moment's work with the raw statistics to tease it out. I'd say "since they don't say that, it's probably not what's happening" -- but that would be making some possibly-unjustified assumptions about the motives of those publishing these results.
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agreed, which is why i plan on moving to charlotte in the next 2 years after i put in some time with my new company. make the same as i do in NY, but have a good 40% more buying power.
Yeah, but won't you miss the traffic?
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I live in Kansas and no it is not California pay but then again the mortgage on my very nice home is less than half what my son in San Fransisco pays for a tiny apartment.
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Recession coming?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The last 2 times this happened were the 1980s and early 2000s.
Businesses always cut IT first as their is no perceived value and is easily outsourced whenever a recession starts
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IT is not equivalent to CS, and new grads do not make up the bulk of the workforce.
(If it does where you are, it means your company is burning people out, and then I pity you!)
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There's going to be a global recession. Russia is in ruins financially. Vast amounts of Europe (and especially Russia) will have a massive housing bubble pop when foreign currency mortgages begin to fall apart. Countries heavily invested in oil are finding their currency is crumbling. Saudi Arabia will tear itself apart financially to destroy Russia, so they'll have a recession as well.
The US could weather it alright, but how much of the American economy is based on selling things to other countries (w
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Putin has no place to hide his stolen goods he might take the world down with him. He has littered the ground behind him with so many dead journalists and prosecutors. No real country would take him at this point. The FSB is holding the world hostage. The USA isn't guilt free in this but invading yet another country puts him on the boarder with NATO again. Stop him in Ukraine or in Poland, make a choice.
Russia h
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Is there any capitalist society which isn't a kleptocracy in some way?
Or any other regime for that matter.
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Countries which rely on resource extraction like Russia, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, etc are going to have financial difficulties as the price of basically all resources is crashing down.
Usually when resource prices go down industry can reduce costs and with cheaper oil people can search for profitable jobs further away from home. Because of the past housing prices a lot of people cannot move houses easily. This means unemployment is bound to go down and productivity will go up.
The US dollar is increas
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requiring US tech companies to release their source code to the Chinese government so their in-house industries can steal it
Like the FADEC code they got from Pratt and Whitney Canada so they could clone a US designed helicopter turbine engine for their WZ-10 military attack helicopter? Yep.
I wonder if they got the F-22 and F-35 source code as well. Then again considering how delayed the F-35 software is not even the US Government contractor has the code on hand either. :-P
China can always redirect their eco
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The 2000's crash happened because companies let go their Y2K programmers in *droves*. It wasn't an economic problem; it was a problem of some of the biggest projects companies had tackled all coming to an end at the same time.
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Y2K really did cause the dot-bubble, via Greenspan. The Fed should have begun raising interest rates in 98 or so when it was clear the overall economy (tech especially) was overheated. But Greenspan was afraid that that would mean companies wouldn't be able to finance needed Y2K work, and so delayed action until early 2000. Of course, the bubble happened, and so the crash in 2000 was nasty.
Re:Recession coming?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wall Street aside, we never left the last one.
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But don't you dare call it a Depression!
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Yes, the recession is already starting. It is going to be another 8-12 months before it starts getting major press coverage, but companies are already cutting back on CapEx in general, and IT CapEx in particular.
You will notice it accelerating when Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities start picking up.
It has begun. (Score:1)
Thanks, Zuck!
I got a raise this year... (Score:1)
Thanks Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
All those H1Bs are taking effect! No wonder the tech industry loves the prez.
The world is falling apart at the seams (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly the shortage of tech workers has gotten so bad in the USA that the laws of supply and demand no longer hold true. Cats and dogs are living together, and pigs fly through the air with reckless abandon!
Congress must act to raise the H1B cap even further before it's too late.
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There is NO shortage of tech workers in the US, stop spreading this bull shit. However, there is a *huge* shortage of tech workers willing to work for peanuts.
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Uh, I think you missed his sarcasm.
Snoopy as usual, I see (Score:2)
However, there is a *huge* shortage of tech workers willing to work for peanuts.
Perhaps the one thing worse than working for Peanuts Worldwide is working for Scott Adams' company [dilbert.com].
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I dunno. They don't like hiring induhviduals. And who can blame them? But that means that most slashdotters wouldn't make the grade.
OTOH, we long-time members of DNRC [wikipedia.org] are shoo-ins.
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New college hires compete on a worldwide market regardless of immigration policy. Fresh out of college there's nothing to distinguish you from a world full of people claiming they can code, and junior dev work can mostly be done anywhere. It's only after 4-5 years when you move out of that mass of people, and might have something to offer that's hard to outsource.
Remember, outsourcing is cheaper than any sort of immigration.
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No, the problem is they taught too many girls to code. Since they only make 70 cents on the dollar a man makes* it's bringing the average down.
Expect a Slashdot article any day now asking, "Should male tech workers demand higher wages for women?" Replies: 547.
* I know the wage gap thing is bullshit; this post is a joke.
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>>Your either from Pakistan, India or a CTO with a budget.
Pretty sure he's from Whooshistan.
Perhaps they can explain the STEM shortage again (Score:3)
How we have too few CS people and we need more to do the work ?
Re:Perhaps they can explain the STEM shortage agai (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if Congress weren't busy sucking Zuck and Gates and Larry's dicks, they'd actually call hearings as to why CS grads were earning less if there were this huge shortage of programmers. Either (a) our economic models are somehow incredibly wrong, (b) we're teaching CS students absolutely nothing useful, or (c) it was a ruse to lower labor costs to increase profits all along.
Other than that, I'll just say I have a suspicion as to which of those three causes is most pertinent.
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Maybe if Congress weren't busy sucking Zuck and Gates and Larry's dicks, ...
Sounds like someone hasn't read the small print in the standard Oracle support contract.
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Negotiation pays dividends (Score:3)
I started in IT at $22k, so screw them. Starting out of college at $67k. Highway robbery.
But aside from getting off my lawn, a decrease is salaries is certainly a crappy situation if you made college into a tech school and thought you would be getting something near $75k after 4 years, and not you've just lost a percentage point.
That having been said, IT jobs, from my experience, is so much about negotiation these days that $67 is almost meaningless, and kids today have access to far more knowledge to sound smart in interviews compared to pre-internet days where you couldn't parking-lot-google everything you need to know for a 5 minute primer discussion to sound knowledgeable.
I think the smart and communicative ones are going to still command higher values, and those who luffed their way through are going to get the lower salaries.
Where I work we pay anywhere from $45k to $110k depending on skillset, what you know, and experience. Your age isn't particularly used against you, other than you have no idea what you're worth currently, so they bone you down unless an interviewer says otherwise. We don't make you start at some Dev1 position regardless, we slot you in at higher values, even if you're knew, if you sound like you're competent, love to learn, and don't act like you know it all at 22.
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Snow Slot (Score:1)
I would think it would be the other way around. It's harder to fill positions where the weather is lousy, meaning more openings. H1B's from warm countries don't seem happy about the cold either. (Russian H1B's may not care).
After the Dot-Com crash when I had to accept miscellaneous contracts to survive, the "cold" cities seemed to be more flexible about candidate requirements. A good many people really h
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I've lived my whole life in the Minneapolis area, and with global warming plus all the skyways connecting the downtown buildings, weather is almost a non-factor for most of the time. Snow happens here like it does in most of the country, only we're better prepared so it isn't a big deal to us. I'm tapping this on a warm bus on my way home, and while traffic is bad ...
Oh, my. The bus just passed a wreck where the fire department and state patrol are prying some guy out of an SUV that he wrapped around a snow
Minnesota - No Tech Job? Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
I've work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market for over a decade. I get calls from recruiters daily. Clients can never find enough experienced people. There's tons of H1Bs working in the market. It's been like that for since about 2006. It can be hard as a college grad to find a job because some bean counter is weighing paying an experienced H1B worker a similar wage as a college hire (and the H1B can't easily leave without obtaining a new sponsor.) But, as the H1B cap have tightened it's forced companies to invest in college workers like they did in the 90s.
To summarize, MN's general unemployment rate is 3.9%, it's tech unemployment rate is a fraction of a percent. It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
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This is what I was going to say. I'm told there's never enough people, although maybe this is a "never enough people for what we want to pay" problem.
Re: Minnesota - No Tech Job? Huh? (Score:3)
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Yep, unemployment in tech in the Twin cities is lower than 2 % and its easy to find work. The original poster is probably in rural MN (or vastly overestimates his skills or employ-ability), Because skilled jobs are simply not as good or as plentiful in rural areas.
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The summary conflates "tech jobs" with programming jobs. They aren't the same. The map does nothing to show programming jobs. Only those at "high-tech" companies.
That's true. The report is about "advanced industries". The OP really just screwed up though.
Even that report indicates that Minneapolis/St. Paul ranks 15th in the nation in terms of advanced industry jobs. Not exactly at the top, but definitely "above average" as they say on Prairie Home Companion.
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I've work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market for over a decade. I get calls from recruiters daily. Clients can never find enough experienced people. There's tons of H1Bs working in the market. It's been like that for since about 2006. It can be hard as a college grad to find a job because some bean counter is weighing paying an experienced H1B worker a similar wage as a college hire (and the H1B can't easily leave without obtaining a new sponsor.) But, as the H1B cap have tightened it's forced companies to invest in college workers like they did in the 90s.
To summarize, MN's general unemployment rate is 3.9%, it's tech unemployment rate is a fraction of a percent. It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
It's the same everywhere. Recruiters are desperate to find workers willing to fill positions at 50% of the usual salary.
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I don't believe it. HR departments quite often want an exact fit for their org's specific tool stack, regardless of how arbitrary it is, and don't want to train near matches nor wait for a learning curve.
They expect, or at least lobby for, unrealistic instant gratification at generic prices. As a consumer I too want instant customization at a generic price. But, it's not realistic.
Train! (or give time to self-train)
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I Know (Score:1)
It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
Wait - this is a UNIX system! I know this!
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That was a Unix system. Specifically File System Navigator for Silicon Graphics's unix system IRIX. At the time SGI was pretty popular in movie production. Albeit quite unrealistic for a tween to have a $15k unix workstation.
But hey, at her age I had Slackware running on a machine, installed from a from a bunch of floppy disks.
Focus on K-12, stop funding college (Score:4, Interesting)
Focus effort on K-12 education. Stop funding college education for everyone. No government support for student loans; no free college from taxpayer money. When the businesses sweat, tell them ... tell them we have workers here, and that they can certainly find our fine, educated young men chomping at the bit, ready to take low salaries and transfer time-consuming grunt work off those high-salaried professionals while their employer works with them and funds their further education.
You know, make the people who know what jobs they need, what expansion they expect, and what it is their business does take the social responsibility of building the American workforce.
We're so obsessed with putting high risks on the individual, demanding they speculate on the greater market, take on the risk of unemployment themselves, go years without building their career to get an education, and then hope that everyone else didn't see the same opportunity and speculate the same way and flood the market. It is the poor who can least sustain themselves when this risk fails them, and the rich who stand to benefit most from this method of operation. This arrangement benefits businesses by producing cheap, surplus, skilled labor; it benefits the middle class and upper class by providing them a stronger position in their self-driven education than the poor; and it benefits the poor least by burdening them with the consequences of dicking around in college hoping for a future career when they could be trying to get into their career now, immediately, for pay--a burden that the poor are less capable of carrying than the more affluent.
But no, we don't see the poison; we only see the plate.
bankruptcy student loans (Score:1)
bankruptcy for student loans is needed
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That's not an answer. Or rather, it's almost the answer I suggested.
Student loans are Federally guaranteed--and now Federal. Bankruptcy for Federal loans is just a roundabout way of saying "free college, but we destroy your life in the process" (bankruptcy will liquidate your assets and shit; it's not just a straight 7-year mark on your credit). Bankruptcy for private loans just means we shift the burden off the Government and onto the banks, who then need to perform their own risk analysis; but bankrup
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How did a Republican get in here?
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Every time someone disagrees with me, I'm either called a Conservative or a Liberal, a Republican, a Democrat, a Tea Partier or a Socialist. Even on the same discussion.
The truth is I have no friends, have no social life, have no desire for a social life, and work directly in strict facts and reality. The things I say come from facts, from analysis, from science and mathematics; if all you have is political bullshit, then I can simply point and laugh and dismiss you as a kook along with those Xenu worshi
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Stop funding college education for everyone. No government support for student loans; no free college from taxpayer money.
This is a horrible idea.
When the businesses sweat, tell them ... tell them we have workers here, and that they can certainly find our fine, educated young men chomping at the bit, ready to take low salaries and transfer time-consuming grunt work off those high-salaried professionals while their employer works with them and funds their further education.
Except they won't. We're in a more globalized economy than ever before. The tech industry here doesn't have to exist here specifically, and it's continually outsourcing whenever possible. The saving grace is that those educated here are usually more qualified and higher quality, even compared to most H1Bs.
Making it more difficult to get the education needed to be competitive is the last thing we should be doing. Maybe instead of eliminating college subsidies we just eliminate the a
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More people qualified to create valuable, exportable products is never a bad thing (assuming it isn't an immediate influx). An industry can shrink or grow based on available talent.
Yeah, of course. As long as those morons go into debt and get compsci and engineering degrees, we can sift through 40 or 50 resumes and remind them that they're basically worth the dog shit on the bottom of our shoes, and pick the few who are willing to lick our boots. The other 74% can work at McDonalds for the same pay [usatoday.com].
Let's get more available talent deep in debt so we can push their salaries even further down, reduce their benefits more, and generally abuse our employees. If they get snippy, we fir
I think the poster misread the graph (Score:1)
Funny, just because the dot is a little smaller and a little lighter on the map in the Minneapolis/St. Paul doesn't mean there are "no tech jobs." In fact, there is effectively negative unemployment for software developers around here.
Great (Score:2)
Less people who are unable to write a short article, use Google, and use their brain for thinking.
But oh these drop is in the US? Too bad. So no change here.
Starting salaries... (Score:2)
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I think a better measure of income is how much a wage is relative to the local average income. I would rather make $50k/year where the average income is $25k than making $100k where the average income is $75k. Assuming it's a nice place to live, of course.
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Really? The extra time you would spend commuting would be at a rate of roughly $180 an hour if you took the higher paying job. I would gladly commute for that much more money per hour of commute.
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Wondering the same thing. I make around the same after 10 years of this bullshit.
That might or might not be so bad. It really depends on the cost of living where you live. You might be better off than someone making 100k where the cost of living is really high.
"CS Grads!" everyone is missing this part... (Score:2)
Nice try. From the 2015 Salary Survey PDF: (Score:1)
"Comparisons to prior years’ Salary Surveys will also not be included and are not recommended as the methodologies are dissimilar and comparisons would not be accurate.
link [naceweb.org]
Michigan employment (Score:1)
Every job is like this now (Score:2)
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While I agree with the general gist of your comment, anyone who has enough education behind them to be worth 100k in loans who is working a job that could have been gotten with a HS diploma either has a useless degree, circumstances that you aren't making clear here that could justify their position in life or is plainly doing it wrong. At this point I'm tempted to ask if he finished college because something here just isn't adding up.
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Gov't enforced healthcare hasn't hurt Canada's and Germany's economy (among others). And how is more people being healed harming the economy? Healing services are part of the economy also.
If it's because Canada and Germany do "socialized"* healthcare right and we don't, then GOP should push to copy their systems rather than push to rid a healthcare plan altogether.
We need more analysts and problem solvers in DC, not whiners. There's a glut of whiners there.
* It's a bit of a stretch to call it "socialism".
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