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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.
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.
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.
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 or NY. To boot, law isn't something offshorable, nor can one hire legions of H-1Bs to head to the courthouse. Same with plumbers, HVAC techs, and electricians. It is a humble job, but it pays the bills and is a decent living.
Yes, there are a few people who can make a living, but those tend to be the distinct exception, and tend to be more PM types than actual coders. The majority of the programmers I know end up drifting from job to job, getting shown the door after 2-3 years when their project gets offshored or their manager calls Tata or Infosys. I wouldn't recommend that type of life, unless one found a distinct niche like embedded programming that required expertise that couldn't be learned out of a CS 101 coursebook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Rightly or wrongly, doctors and lawyers have well-established blocks that effectivly bar outside competition.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
And rent is like $3000 a month for a studio apartment
I don't want to do a sig now
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.
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
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.
There are tons of unemployed and underemployed lawyers. The profession is saturated and many never work in the field.
bankruptcy for student loans is needed
....welcome to the real world. It's not so cushy.
"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
> 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 federal government.
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.
Or my vote: (d) All of the above.
Clearance jobs aren't ONLY for super top secret stuff, just handling personnel, PeopleSoft jobs even for the Feds require clearances.
SO, you don't have to worry about anything "illegal". It isn't just the three letter agencies that I was talking about above,in fact, those are a TINY part of the jobs I was talking bout with govt contracting.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So much for the law of supply and demand.
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.
"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 like it's easier for devs to make above 60k (I know a recent graduate whose first job is 60k, several mid-level devs who make about 90k and one friend with a PhD who makes 150k at Google), but it's easier for lawyers to go above 120k.
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.