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Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year
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.
67 was too high to begin with. Maybe this will help curb the visas.
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.
So all those tech company execs pressuring congress & the president that there is a shortage of developers and that they desperately need more H1Bs....
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
http://saveie6.com/
Thanks, Zuck!
1.7 percent increase, for a total of $698/month...SSI...lol
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
All those H1Bs are taking effect! No wonder the tech industry loves the prez.
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.
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.
How we have too few CS people and we need more to do the work ?
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'm a satanic clam.
> Ordinarily, rapidly falling salaries indicate a glut, not a shortage.
Yep.
I wonder though if the salary drop can be explained in part by SV reaching saturation and an increasing number of positions elsewhere? I live in the rust belt in a city where things are finally starting to pick up, but the average starting salary for a person with a CS degree here might well be 50% less than in major tech hubs.
I know a few people in debt up to their eyeballs and will be for some time. One owes $100,000 plus in student loans! Now works in manufacturing and not the white collar kind of work. Could have got the job now with a HS diploma. I think more young people need to think hard on college and determine if what they spend in a degree is worthy of paying them back sooner rather then never. Otherwise if you don't increase your earnings over a lifetime then you have actually reduced your earnings. People should also not be surprised if another recession or worse is around the corner. We have struggled through almost 7 years of recovery and a good chance another down turn could be just months to a few years away. In fact average GDP is dreadful for a market this many years into a recovery. In reality we may be seeing a very mute recovery and in turn a quicker cycle of recessions.
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 hate cold weather. (I personally prefer cold over humidity, if forced to choose.)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Only if they are stupid and do not stick together. Companies bet on someone taking the crap salary.
The pro-immigration folks have sown the wind, the rest of us shall reap the whirlwind.
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.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
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". It's pretty much mandated insurance, but gives one market-based choice of providers. It was invented by Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank (yes, such things exist, or at least used to).
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
These starting salaries look extremely inflated. Perhaps to draw more students into the programs? Or am I severely underpaid?
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.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
Well, it's STEM, not sTem.
Had to work with a CS postdoc on a science / engineering project... they were worse than useless.
That can't be said enough. I'm certainly thankful for both of those things.
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.
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.
That is all.
There is no chance that salaries are going to drop, the demand for developers is out-of-control. You can basically name your price if you're any good at all.
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.
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.
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.
Just completed a BSCS program at a state school and my median offer was 90k. Based on the anecdotal evidence of those graduating at the same time, seems like the job market is still hot here in silly valley.
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.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If your company hired some incompetent H1bs person, why are you working for a company that cannot recognize the difference between competent and incompetent programmers? Heh.. which raises the next question, under the same system, how come you were hired?
ALso, even you hire them as consultants, they have to bill the company at the prevailing wage rate. So, no, H1bs are not "cheaper". I don't buy that for a second. While it could be that some middle-man makes money off of them and they get less "in-hand pay", theres no way that they're going to bill the company at a cheaper rate. In any case, I'd rather see more H1bs come to the US and pay taxes and spend money here, than the jobs leaving the US and we get *nothing* back.
It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
Wait - this is a UNIX system! I know this!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Quoting a low unemployment rate as evidence of plentiful jobs is rather naïve. You could be correct thinking that that means every person wanting a job is being hired, but it is also just as possible, more likely IMHO, that all the positions are full. If MN has 4 IT (or 4000 for that matter) positions available and it is fully staffed then the unemployment rate in that sector will be zero. You should be using a more defensible stat to argue your case from.
The pro-immigration folks have sown the wind, the rest of us shall reap the whirlwind.
The only immigrants in tech jobs around here speak Hindi, not Spanish. None of the stupid political debates about illegal immigration in the US have any relationship to the tech sector.
Take your xenophobic racist arguments to foxnews.com, where they welcome bigots of any color, as long as they're white men.
Thank you for playing the "fuck you I got mine" card. I am sure you took advantage of every loan, grant, & scholarship program available when you went to college. But hey, now that you're at the top, you need to keep competition down so you can rest on your laurels, and so here you are campaigning against the very program that helped you get to where you are today. You old bastards always do this. You'll certainly claim that experience shows you just how wrong you were back then and that we need you to save us from certain peril. Instead of fucking us over, how about you just sit around in your hot tub full of money and worry about if you really want a Rolex or a McLaren more. Your kids are probably grown up by now, but mine are still young. I do not want them eating Gov'ment Cheese forever. HA! What am I thinking anyway? The won't quit eating the cheese because I climbed my way out of poverty- that's silly. They'll quit eating it because you bastards will cancel the Food Stamp program.
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.
Given the quality of the graduates institutions are putting out anything above 40K is too high. I'm running a kindergarten where I'm at.
I live in Minnesota, and the job sites are full of jobs. I get at least twenty recruiters emailing me each day about some new position. And, they aren't the same position.
I live in Minneapolis, and I can tell you this much - if you have half a brain, and can use something besides Windows 8, you can earn a damn fine living here in the Twin Cities. There are also a ton of non-IT jobs here as well. Better get up here before Obama gives them all away to the Somalis.
bankruptcy for student loans is needed
With everyone getting CS degrees they become more and more worthless with the increase of technology which requires less and less people. Some companies I hear are saying that people coming out of college aren't good enough and need to be beginning programming in more like elementary or middle school age.
"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
It depends on where your job is located. Come to Seattle. There are tons of job openings and no one to fill them. Almost every evening some big company has an open house, looking for devs. My little company wants to hire 30 people, tripling our size. We cannot even get people to interview. The big companies here like Amazon, Microsoft, even the local Google office all have thousands of people. They have some h1bs but thats just because there aren't enough americans. If you suck, maybe you can't find a job, but generally you just get tried of recruiters bugging you and talking to you via linked in. And I'm almost 50 years old. If you can code, you can find a job. Yes, I have experience working at some large companies, but I only have degrees from non-famous schools.
When I look at your A, B and C, I do not see how one excludes the other. This is not OR/OR, this is AND/AND.
I would also add the fact that government is there for the companies and not for the people.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I live in Minnesota and keep an eye on the new software jobs available for my own purposes... Seems like a pretty steady stream to me. Obviously not as much as a place with much larger cities, but it's pretty sufficient for the area. Everyone I know who has a CS degree or works in tech/IT has a job right now.
Or my vote: (d) All of the above.
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.
They are overpaid and EE's work harder and are smarter anyway
You're an idiot if you think recruiters represent reality. Go ahead and actually follow through with them to see what they have and you'll see the same shit jobs that everyone else is talking about. If you see low unemployment, maybe it's because everyone is stuck as a wage slave. Maybe even you. Sucker.
I make over $100/hr in this market as a Java programmer (1099 corp-to-corp). Might suck if you're a help desk person, but high level folks are cleaning up. West coast wages and midwest cost of living.
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 the vast majority of people.
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.
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.