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