13% of CompSci Grads Have Starting Salaries Over $100K 264
itwbennett writes: That was one of the findings of a survey of 50,000 U.S. college students and recent graduates by Looksharp, a marketplace for internships and entry-level jobs. For general findings across all majors, check out the State of College Hiring Report 2015. But the company shared some more computer science-specific findings with Phil Johnson. Among them: "Of all majors, students studying in CS had the highest average starting salary, $66,161." And, what's more, they know the value of their degree: "On average, they expected a starting salary of $68,120, slightly above the actual average starting salary of $66,161."
Total (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah I work in engineering and starting salary expectations were similarly overinflated. These sort of claims mean nothing without a breakdown of what the averages are in different states and cities, starting salaries can easily vary by at least $20k depending on location.
Re:Total (Score:5, Informative)
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
Lets see a breakdown that calculates geographical cost of living and hourly wages (rather than salary). $100k isn't much when you're working 100 hours a week and live in silicon valley.
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Re:Total (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Employees have a vested interest in inflating these numbers. I have filled out these surveys multiple times, and I always put in about double my current salary. That way my employer thinks I am underpaid, and I am also more likely to get the free magazine subscription that the survey is supposed to qualify me for.
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And that exposes the problem with big data/analytics:
Errors, false positives, and bias grows 1:1 as the larger and fresher (more recent) datasets become. Until the big data tool can filter out & break this pattern, the big data answers of today are not telling the full story.
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I tell recruiters not to contact me with anything under any 30% over the salary I'd accept. The job adverts always give a ridiculous spec in the expectation that they will use it to haggle you down, so I start high and sometimes get lucky.
Re:Total (Score:5, Informative)
This is pretty common in insane cost-of-living places like the CA Bay Area. I finished my BSCS in December and am making 108k now. I had just under 3.5 GPA at a state school and a couple of good internships, so it's not too hard. Though that salary isn't even enough to buy a house here.
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Drawbacks are that you have to continue living like you did in college. It's worth it to some people.
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That's completely ridiculous. $108K is more than enough to buy a house in the SF Bay Area... You just have to be "willing" (put in quotes since it's no problem) to live in suburbia.
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EE grad here though. My internships (and the ones my peers landed) all paid fairly well.
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I always thought unpaid internships were relegated to liberal arts students ..?
Unpaid internships are illegal in the United States. They are a blatant violation of minimum wages laws. In the past, a few companies got away with it, by claiming the internships were purely education, and didn't involve any work. But that loophole was effectively closed more than a decade ago. If you worked an unpaid internship, you likely have the right to demand full retroactive back pay, if you even so much as fetched your boss a cup of coffee.
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I always thought unpaid internships were relegated to liberal arts students ..?
Unpaid internships are illegal in the United States. They are a blatant violation of minimum wages laws. In the past, a few companies got away with it, by claiming the internships were purely education, and didn't involve any work. But that loophole was effectively closed more than a decade ago. If you worked an unpaid internship, you likely have the right to demand full retroactive back pay, if you even so much as fetched your boss a cup of coffee.
According to the Department of Labor [dol.gov], your statement is wrong. I agree that unpaid internships SHOULD be illegal, but there are circumstances in which they are allowed.
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According to the Department of Labor [dol.gov], your statement is wrong.
According to your reference, my statement is correct. Read the "six criteria". Unpaid internships are illegal, if the intern does any actual work. Twenty years ago, this was not strictly enforced. Today it is. You can legally provide pure education to a student, with no actual work whatsoever, but that is not what an "internship" means to anyone.
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Re:Total (Score:4, Informative)
No engineering intern makes 0. The law is that an intern can only be unpaid if they do no work relating to the company. For example, an unpaid intern at an advertising company can sit in on meetings and bring coffee, but they can't draw an ad or write copy. If they do, they have to be paid. An unpaid intern at a software company wouldn't be able to write source code. SO basically worthless. So engineering interns get paid, just a lot less. Generally a good chunk more than minimum wage though, as there is competition for interns.
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So in the US interns are basically waiters, bringing you coffee, and hoping to absorb some knowledge and experience by observing you work. Like a student and a zen master, except that the student is working at Starbucks for free.
I hear such things are becoming more common in the UK too. I'm kinda glad I'm not that age now.
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Totally not bullshit out here in California, ESPECIALLY in the bay area.
I just graduated and I'm making $100k at Citrix Systems in Goleta, CA as a Software Engineer 1
That's about as high as you can get here in the Santa Barbara area out of school.
Everyone I know from classes that went to the bay area are making over $100k out of school.
In Other News (Score:2)
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Wow, That's only 50K less than what I make--and I've been in the s/w field since 1995.
And it's only 100k more than I make and I have been in the s/w field since 1989. Aren't statistics wonderful?
Of course, I started out at $36k and have made as much as $180k and recently made about $85k(with 27 years of experience) but was let go because the company thought my salary was too high.
geography is key (Score:4, Insightful)
Must be Silicon Valley (Score:3, Interesting)
...where they need $100k just to keep your head above water. The cost of living is ridiculous over there.
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This is very much true - I eked out a living in California and shared a cramped apartment. Took a pay cut to move back to the Midwest (where my family is from), bought a house and almost have it paid off. The first couple of years I had a house-mate, but after my salary started skyrocketing I stopped sharing until I met my wife-to-be (and now wife).
Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales (Score:2)
New Hampshire Doesn't Have Income or Sales Taxes (Score:2)
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Well, you have *some* income tax..
From http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/05/05/the-5-states-with-no-sales-tax/ [dailyfinance.com]
Wow, usually interest & dividend income is what has a LOWER tax rate..
But still, how does the state pay for things, with low income tax and no sales tax?
Plus, you've got snow in the winter.. I like the weather here better.
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No, the difference is probably way more than $40k cost of living. I live in a low cost medium-sized city (Charlotte). I have a 1200sqft condo less than 20 minutes from downtown, less than 20 minutes from work, and the best school district in the city. My condo was $120k at the peak of the housing boom brand spanking new. Most houses of 2000-3000sqft range from $250k to $500k depending on quality. You're lucky to find equivalent housing in an equivalent area in SV/SF 3 times that price, unless you're al
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Exactly. What's the added value of living 20 minutes from downtown and 20 minutes from work? I live in a similar situation. I bike 15-20 minutes to get to work, and I can walk 5 minutes from my house to pick up groceries. My house was 200K. My life is pretty stress free and I'm glad I don't have to spend 45+ minutes each way commuting to work.
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Not to mention compensation isn't always just in pay, especially when talking about Silicon Valley. A friend of mine moved from the Midwest to California because he was an expert on a proprietary system after the other expert in the world died of a heart attack. They bought him a "modest" million-and-a-half dollar house comparable to the one he lived in before (no more than $100000 - he sold about the time I bought and we had comparable houses) and gave him a million dollar signing bonus if he stayed on for
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Coincidentally, I read an article [taxfoundation.org] today about The Tax Foundation calculating how much real money someone would have if you gave them $100 based on the national average. In other words, 100 "National Average Dollars" would buy you $111.61 worth of stuff in Ohio, but only $86.73 worth of stuff in New York (where I live).
Using this, someone with a $100,000 salary in California would be making 112,296 "National Average Dollars" which would buy you 128,197 worth of stuff in South Dakota. To put it another way,
Re:Must be Silicon Valley (Score:5, Interesting)
Alex takes a job in San Francisco and is making $100K. He buys a house at 5x his salary ($500K) and lives in it for 30 years until the mortgage is paid off.
Bob takes a job in the midwest and is making $50K. He buys a house at 5x his salary ($250K) and lives in it for 30 years until the mortgage is paid off.
After 30 years, both Alex and Bob sell their houses and move to Florida. Both houses have doubled twice in those 30 years (look at the price of houses in 1985 and don't you wish had bought back then). Alex comes to Florida with $2M, Bob comes to Florida with $1M. So who is the winner, the one that lived in the low cost area or the one in a high cost area.
My point is that those in high cost of living areas are compensated for it and win in the long run.
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My point is that Mike was working in Miami for $90K/yr, living in a modest house worth $125K at the time.
Mike considered taking a job in Los Angeles (not even SV), but the job in LA might have offered $95K or 100K at the time - but similar houses out in a god forsaken fire trap of a canyon were $250K and up, and other neighborhoods would have extended Mike's workday by 2 hours or more with commute hour traffic, while charging similar ($250K+ ish) prices for the houses. Silicon Valley might have been paying
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Maybe it includes at lot of 30 something's who went back to school. I made a good deal into 6 figures because I've been in my field for 15+ years. I'm just now going to school because I've always wanted the related degree. So when I graduate my 'first job after college' will be over 100k.
Undergrad only? (Score:5, Insightful)
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In 2001 I got my undergrad CS degree. I started at 70K in San Diego. It wasn't uncommon to make mid 60s 14 years ago. That its over 100K now in the Valley is absolutely no surprise. Even in rural areas under 60K for a CS degree out of college is insultingly low.
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I was $55k right out of college 13 years ago. Those were, frankly, the easy jobs to get too.
Re:Undergrad only? (Score:5, Informative)
All of the numbers in this article are very believable.
I have a BS degree from the University of Nebraska. And not the prestigious Raikes school, but the normal old pre-Raikes degree program.
After a summer internship, I got an offer from McDonnel Douglas for 48k.
My offer from Microsoft was more like the 60k figure. I took that one, because it didn't involve living in St. Louis.
The year: 2000
So, 60k to start right out of college was a going rate for top-tier companies... fifteen years ago.
Some companies paid much more, and sometimes that was a company decision, and sometimes it was a reality of where the position was located. For instance, before I had even finished my degree, I was recruited for a position with a 99k starting salary. That firm, however, was in NYC. When you adjust for NYC cost of living, it's not such an eye-popping number.
Subsequent to these numbers from 15 years ago, I have been involved in lots of hiring at Microsoft in the years I've been here.
Starting salaries have adjusted upward significantly since I was hired.
If you can score an engineering position with a top software/services company like Microsoft, you will be paid exceptionally well. For someone fresh out of college, there is just an obscene amount of money on the table.
Different companies target different spots in the industry pay curve. Microsoft by no means targets the top of the salary scale, but neither do we target the bottom. At times, Microsoft has been seen as, to put it mildly, "pretty uncool". At times, there has been lots of startup money and equity available for top quality grads to go after.
In those time periods, Microsoft has to offer more money to continue to attract new talent.
If you want to work at a company where lots of people want to work (e.g. a games company, or SpaceX), those organizations don't have to compete as much with offer packages, since their brands have a high intrinsic draw.
While I don't know what a Netflix offer package is like, Netflix states that their policy is to pay very high wages - the wage they'd be willing to pay to keep someone excellent who wanted to leave.
Finally, it's important to consider the type of organization you're looking at joining. Do they do software/IT, or is that a cost of doing business for them? If a company is in the business of selling shoes, but has an unavoidable need for software engineers, they're going to treat software engineers as a cost of doing business.
If a company is in the business of building software, they're going to think differently about compensation and retention.
Finally, companies that aren't well established players in the software space can have difficulty making big offer packages. At times in my career, I've been frustrated and have looked elsewhere, and the smaller, less profitable companies I've spoken with are offering tens of thousands lower than what I was already making.... making the friction of leaving financially tremendous.
(my personal financial plan is to expect a 50% paycut when something happens to my MSFT employment)
In summary, I have no problem believing the numbers. Top quality CS people at top quality organizations are paid outrageously well.
However, I get that lots of people are expressing disbelief. Let's talk about why that may be. The survey data could be skewed by multiple factors:
- the locale of the person responding
- the self-selection bias of the person responding (e.g. are people happy with their comp more likely to fill out a survey?)
- the kind of organization the survey respondants work for...
If you surveyed internal apps developers at regional insurance offices, in the Midwest, you would get a different picture from a survey of facebook engineers...
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2 years ago fresh out of undergrad with 3 internships during school summers got me started at $70k a year in Lansing Michigan.
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70k was my salary 14 years ago fresh out of school, with no internships. Although I did have a good GPA (3.3ish I think) from a top 10 school (UIUC). And it was San Diego, which is lower than NYC/SF, but higher than a lot of other cities. But your scale is totally off, 100K in the valley sounds about right. Maybe even low.
wage inequality (Score:3, Funny)
This is why there is a major push to get the H1B program expanded and more women into CS. To drive down salaries. H1Bs can be abused by their employers at will(indentured servants anyone?) If anyone thinks that the gender pay gap is going to go away by more women getting into CS they're nuts. What's going to happen is, more women will get into CS related jobs as employers know they can get away with paying women 20% less.
So..there is some food for thought for you....
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Basically, I've encountered two classes of H1-Bs:
-Folks who are exceedingly good at what they do and are sought out by name. They are by no means cheaper, but a company has to do H1-B to get them.
-Folks who are cheaper and held hostage to their circumstances.
I think across the industry the latter is at least somewhat more common (it's the simplest explanation for the high volume of H1-B requests from specific companies, it's unlikely one company would need the former case by the hundreds). However this si
only ~ 300 CS students in the study (Score:2, Insightful)
of the thousands of students in the poll... only about 350 were CS majors. Makes it kinda easy to have a skewed perspective.
Neither article talks about LOCATION (Score:5, Informative)
$150k in Silicon Valley = $90k in a more modest location... (adjusted for the cost of living in the area)
My $0.02 CDN.
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Or maybe you worked for well under the average? The numbers seem to fit with my experience. (I have worked in multiple locations and have been on the hiring end of things)
I hope they realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope all these CS graduates making this kind of money right out of college realize the kind of rarefied strata that they are in.
More than half of all people on the country make less than half of their starting salaries.
I see so much flippancy from some people here in Slashdot who don't seem to realize the kind of money that most people in this country have to live on.
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~$250K is the "new" true starting 6-figure income
$100K isn't sh*t nowadays (eg. IC physical design jobs have been hovering around $100K since 2000. Don't tell me inflation has not taken its toll in the last decade and a half)
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I mean flippant in the sense that in various discussions people get blamed for not doing things to prevent their own problems, when those things presume a level of income that most people simply cannot access.
For example someone here once blamed people who were suffering a supply shortage during an emergency for not keeping their pantry adequately stocked with emergency supplies, neglecting that a lot of people rent a tiny bedroom in someone else's house and don't have a pantry of their own to stock with em
Re:I hope they realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about guilt, it's about recognizing the way that other people have to live, so that when you make broad generalizations about society you don't assume that everybody has he advantages you have and dismiss the problems they suffer from lacking those advantages.
I kinda hate the way "privilege" gets thrown around a lot of the time, but this is pretty much the clearest sense of privilege here. And like all privilege, the point is not that it's bad that some people have it and they should feel guilty for it; it's bad that a lot of people don't have it, and those who do should bear in mind the different challenges that those who don't face.
Re:I hope they realize... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's where not being a leftist comes in handy. I get paid well, and don't have to feel guilty about it, nor about wanting more. And I can walk past the beggars in the subway faking disabilities or telling some sort of bogus sob story and feel nothing more than mild irritation.
s/leftist/uncaring, selfish bastard/
Dan Aris
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I don't know if you think you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I'm not talking about beggars in the subway. I'm talking about people who work 40 hours a week and then have less than $10/day left over to cover all of their expenses after they pay rent. That's about the mode standard of living in this country. The median is about twice as well off as that. The mean around twice that again, but that's because a tiny handful of people making exorbitantly more than that pulls the mean up deceivingly high.
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The part where there are lots of people who can't afford that education, who lacked the upbringing to be able o engage productively in it if they could afford it, or the security to be able to take risks and move about to pursue better-paying jobs (if they got the education to qualify for them) without losing absolutely everything if they should slip up only once, or the guidance to realize that that was a path that was available to them (if it was). A lot of smart people with plenty of potential get dumped
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(3) Had the opportunity to take those steps.
That's where the privilege comes in. Nobody is denying that hard work or ability is a factor in success, only that it is not the only factor. Opportunity is another factor, and opportunity is not equally distributed, or else we would expect success to follow the same normal distribution as ability rather than the disproportionate distribution we actually see.
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I think some of them -- the ones who went directly from the approved pre-schools to the high-ranking suburban public schools (or less likely, private schools) and college prep courses to the top colleges, did get it handed to them on a silver platter, or at least they certainly didn't notice any difficulties. This makes them easy prey for the philosophy of "privilege" (which they got fed in their
50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed (Score:5, Informative)
Our survey found that only 45.4% of the class of 2014 is currently enrolled in a full-time job meaning 54.6% of grads from last year are unemployed or underemployed (this is excluding students enrolled in graduate education).
This seems to be more noteworthy.
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Our survey found that only 45.4% of the class of 2014 is currently enrolled in a full-time job meaning 54.6% of grads from last year are unemployed or underemployed (this is excluding students enrolled in graduate education).
This seems to be more noteworthy.
Oh it is! However, it doesn't fit the desired story line so we just ignore that little issue and start arguments about minimum wage and the confederate battle flag... The number of people not working in this country is a serious issue, but none of these unemployed graduates actually get counted in the headline unemployment numbers, so the Department of Labor doesn't have to report on them and the press doesn't have to report on it.
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Obvious solution (not that anyone will do it): pay twice as many people half as much each. That would bring the incomes down into the actual median range, and eliminate the unemployment problem.
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Oh and of course you require half as much work from each of them as well, so they're still getting the same value for their labor, they just have to labor less.
Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Our survey found that only 45.4% of the class of 2014 is currently enrolled in a full-time job meaning 54.6% of grads from last year are unemployed or underemployed (this is excluding students enrolled in graduate education).
This seems to be more noteworthy.
Ah, so in fact, the average starting salary was only $50k when you factor in the salaries of the unemployed.
What kind of grads? (Score:2)
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Not in Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
I hire a lot of developers for my company, and recent grads are slotted in our "junior" role (unless they somehow had a lot of experience during university) and the starting salary is between $55-70k depending on many factors that are personal to them. I have never hired anyone out of university for $100k, and I think that is nuts. Companies should pay for quality, not ambition.
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You call a 20% drop [google.com] a little?
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I hire a lot of developers for my company, and recent grads are slotted in our "junior" role (unless they somehow had a lot of experience during university) and the starting salary is between $55-70k depending on many factors that are personal to them. I have never hired anyone out of university for $100k, and I think that is nuts. Companies should pay for quality, not ambition.
At the company I was at before, they mocked the salary expectations of graduates who came in armed with average starting salaries. The people were coming in with numbers in the $50k area. But my company was only willing to pay about $30k for a recent graduate AND they expected them to be able to hit the ground running. Most of the developers there were not getting $50k even with 7 or 8 years of experience. I was getting more like $85k, but I was one of the founders and I had 27 years of experience. Then th
Alternate title: (Score:2)
"13% of CompSci Grads Get Jobs in Silicon Valley or Redmond"
Well sort of accurate (Score:2)
I think most folks are not reading this article right. The average starting salary is $66K. Being average, it means that half the graduates are paid far less than that amount. There's no mention of location as well which varies tremendously as living costs vary. I'm paid well under that average but where I live the amount they give me is considered quite good because of low living costs. This survey also probably doesn't include the unemployed as you can't report a salary if you can't find a job which
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In Silicon Valley? (Score:2)
Yeah, a $100,000/yr. salary there is barely enough to pay the rent.
Salaries meaningless unlocalized (Score:2)
If you're in Silicon Valey or New York City, you basically can't survive without a salary over $100K. On the other hand, if you live, for example, in Ohio or anywhere in Michigan other than Troy or Detroit, you can so better on half that.
So what we really care to know is what are the salaries prorated for the local cost of living?
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Not every state is Iowa. There are lots of reasonably big cities throughout the midwest.
Columbus, OH
Cincinnati, OH
Cleveland, OH
Detroit, MI
Indianapolis, IN
Minneapolis, MN
These are just some that pop into my head. But then, you're an AC, so you don't really care about a real answer.
Potential can be incredible (Score:3)
Actually, if you're willing to take a risk and join a startup and have stock options, you can stand to gain an incredible amount. Most startups fail, but finding another job shouldn't be a problem.
What I suggest is to first find a relatively large stable corporation to work for after graduation. After 3-5 years experience, join a startup (do your research on them first of course) or a relatively new company that is planning to go public, and negotiate a nice chunk of stock options. It is likely there will be many long nights at work, but the energy and vibrancy will sustain you. Don't get married too early - if the relationship gets serious, live with each other for at least two years, and get a prenup.
Best area for this sort of lifestyle is still the US west coast, home of the venture capitalists.
But as another poster noted, it helps to have a certain love for this field that extends into your personal life - technologies evolve quickly enough that you should be constantly learning. From my fifteen years plus experience as a software engineer, there are very few people who have this sort of passion. Most prefer to settle into doing the same thing day in day out - their priorities shift elsewhere like to their families - the good news is that most larger companies need people like that, and still pay a decent salary.
Factor in cost of living (Score:2)
$100K in California, equates to around $5.5k in hand (for a single person) per month. 1 BHK apartments are going around $2.5K per month in Mountain view.. much much higher in SF. $500 goes for your car payments. A new grad would probably try to pay off his education loan off, so can take around $1k per month out for that.
Since bay area has a higher population of immigrants, you can assume that he is sending some share of the remaining money to his parents in his home country.
$100K is not a lot in SF Bay are
how low am I? (Score:2)
The "B" word (Score:2)
There has been a lot of talk of another tech bubble. A lot of money is going into a lot of silly startups.
Before the other bubbles, there was a lot of speculation about "are we in a bubble"? About 2/3 the time the conclusion was "no", which turned out to be wrong.
But on the flip side there has been speculation of a college loan bubble going on for several years, but we've yet to see the popping. But maybe a tech burst would also trigger a loan bubble burst as graduates couldn't pay off their loans.
Caveat Em
Re:People are overpaid in the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta cover the prices. The rest of the world is underpaid. Nobody should ever have to work more than an hour to buy a case of decent beer.
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Well, apparently there's money to be made in products that people can use worldwide.
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
If 3 mediocre software engineers could match the capabilities of one good one, I'm sure we'd see more application of that principle outside of government contracting (cost-plus) work.
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Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?
No. The Mythical Man Month [wikipedia.org] was published forty years ago. Even then, it was clear that the best programmers were ten times more productive than an average programmer. Bad programmers have negative productivity, since the cost of correcting their errors is more than the value of what they produce.
Write'n code ain't like digging ditches.
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Racism?
More often than not, those people are not as good as you are, because they haven't had as good an education, and:
- they don't speak English as well as you do
- they live in a different time zone
- their culture is different, as in "Everything is OK!" when actually it's not
- they are not as settled and dependable, and you will be working with a different person every 4 months
- their country can be invaded by Russia
Okay, the last one is perhaps unlikely, but it has happened at least twice in the last 8 y
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See title
People are overpaid everywhere. A lot of people are not, including most Americans.
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What do you mean doesn't get them much in terms of housing? Yeah, rent in the bay are is high, but 2500 get's you a 3-4 bed house in the east bay, you can live quite comfortably, that's 40-50% of your net salary, which is high, but you don't have many other expenses, silicon valley companies feed you, offer transportation, etc etc.
And this doesn't include stock, and may or may not include the bonus, so it's not that bad. And it can only go up from there, 3-4 years in and you can easily be earning a base sal
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rent in the bay are is high, but 2500 get's you a 3-4 bed house in the east bay
You're missing the big picture of real estate: Equity.
When you pay into a mortgage you can sell the house or borrow against the equity. When you pay rent, you build someone else's equity for them. This person already has enough wealth to buy to pay the insane prices of houses in Silicon Valley. So the rich person is getting richer, and the poor person is going nowhere.
but you don't have many other expenses, silicon valley comp
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Equity doesn't matter nearly as much as you think, especially illiquid equity. Here's the real math.
If you rent, you pay X per month. You may have renters insurance of Y. So your monthly cost is X+Y. This entire amount is lost.
If you own, you pay A per month in principal, B per month in interest, C per month in real estate taxes, D per month in utilities (things like garbage and sometimes water are usually rolled into rent), and E per month in maintenance. B+C+D+E is lost.
If B+C+D+E >= X+Y you shoul
Re:Salary vs. cost of living? (Score:5, Informative)
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Until rents go up.
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For contrast, I had a minimum mortgage payment of 850/month on a 3,000 square foot house, had enough extra to pay it all off in 8 years. It's a fair point that $66k/yr in most areas easily beats $100k/year in SV. That's one thing if you really *want* to live in Silicon Valley, but if you move there because of a better job opportunity and didn't particularly care about being in SV specifically, you are probably making the wrong move.
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Now I'm not criticizing you here, I want to be clear about that. If you're choosing to live a relatively modest lifestyle so that you can have the convenienc
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But you know what, dude? Kudos. You're living (presu
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Right off the bat?
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Well, if $150k in Silicon Valley is "Good", then YES: 100K in Silicon Valley would actually be an "entry level CS salary"
(as scary as that is, being equivalent to the $50-77k we're used to for the same entry level CS job here in Canada)
Consider that a nice 1 bedroom condo in downtown Toronto might go for $400k
The same size of Condo would be priced at $900k in San Mateo.
Salaries for the same job scale with the cost of living (although not a perfect 1:1)