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Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year 170

Posted by Soulskill from the gotta-keep-that-stem-shortage-looking-short dept.
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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Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year More

Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year

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  • Insourcing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @04:59PM (#48973213)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by netsavior ( 627338 )
      In my experience, someone in Texas or North Carolina or wherever makes 10k MORE than someone on the coast. For some reason, the higher the cost of living in the area I am offered a job, the lower the salary.

      • someone in Texas or North Carolina or wherever makes 10k MORE than someone on the coast

        North Carolina is on the East Coast.

        • 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.

        • Texas is on the Gulf Coast.

      • 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

        • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rich0 ( 548339 )

        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?

    • That is "onshoring" not "insourcing". "Insourcing" is when instead of hiring an external company to do some work, you hire your own employees for the task; like when a growing company gets it's own lawyer. "Outsourcing" is when you take work that you'd normally do in-house, and contract it out to a thrid party. "Offshoring" is where instead of having work done locally you send it to a cheaper country.

    • 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.

      • The cost of living in San Francisco is 68% more than Kansas City (source: http://www.bankrate.com/calcul... [bankrate.com]). According to Brooking's Institute report the average salary for a tech job is 96% more (source: http://www.brookings.edu/resea... [brookings.edu]). So it all depends where you fall in that spectrum. I wouldn't be surprised if some one-percenters are skewing the San Francisco average. Last time I compared salaries, it was less than a 50% increase for me to work at Apple, but I didn't compare any other companies.

  • Recession coming?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:00PM (#48973225) Journal

    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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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!)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Bonzoli ( 932939 )
        Russia isn't capitalist, its a kleptocracy. Please watch PBS frontline - Putin's Way.
        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

        • Is there any capitalist society which isn't a kleptocracy in some way?

          Or any other regime for that matter.

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      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.

    • Re:Recession coming?? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Maltheus ( 248271 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:38PM (#48973663)

      Wall Street aside, we never left the last one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave562 ( 969951 )

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thanks, Zuck!

  • 1.7 percent increase, for a total of $698/month...SSI...lol

  • Thanks Obama (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:02PM (#48973245)

    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)

    by melchoir55 ( 218842 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:05PM (#48973289)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      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.

    • 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.

  • Perhaps they can explain the STEM shortage again (Score:3)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:10PM (#48973345)

    How we have too few CS people and we need more to do the work ?

  • Negotiation pays dividends (Score:3)

    by clam666 ( 1178429 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:11PM (#48973353)

    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.

    • i still remember when i was getting my CCNA, starting money was around 80 grand. by the time i graduated, it was cut in half

  • On the other hand, if you live in Minnesota and you think there are no tech jobs, you are probably right.

    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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plover ( 150551 )

      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)

    by Kagato ( 116051 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:15PM (#48973417)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      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.

    • I also found this crazy. I just lost a couple guys with 5 years experience to jobs paying $100k+ which we just could not match. Even the new college grads have been in the $70k range... The MN job market certainly doesn't seem like it has tightened up to me.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by unimacs ( 597299 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unimacs ( 597299 )
      If the OP based that statement on the map in the report, they either missed the big blue dot smack dab on the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area, thought it was in Wisconsin or doesn't really know which state Minnesota is.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      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)
         

    • It's probably a supply/demand thing, then. This study was only looking at the demand, but if there are fewer tech workers than required jobs, it's still great to be a programmer.

    • It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.

      Wait - this is a UNIX system! I know this!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by s.petry ( 762400 )
        In some regions, sure. I live in the SF bay area and am contacted daily by recruiters. I moved here from Detroit however, where there are few jobs and no pay. I laughed at a recruiter from GM who called me and offered me 30K/yr to work as a Senior Team lead when they were pulling IT jobs back to Detroit from overseas about 3 years ago. With the shit economy in Detroit, they had plenty of people willing to work for peanuts because it's peanuts or starve.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kagato ( 116051 )

        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)

    by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:21PM (#48973477) Homepage Journal

    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 for student loans is needed

      • 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

    • How did a Republican get in here?

      • 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

    • 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

      • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    On the other hand, if you live in Minnesota and you think there are no tech jobs, you are probably right.

    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.

  • 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.

  • These starting salaries look extremely inflated. Perhaps to draw more students into the programs? Or am I severely underpaid?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      The problem is where these high paying jobs are located. Making $75k is nothing when you have a 1500 sqft 2 bedroom house with no garage and it costs $250k.

      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.
      • Totally agree. I'd rather have $50k/year and 10 minute drive to work vs 100k/year and 50 minute drive to work. Also, don't understand why there is not more telecommuting.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Altus ( 1034 )

          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.

  • They are specifically talking about people right out of college with a CS degree. Any one in the field will tell you 4 years of hands on experience out weights 4 years of academic work. Once they are our of college, you now have to re-train that grad to do real world work.
  • "These results come as Salary Survey has undergone a major change in its methodology."
    ...
    "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]
  • I can tell you why there are so many jobs in tech for MI. People forget about it but, in 2008 we all got laid off, like literally 30-40%. What did the laid off people do? We left the State. Now companies are thinking dam we needed those people. I live in WA now. I can (and have) get a job offer in MI with 2 phone calls. I can't say its that easy in WA.
  • There is just not lots of good work around anymore. Even fed ex drivers are independent contractors that don't get any benefits or company paid unemployment services. So everyone in those jobs are fighting to get the few better jobs, driving everything down. There is good work around, but it's so limited, even middle class work is becoming a elitist circle. Those inside the circle just don't get how many more people are outside it now. "I'm making 80k out of college, you can too" is just not true for

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