13% of CompSci Grads Have Starting Salaries Over $100K

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."

Comments

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[crow_t_robot]

Bullshit. Not believing any of this till I see paystubs.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[ShanghaiBill]

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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[Anonymous Coward]

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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[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the Silicon Valley, I was paid $70k salary just out of school (undergrad), a decade ago, working for a medium-sized company (i.e. not Apple/Google). Sounds like the rest of the country is catching up with that (and Silicon Valley is getting even crazier).

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[thinkwaitfast]

But it's enough to buy a few houses in less costly places and retire in a few years to a decade on rental income. At least this is what a few people I know did.
Drawbacks are that you have to continue living like you did in college. It's worth it to some people.

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[Anonymous Coward]

West coast Citrix? So you joined the dark side....

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[knightghost]

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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[Ryan McLaughlin]

I graduated from college in 2004 and my starting salary was $50,000. With inflation I could definitely see it at $65,000 today. In some of the bigger cities with bigger companies where cost of living is crazy high I can see high starting salaries. I hear that stock trading companies pay crazy high salaries to their developers.

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[Bengie]

"Average" is kind of useless when you have a large variety that are directly dependent on the local market. I think a better metric would be what percentile the wage is relative to the local economy of where the job is located. Fresh out of college, I had a lot of jobs to choose from, all at or above the median household wage for the city it was located.

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[lq_x_pl]

I always thought unpaid internships were relegated to liberal arts students ..?

EE grad here though. My internships (and the ones my peers landed) all paid fairly well.

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[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt. "Overtime Exempt" is zombie food.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Not believing any of this till I see paystubs.

20% of survey respondents were California. As mentioned below, only 346 CS students responded and only 58% of the survey respondents HAVE salaries, so the "13% of CS majors with a salary over 100K" is .... Maybe 26 people. Show me the 26 paystubs and I'll believe.

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[Bengie]

We have to pay interns to attract them. We also need to have enough work to keep them busy. If we can't guarantee them enough money to have fun during the summer, we won't win them over.

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[AuMatar]

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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[Anonymous Coward]

Save your money and get the fuck out of there, get a deal on some farm property and bury a few school buses in the ground. Start a cult where you insist that you are the second coming of Christ and have to procreate with only the hottest nubile bitches. Worked for me.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, That's only 50K less than what I make--and I've been in the s/w field since 1995. And I know VPs here are making 200+ w/bonuses and options. It's like s/w salaries follow a long tail curve unless you make it to the VP level.

Something is wrong with this picture. Really.

100K in a small town? Likely if your customers are in NYC or SF. And PhDs start in 80-100K range so I'm sure it includes them as "grads". Heck 40yr old CS grads from University of Phoenix are likely included.

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[recharged95]

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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[ShanghaiBill]

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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[Anonymous Coward]

Still waiting for mine. Can't seem to get a job after getting my CS degree, what is worse somewhere between 50% and 75% of jobs seem to close without hire.

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[WillAffleckUW]

In the Seattle-Bellevue area "average" wage is driven up by a lot of senior execs pretending to be programmers. Median salary for actual starting employees not counting benefits is what matters, and what you get taxed on.

Just because Bill Gates makes $20 billion doesn't make me a millionaire (even if I am).

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[Anonymous Coward]

What about Student Teachers?

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[tompaulco]

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, 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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[mattack2]

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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[tompaulco]

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.

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[AmiMoJo]

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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[AuMatar]

If they're free. Most of them are paid, then they can do work. Pay for an engineering intern is actually pretty good- the firms want to recruit the better ones.

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[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's right. 108k after taxes is about 55-65k. Auto insurance is huge - guessing about 3-4k year.
His disposable income isn't that much to afford to carry a morgage + health insurance @6-10k year.
 

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[Anonymous Coward]

lol you're an idiot.

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[ShanghaiBill]

According to the Department of Labor, 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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[imboboage0]

I find this point interesting - I was set to graduate in 2012 (Mech Engineering, 3 years in) and many of my peers took unpaid internships. Coming from a family that scraped to get by, I could never wrap my head around why you would WANT to get experience from some asshole who won't even pay you for your time. My time is worth money, because I make myself useful to have around. Fetching coffee is not a good use of my skills and I'd certainly walk away in a heartbeat.

Side note: I now work as an auto tech and inspector, making more money than most people I know, with a job that is in demand.

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[tompaulco]

According to the Department of Labor, 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.

So do all the media companies have to redefine what "actual work" means? They seem to be the most offensive industry as far as sheer volume of unpaid internships.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Then move somewhere cheaper and stop bitching about things you can change if you only put your mind to it. The world is not fair. All men are not created equal. Net contributors to society should not have to pay for the net consumers of society. We are in the midst of the "entitlement" generation who are slowly but surely driving the country into the ground. Personal responsibility and making sacrifices in life are non-existent. Standing around bitching and moaning about only making $108K will change nothing. And for all the people in this thread complaining about inflated salary surveys you must not be very good IT professionals. There are millions of opportunities for programmers and techs in all disciplines. If you don't pigeon hole yourself with narrow skill sets and unwilling to consider changing geographical locations you can succeed.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The law is that an intern can only be unpaid if they do no work relating to the company.

That's not right. An intern can only be unpaid IF they are being given experience related to the field. That's the point of the internship - to be paid in experience. If all you do for an engineering internship is get coffee, then that company is breaking the law.

Internships can't be used as an excuse not to pay a normal employee, but the idea that they can in no way contribute to the functioning of the company or its products is an overstatement.

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[AuMatar]

Free interns aren't allowed to displace paid workers. That means they cannot do anything material for the company. An intern at a software company cannot write software, unless he's a paid intern.

Of course that's why unpaid internships are pretty much non-existent these days.

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[Anonymous Coward]

So engineering interns get paid, just a lot less.

When I worked at a place with interns (2005-2008), they were paid comparably to me, about $6000 per month. I'm not sure they got benefits though, and they certainly didn't get stock or other bonuses.

Of course, part of it was simply that our interns were auditioning for full time jobs after graduation. Paying out $20,000 in salary is nothing if it gives you enough time to really evaluate the candidate in a way that other employers can't match.

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[serviscope_minor]

I hear such things are becoming more common in the UK too.

In the tech industry it still seems to be business as usual: most internships I've heard of are paid. There's probably some skeezy companies that try to get away without it (though you have to be careful to be on the right side of the law), but many use them as an extended job interview.

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[AmiMoJo]

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.

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[cthulhu11]

Yet MSFT is documented as paying fresh code monkeys 100k, AMZN too

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

On the other hand here in the Midwest if I had started at that salary 4 years ago I could have bought my house cash rather than have a mortgage.

People are overpaid in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

See title

Re:People are overpaid in the USA

[fustakrakich]

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.

Re:People are overpaid in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

You're basically defining a job as any activity an hour of which is worth a case of decent beer. Unfortunately, then, some activities that people call "jobs" are not, by your definition, actually jobs.

In other words... IF YOU WANT A CASE OF DECENT BEER, THEN DO SOMETHING ELSE WITH YOUR TIME!

Re:People are overpaid in the USA

[kthreadd]

See title

People are overpaid everywhere. A lot of people are not, including most Americans.

Re:People are overpaid in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

You can stay in your third-world nation and keep your uninformed opinions to yourself.

To be certain, there is a lot of easy money flying around in the U.S. due to stupid monetary policies that gooses some wages excessively.

However, American wages are higher than third-world wages because we deserve higher wages. For those American companies and industries that can stand up and excel against the race-to-zero mind sets of companies in third world nations, it takes workers with a skill set typically not present in the third world.

If it's so easy to do what U.S. workers have done, countries like India and China would have much stronger economies and much more dominant products on the international market than they do. No person of wealth is anxious to buy the latest product from China or India.

geography is key

[swan5566]

Where are these jobs? Silicon Valley? A small town in the Midwest?

Re:geography is key

[FictionPimp]

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.

Re:geography is key

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, in my area and the areas I'm looking to move, you're lucky if you manage to get to $100k after a decade of experience. All the entry level CS positions pay $30-40k.

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

in other news, 80% of 12 year olds have totally gotten to third base

Undergrad only?

[assantisz]

Are they talking about undergrads or did they include graduate students and PhD graduates as well? I really doubt that somebody fresh from college with an undergrad degree can make mid $60k right off the bat.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft,Amazon,Google,Symantec,Intel,Nvidia off the top of my head pay in this range to fresh undergrads I think

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend with just an undergrad who claims he's making >$100k at Amazon.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, when I got my Bachelor's in CS 10 years ago, median was $50K. Got my Master's in CS and got a bump to $84, but that was almost 5 years later and more professional experience. Another 5 years and I'm still not quite north of 100K.

FWIW, I'd be "other" in the OMB pay scales... that is, NOT in CA/DC or any place like that.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really doubt that somebody fresh from college with an undergrad degree can make mid $60k right off the bat.

Mid $60k doesn't sound like an absurd number, but $70k seems unlikely even if the person was cruising out of undergrad at a mean 3.7 and an internship or two. But then at that point, it goes back to being location dependent because you could be making $80k in NYC where, post-expenses you have as much money leftover as someone living in a cheaper, suburban area making $55k simply because the cost of living is higher.

Re:Undergrad only?

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I graduated in Virginia Tech CS in 09, all of the salaries I got offered or knew other people took were in the 60-80 range. 66 actually seems kind of low.

Re:Undergrad only?

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the SV, I wouldn't even talk to a freshout with a BSc in CS who would accept mid $60K for for a software developer position (assuming I'm not granting very lucrative stock options in a Series A/B private company to offset the low salary of course). Someone who would accept that is either incompetent, has no pride, and/or is so bad at basic market research that I wouldn't trust them to make decisions on what to name a variable.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Junta]

I was $55k right out of college 13 years ago. Those were, frankly, the easy jobs to get too.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? I did, and I didn't bother to finish my undergrad degree. Nor am I in the Silicon Valley.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Went to Microsoft as a fresh grad (from Canada). 76K was my base salary in 2007 (Seattle area), no internships and they don't know my GPA.

Re:Undergrad only?

[bmajik]

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...

Re:Undergrad only?

[Malenx]

2 years ago fresh out of undergrad with 3 internships during school summers got me started at $70k a year in Lansing Michigan.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just graduated with a BS in CS from UCSB, and I am making $100k straight out of school as a Software Engineer for Citrix.

Nobody I know who works as an SE in CA makes less than $70k. Everyone in my class that I know of who moved to the bay area are ALL making over $100k out of undergrad.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for instance Seattle is more expensive than average but less than NYC or San Francisco. 8 years ago MS's standard offer for a new grad with no internship was in the upper 70s. Besides inflation, there was a well-publicised salary jump that happened in Microsoft (and Google and probably others) a few years back, for existing and future employees, that especially bumped the lower-end employees. Pretty sure their standard offer is a little over 100k now.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/salaries

EE there is really EE & ECE - not exactly CS, but a good approximation for salary.

Re:Undergrad only?

[AnotherSeattlePrgmr]

All of the numbers in this article are very believable.

(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.

No, you should expect your salary to go up when you leave Microsoft! There are even enough jobs here to absorb a big layoff from mr softy. I worked there for more than 10 years, and had no problem finding my next job.

I assume you are in the Seattle area if you are at Microsoft. If you are a dev, you should expect your salary to go up after you leave Microsoft. The big co job train goes between Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook in Seattle, and then there is almost every mid tier company here, plus hundreds (1000s?) of startups. I'd been at 2 of those for almost 20 years, and tried a startup that paid what I'd been making at my previous big company job (although I lost the annual stock grants that were actually worth something, and the startup had no bonus).

Now I'm heading back try a middle tier company, and I'm back in that world of high salary, plus bonus, annual 4 year stock grants. It's so much money I can hardly believe it. My new company focuses on long term hiring, they don't want to burn people out.

My spouse works in education and if you have lots of experience and a master's degree and have national board certification, you can make $90k at the top of the salary scale. We paid interns 65-75k at one of the big companies above, here in Seattle, and I'm sure new college hires make more than $90k. $90k is barely enough to buy a house, but starting teachers make in the $30's, which is barely above poverty wage in the big cities in puget sound.

Another crazy thing is I constantly meet people moving up here because the weather is so great, the traffic so much better than SF and the houses are so cheap :-)

Re:Undergrad only?

[AnotherSeattlePrgmr]

That's a great link, thanks. I always wonder how many EE people end up being devs, since it pays more and there's more demand. I know a lot of EEs who ended up as software engineers, and some of them wished they hadn't ground through all those tough EE classes and instead spent more time working on their programming. I have read in India non-CS fields lose so many engineers to the software world that there is a huge shortage of junior people, they just get sucked up into programming. I have wondered if this would happen in the US, but I haven't see it happening - there are just a lot more engineering, math etc grads here.

Re:Undergrad only?

[bmajik]

While I started in Redmond, I no longer live there. The tech job market where I live now is incomparably less developed than Seattle.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

2010 Graduated and got $63K in Louisville,KY. Also worked IT for 4 years while in college so there's that.

Re:Undergrad only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my undergrad from a college in Boston and made $72k right out the gate. And I'd say the average for my graduating class was $65k.

I had a pretty good paid Internship during college too that if it was full time would have been $40,000 and that was before I had earned the degree.

And this was in 2007. Salaries are higher now.

Anecdotally too... I'm a senior executive at a startup and we routinely higher people with no degree at all for that much if they are good coders. Never-mind an undergrad in CS. On the flip side if you can't code your Computer Science degree won't help you (even if it is a doctorate you are not getting the job).

Average is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated 6 years ago and found that the vast majority of starting jobs paid $15k-$20k less than the supposed average in my area and also required at least 2 years of experience, so I didn't even qualify. I suspect the very high starting salaries of the big tech companies are skewing the average, yet those jobs are incredibly difficult to obtain.

I'd be really surprised if this isn't still the case today.

Re:Average is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

I graduated about the same time (Dec 2008), and even with internship experience, nobody was hiring. The job fair for CS grads consisted of the Army recruiter wanting active duty enlistees, and only certain MOS types (mainly 11X) need apply.

The high salaries are usually people near retirement, were in a startup before the MBAs got in and hosed everyone behind them, or were lucky to be in good positions in the 1990s. The people entering in after 2001 tend to at best wind up with scraps unless they had a VERY lucky break.

wage inequality

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:wage inequality

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, my wife and I are H1b and are working in Silicon Valley for a tech company and earn ~135k each + (at least) 10% bonus + ~50k each in stock... my, I feel exploited

And for whoever responds that this is bullshit, do your research, this isn't even very senior jobs, we still have a lot to grow.

Re:wage inequality

[Junta]

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 situation results in some reactions that are highly offensive to those in the first category.

Re:wage inequality

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen the same exact thing. There are the H-1Bs who are true professionals/artisans. These people know what they are doing, get in, get a job done, then go onto the next thing.

Then, there are the H-1Bs who are hired on for mass quantity work, because they are cheap, loyal (it will take a LOT for them to risk deportation), and take a lot of shit. I don't blame them for being here. I blame the system that can effectively use them as strikebreakers, diluting wages.

Re:wage inequality

[AnotherSeattlePrgmr]

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 situation results in some reactions that are highly offensive to those in the first category.

Thanks for that insight on h1b. I've been a dev for 20 years and that exactly matches my experience. Many good people, good engineers, who were just not us citizens, and then occasionally I'd meet someone not so good. I do read stories about what seem to be lower level jobs in the us replaced by outside firms hiring h1-b's with massive layoffs. That's terrible and wrong. My experience working at Microsoft (left almost 10 years ago) was that we hired all the good devs we could find, and there just were enough americans. We always had 3000+ job openings. The same was true at the next giant company I worked in.

But like the recent example of California Edison replacing IT workers with H1Bs, that's wrong. Explicit replacement should be illegal. And training your replacement when you are laid off should be a fine paid to the work of 5 years salary.

Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of salary vs. cost of living. For CS majors who work in Silicon Valley, a starting salary of $100K doesn't really get them much in terms of housing, for example.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 salary of 150k. Doesn't look that bad to me.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

I make $50,000 per year and rent a 475sqf studio apartment for $1,400 in Silicon Valley. For my needs, it's perfectly fine. Then again, I'm not trying to live the American dream of having it all. A modest lifestyle can go a long way in an expensive area like Silicon Valley.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Krishnoid]

Until rents go up.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Junta]

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.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

The city of San Jose has a rent control for apartments that allow rent can to go up only 8% per year. When I leased my studio apartment ten years ago, I was making $32,000 per year and paying $800 per month in rent. Although my rent went up 57%, my income went up 64%. As long as I continue to make more money, rent isn't a problem.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Critical Facilities]

A different point of view: is renting a $1,400/month studio on $50k per year really a modest lifestyle? With even conservative estimates of your 401k contribution and benefit costs, calculations show that your monthly rent is a couple hundred bucks more than one of your paychecks, making your rent is more than 50% of your monthly take-home income.

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 convenience of living right in the heart of Silicon Valley, that's of course up to you. But, the thought did occur to me that you're not so much choosing an overall modest lifestyle as you are prioritizing where you live over other things.

I guess the point I'm making is that a truly modest lifestyle would probably be to move to a cheaper place, and save/invest more money or something to that effect.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

I pay 50% for rent, save 20% and live on 30%. IMHO, that's a modest lifestyle. I know many people in Silicon Valley who pay 50% for rent, live on 50% and spend 50% on credit cards. While those people are considered middle class, they regard me as being poor. Go figure.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

Being one of the few native Californians in the state, born and raised in Silicon Valley, I see this area as my home. I'm always amused by stories that people need $100,000+ per year to live here.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Critical Facilities]

Well, yes, compared to those folks, that is certainly more conservative. At lease your numbers are in the black. I was more pointing out that most financial advisers recommend spending no more than 25%-30% of your monthly TAKE HOME pay on rent/mortgage. Now again, there is NOTHING wrong with what your doing (and you certainly don't have to justify it to me or anyone else for that matter), I just don't know if you'd really call it modest, per se.

But you know what, dude? Kudos. You're living (presumably) debt free in one of the most expensive areas of the country on a relatively modest salary, and that is a hell of a lot better than the way a whole lot of people manage their money.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[sheetsda]

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 companies feed you, offer transportation, etc etc.

That was tried before in the coal mining towns of West Virginia. It doesn't turn out so well for the workers. See these. You're just skipping the pointless pieces of paper and instead presenting a company ID.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so you're okay with rent prices as long as someone else is paying your rent instead of you.

Gotcha. Typical California mentality.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm a renter, not a landlord. Besides, I don't live in San Francisco.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

My two children are working as computer scientists in the bay area (neither with a CS degree), making salaries commensurate with these survey results, and are getting a good deal for their housing in the bay area by living with their parents. Should I be charging them market rent?

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live near Boulder, CO and have never spent more than 25% of my take-home on housing and utilities. 50% seems insane to me.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

The house that I bought twenty years ago in SIlicon Valley when my salary was under $100k is growing more than $100k per year in value.
If you work here, you can't afford not to buy real estate: rental rates are stupidly high, and mortgage rates are stupidly low.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

A few more certifications and another job change in a few years should put me on the $100,000 per year pay rate tier. Then, for the second time ever in my lifetime, rent will be less than 50% of my take home pay.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also a native Californian from San Jose. You can definitely live on $100k if you're single or live reasonably, and have a ton of disposable income left over.

But if you want to buy a house, you're going to need a lot more than $100k -- like a couple earning $200k household income ($150k tech salary + $50k non-tech salary, or $100k each). Anything less will probably get you a house much smaller than your parents's house (which cost a lot less back then), or someplace with a 1+ hour commute from work each way.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your math. 57% of $1400 is ~$800. But if your rent went from $800 to $1400, your rent went up $600. $600 out of $800 is 75%. Your rent increased 75% you mean, right? Or did I misread something here?

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so you're okay with rent prices as long as someone else is paying your rent instead of you.

Gotcha. Typical California mentality.

As long as he earned the income he is paying the rent and no one else is. If other states were to do away with employer-employee non-competes like Cali. this issue might go away. But in Cali. you have to fight for talent. Trust me if you are willing to go a lot opportunity exists. Just gotta decide if you can make decent living at it.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

800 / 1400 = 0.57 or 57%

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 should 100% rent. Your equity will be in the form of monthly savings, which you can put into any investment you wish.

If B+C+D+E is anywhere close, you should rent. Why? Because its fucking stupid to put all of your money into a single investment. Diversification of assets is key to any investment strategy. So why put it all into one?

Worse, its illiquid. Selling real estate is hard. It takes months, and you may not get what you expect for it. Then you'll take an 8-10% cut in taxes, realtor fees, title insurance, lawyers, etc. You need an 8-10% increase in value just to break even and pay off the mortgage.

You also can't sell just part of a house. Its all or nothing. You can get a loan against principle (maybe), but that's another expense at a higher interest rate. Whereas selling stock/bonds you can cash out at any time at no penalty.

And it completely ties you to one place. YOu cannot move without taking a huge financial hit. If your local area goes into a recession, you're unable to take offers outside. If life changes and you have a long distance relationship, or you need to move back to care for a parent, or you get a job offer on the other coast you're fucked.

The only time it really makes sense to invest in real estate is when
*its for cash, no mortgage
*you have plenty of other money and won't become underliquid
*your career is over, or its a rental property.

For the vast majority of people, buying is a bad idea.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it make sense to say your rent went up 57% of your current rent?

If a candy bar sells for $1.00. And it goes up 50 cents to $1.50. Do we say it went up 33% or 50%?

Oh well, not going to argue this. I may read the replies though.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, your rent went up 75%, since it increased by $600.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just naive. Rent has gone up 2 or 3 times over the last 10 years. Meanwhile mortgage payments are flat through decades. Why did fall in real estate value result in skyrocketing rent?

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

The percent difference calculator disagrees.

http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-difference-calculator.php

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[PPalmgren]

Holy mother of god that's expensive. My condo is 3 times that size and my ENTIRE housing costs (including HOA dues, power, cable, mortgage, water) are $950/month.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, that's not the correct calculation when you say something "increased by X%". It's (NEW - OLD)/OLD. (1400 - 800)/800 = 75%.

It's less than 8% per year, though, which would've been a rent of a little over $1700. You averaged increases of ~5.76% per year. Sadly, that's still significantly faster than inflation...

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[the_humeister]

When talking about percentage increase, you have to use the starting value as the denominator, not the end value (actually your numerator isn't right either).

Rent:
$800+$600=$1400 so the actual increase is 75% ($600/$800)

Your salary:
$32,000+$18,000=$50,000 so the actual salary increase is 56% ($18,000/$32,000)

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

There were no rent increases in 2009 and 2010 after the economy cratered from the Great Recession and people started moving out from Silicon Valley. The maximum rent increase by law is 8%, which didn't always mean that the rent went up by that amount each year. The rents have gone up in recent years because the apartment complex got sold several times. Each new corporate owner felt obligated to slap on a coat of paint, list the "luxury" apartments for inflated rents, and tried to recoup their costs in the shortest amount of time.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[__aaclcg7560]

I like my numbers better. :)

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[jfisherwa]

Property taxes.

Re:Salary vs. cost of living?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the specific A.C. you replied to.

http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-difference-calculator.php
Right on that page... (Difference between V1 and V2 - Not the same as percentage change)

You want percent change, not percent difference. Try http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-change-calculator.php

This may explain when to use percent difference. https://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage-difference.html

To help understand https://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage-difference.html, let me say this. The site says, "Because there is no obvious way of choosing which value is the "reference" value." in reference to percent difference. In your case, the reference value is clear, the older value. If I'm not mistaken. I don't think I've heard of percent difference and change before today.

only ~ 300 CS students in the study

[Anonymous Coward]

of the thousands of students in the poll... only about 350 were CS majors. Makes it kinda easy to have a skewed perspective.

Re:only ~ 300 CS students in the study

[Nchantim]

of the thousands of students in the poll... only about 350 were CS majors. Makes it kinda easy to have a skewed perspective.

And only 58% of respondents had graduated [to HAVE a salary], so the number of CS salaries surveyed might be more like 200. Out of 45,000 respondents. 30% of respondents were California or New York, which may tend to inflate the reported salaries

Salaries are for luddites

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern graduates get paid with apps.

Neither article talks about LOCATION

[dav1dc]

$150k in Silicon Valley = $90k in a more modest location... (adjusted for the cost of living in the area)

My $0.02 CDN.

Re:Neither article talks about LOCATION

[newbie65536]

I started out in one of the largest cities in Alabama and my starting salary was $23,000. This author needs to do just a little bit more research before publishing.

Re:Neither article talks about LOCATION

[Anonymous Coward]

That seems really low. In Huntsville, AL, I made more than that as a co-op. In Birmingham, I started full time at $55K.

Re:Neither article talks about LOCATION

[Moses48]

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)

Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

...where they need $100k just to keep your head above water. The cost of living is ridiculous over there.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

A job that starts at $100k in Silicon Valley probably starts at $60k in the Midwest (and you'd probably get to keep more of it there because of the lower cost of living.)

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being ridiculous if you think that the difference is 40k in cost of living, you can get very decent housing in silicon valley for much less than that and many of the other costs are the same wherever your are. On top of that many silicon valley companies offset many other costs like food during the week, transportation, etc.

And the nice thing is that any additional dollar that you earn is the same wherever you are. So if I get a salary increase in the midwest of 10% on my 60k salary, it's 6k, but the same increase in SV is 10k, and my cost of living didn't change.

I'm not saying SV is great or anything, I'm not in love with this place, but it's not that bad or as bad as many people think, and I save A TON of money.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Bengie]

My federal taxes are much lower because my gross income is lower. They can deduct more than me, but it doesn't make up enough of a difference. Not to mention being able to live 5-10 minutes from work.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[PPalmgren]

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 all the way in Sacramento.

Take a look at this chart to get some perspective:
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Jason Levine]

Coincidentally, I read an article 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, to earn $100K someone in South Dakota would need to earn $87,596 "National Average Dollars" - or $24,700 less "National Average Dollars" than someone in California would need to earn.

Of course, these state figures can be misleading. While it is certainly more expensive to live in a comparably sized town in New York than South Dakota, it is less expensive to live in Upstate New York than it is to live on Long Island or New York City.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Creepy]

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).

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

To give an example of how far different the prices can be. For the amount you bought your 1200 sqft condo, I have a 2100 sqft townhome, with water, cable, trash, and landscaping rolled into the price. My friends say I overbought, but it's the neighborhood. I'm in the 3rd best neighborhood in Houston, TX. If I moved a few miles away, I could have bought the same thing for $65K (and added an extra 35 minutes of commute time per day). People flock here from California. They sell their house they have 20% equity in and buy a house three times bigger with 50% equity. If you want, you can still buy houses on the fringes that are nice, 3500 sqft brick faces mini mansions for the low 200's (just be prepared to drive an hour each way). Houses closer to the employment centers typically go for the sub 300K range, unless you are looking at the best neighborhoods or new construction in a gentrifying area.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Creepy]

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 two years. He's been there over 20. I don't know his salary, but the last time I spoke to him he said his kids are set up for life (unlike me, he hit it huge with stock options, but I'm sure his salary isn't bad, either).

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[byteherder]

I always thought that the cost of living argument (SV vs non-SV) was bullsh*t. Let take two recent CS grads, Call them Alex and Bob.

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.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

$500K won't buy a house in SV these days; it'll buy a two-bedroom 800 sqft condo. The condo might appreciate reasonably well but then you've spent 30 years living in a tiny condo.

A real house will cost $1-1.5M and you'll be paying $1000-$1500 a month in property taxes.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[mattack2]

Umm, I'm about 15 minutes from work, in the SF Bay area. Yeah, my house was way more than your condo, but it's a house for one... (I like the idea of a condo for low maintenance reasons, not for the condo fee reasons even though I realize your retort is going to be that your condo + fee is still way way less..)

I wish I were a lot closer to work, actually.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Bender0x7D1]

Except a $250k house in the midwest is probably large, with a big yard and close to work. In San Francisco, Alex has a multi-hour commute, higher taxes on his house and not much space if he has children.

I had a 45-minute commute when I lived in Iowa because I lived in a small town about 30 miles out. However, in that town you could get a 5 bedroom, 4 bath house on 2 acres for less than $100k. So, having the same commute as SF, but saving crazy amounts of money, is an option...

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

congrats to your friend for ripping off some retards who had too much money and no sense?

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

Flawed. You forgot taxes. Bob _probably_ has a higher disposable income,
and if he's smart, won't blow it all before retirement. Citing your example, Alex
will come to Flordia with more money, but in real dollars, maybe only 100k more
than Bob.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[JoeMerchant]

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 $125K for the same position at the time, but the modest houses there were $500K and up, or a 3+ hour extension of the workday.

I have never seen Silicon Valley offering double salaries, often times they offer the same salaries that you can get in places like Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, etc.

Now, when there's a go-go bubble, the stupid money does flow in greater abundance in Silicon Valley, but if you're going to get stupid salaries from go-go bubble companies, you can get those anywhere you can find the go-go bubble companies, and they can pop up anywhere. _Some_ people get quite wealthy off of these deals, some make a nice little chunk of change off of a stock option / buyout deal, _most_ end up out of work and looking within a very short time.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[PPalmgren]

I chose a condo because I didn't want to have to deal with the upkeep of a yard, actually. Now, I kinda wish I'd chosen a house because I don't feel right getting a dog unless I have a backyard, and I'd like a garage for a workshop. The house general price per sqare foot in Charlotte ranges from $100-$200/sqft, SF is $800-1000/sqft. I was just trying to give an example for perspective, to retort the parent post. Being generous, cost of living in those kinds of locations is 4 times as high, so the higher wages (and taxes) rarely make up for it.

I'll say though, one big benefit of living in one of these expensive locations is future mobility. If you manage to suck it up and pay off significant chunks of your mortgage rather than refinancing repeatedly over a 15 year period, it allows you to move wherever you want to in the future. If I really tried I could pay off my condo in 7-8 years, but it wouldn't really add much to my mobility, because the equity would be barely a down payment in one of the expensive cities and I'd have to start all over again. I do get more room for early investing early though due to no major debt.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[byteherder]

I agree with you. If the salary doesn't make up for the difference in housing prices, it is not worth it. The housing prices in San Francisco have just gone insane. Same thing for the housing prices in Manhattan. More than outstripping the salaries that they are now paying IT workers.

The best of both worlds is to do contract work in SV but live elsewhere. You get paid like the locals but then get to go home to a house with yard.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[PPalmgren]

The problem is you're not comparing based on equivalent lifestyles but by 5x salary. The cost per square foot of housing in SF/SV area is between 5-10x most places in the country. So, in order to be equivalent to the house Bob bought for $250k, you're spending $1.25m->$2.5m on a home, not possible on Alex's income. $250k in the midwest or most smaller cities (~1m pop) buys a LOT of house.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[byteherder]

Even if the house costs $1-1.5M, if you are making the salary to afford that house, you end up ahead. The higher cost of living results in higher salaries and in the end, the person making the higher salary accumulates more assets.

Here is a simpler example, Alex and Bob both buy a car for $500/mo and both have student loans for $1000/mo. For Alex, that is only 18% of his salary. For Bob, it is 36% of his. In the end, Alex will accumulate more assets in his working life.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Except the reality is: (I live in the Bay Area and Owned a house previously out of the bay area)
Alex in SF makes $130k (Common starting total comp) total a year out of college and needs to save for 5 years to buy a 1 million dollar shack. He can live in it and be rich once he pays it off.
Bob makes $80k in the Midwest and buys a mansion immediately for $250k. Once he pays it off he'll just be middle class.

Out of college for most people, living in the Bay area doesn't make sense. However it pays off for the top 5%-10%. You can get 10% raises and stock grants equivalent of a 10% raise every year. Engineers and first level managers top out at 300-400k a year. I live in the Bay Area and while I am "house poor", I live a much higher quality of life and in the long term will be much richer.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[xiux]

My point is that those in high cost of living areas are compensated for it and win in the long run.

That's assuming salaries scale with cost of living favorably.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

Flawed. You forgot taxes.

Alex will come to Florida with less money, since the cost of living in SF is insane. The compounding on the property taxes alone is enormous! The cost of maintenance on any house is a lot more than the apartment dwellers tend to realize, and the SF house will probably be a lot older and need more work, all of which will be paid for at a highly inflated rate (even if the owner is able to do some of the work themselves: they still need to buy materials and get them to the site, all of which costs a lot more in SF).

All that lost money, along with all the other inflated expenses of living in the big city, and the requirements of supporting a government with no sense of fiscal responsibility, compounds over those 30 years.

The SF dweller will also probably be effectively many years older, and have worse health, and thus will have fewer years left to enjoy the fewer dollars they have, due to the much higher levels of stress associated with city life, and greater exposure to pollutants.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought that the cost of living argument (SV vs non-SV) was bullsh*t.

Let take two recent CS grads, Call them Alex and Bob.

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.

That assumes that their houses only appreciated over time and neither lost money in real estate bubble along the way. Also housing is just one part of the equation, everything else in California is also more expensive: food, water, electricity, etc...

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[JoeMerchant]

It's a speculative market - the people with money have snapped up the real-estate and they rent it back to the tech workers at whatever the market will bear for rents / cramped living conditions.

Re:Must be Silicon Valley

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy a $250k house when you're making 50k you're a moron. I make 120k, I have two houses, one was $100k one was $150k. I rent one of them out which pays for it. Your assumptions and the 'math' underlying it is wrong. I'm guessing you have no real life experience. Location IS everything. Cost of living can make the difference between having two nice houses and NO nice houses. This is the problem with coming up with likely scenarios, they almost never are.

Keyword

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyword: "expected"

Even better career

[FilmedInNoir]

That's nothing.
A young attractive woman can get a $250,000/yr job working as one of my whores.
I ascertained this after conducting an extensive employee survey study and some bitch slapping.

Re:Even better career

[MouseR]

Right off the bat?

Re:Even better career

[Anonymous Coward]

No - if they can take a bat they go straight to porn, and sometimes Beastie Boys songs.

Re:Even better career

[Anonymous Coward]

That is one of those jobs where a little experience is a good thing but age discrimination tends to cause income/hour to drop as the provider gets more experience (and ages). The gender gap seems to be even more pronounced in the heterosexual segment of this business than in software development.

Re:Even better career

[dav1dc]

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)

Re:Even better career

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite; you can get a 2bd/2ba 1000 sqft condo in San Mateo for $750k or so. Maybe even $600k for an older unit further from downtown.

I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

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.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes yes, we all feel very guilty. And I hope people making $30k a year realize how well _they_ have it compared to 90% of the world's population. And I hope 90% of the world's population realize how well _they_ have it compared to 90% of the people who lived more than 100 years ago.

It's sensible guilt all the way down!

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

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...

[russotto]

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.

Re:I hope they realize...

[danaris]

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

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

"Privilege", my ass. What part of grinding to get the technical education to be considered for an elite tech job, busting your ass to stay competitive against co-workers that are as smart or much smarter than you, and continuing to grow your technical abilities, often on your own dime, for the rest of your career is "privilege"? Though the pay is good, it's a hell of a lot of damned hard work.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

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.

The world is not divided into lazy beggars and the hard-working elite. Most of it is full of the hard-working permanent underclass with little hope of ever crawling their way into a better place in life no matter how hard they try. And even most of the statistically "wealthy" in terms of income are still not even middle class in terms of assets, still so lacking in assets that they have to borrow most of what they live on from an even smaller fraction of super-rich.

Re:I hope they realize...

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

It's not so much being flippant as it is being sad reality.
~$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)

Re:I hope they realize...

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Crap, meant to say ~$150K, maybe even closer to $200K.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

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 into their adulthoods straight into a day-to-day or month-to-month survival kind of living and never get the chance to pursue paths in life that could realize their potential.

Outcomes are the product of hard work and opportunity, and the inequality of opportunities is where privilege comes in.

Re:I hope they realize...

[jmcbain]

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.

This is not an intelligent comment. The folks who succeed in getting high-paying software jobs are not privileged. They are the ones who are (1) able to identify where the good jobs are, and (2) take the steps needed to obtain that goal. I don't consider taking the time to learn software skills as some sort of "privilege". If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

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 emergency supplies, and also don't have the leftover income to stock up on emergency supplies after they're done paying for the food they need to eat that week.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

(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.

Re:I hope they realize...

[russotto]

If you get a 100K job, it means you are good at it, not because someone handed you that job on a silver platter.

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 electives at that top college).

Then they go and assume it's because they were the right color and gender (because that's what they've been told by those professors, and because they've read and believed all the atrocity stories about how people of the wrong color and gender are treated in tech), and start trying to shove all that guilt off on the rest of us who are of similar color and gender. They make some recruits, but those of us whose life wasn't a cakewalk aren't buying it... and Eastern European immigrants (who typically didn't have it easy) _especially_ don't buy it for some reason.

Re:I hope they realize...

[russotto]

US median rent is $762 ($9144 annually). US median household income is $51,900. Which works out to $117/day after rent, not $20. Federal taxes for that group would be somewhere around 14%, state income tax varies but 6% should be slightly high, so call it 20% for taxes, now we're down to $88/day after rent and taxes. Still more than $20.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Pfhorrest]

Median household income is not the same as median personal income, it's almost twice that much. And I didn't say that the median person had $20/day to live off of, but that they made twice as much as the more typical full-time-minimum-wage person who only has $10/day to live off of; obviously, rent doesn't magically double when your income doubles, so the median person has more than double the disposable income. I was using an approximation of that median rent in my calculations (recalling it as being about $750, which you might note is for a single-bedroom apartment, so usually not being split between two income earners like you'd expect with a median household income being double the median personal income), and my own recollection of what I paid in taxes back when I was making about full-time-minimum-wage (which was about 1/6 of my income).

Someone making $7.25/hr, full time, renting a typical one-bedroom apartment, ends up with about $10/day to live off of. That's a far cry from your lazy beggar in the subway in terms of the work they do, and an equally far cry from many of the things you probably take for granted in life making an awful lot more than that. That's the kind of working poor who make up the largest demographic of Americans. And a full half of Americans make less than twice that (about 165% of it), as the median personal income is around $25k/yr. My memory of this part is less certain, but IIRC by the time you get up to the national mean personal income (i.e. GDP per capita), which is close to the same as the median household income (around $50k), you're making more than about 75% of the country.

I'm concerned that these graduates whose first real job is paying even more than that still may just not have occasion to realize just how terribly little their fellow countrymen -- the hard-working ones, not the beggars in the subway -- are making, and take for granted that anyone facing hardships they could easily overcome with that kind of income must just be some... lazy beggar in the subway, like you did.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

US median rent is $762 ($9144 annually). US median household income is $51,900. Which works out to $117/day after rent, not $20. Federal taxes for that group would be somewhere around 14%, state income tax varies but 6% should be slightly high, so call it 20% for taxes, now we're down to $88/day after rent and taxes. Still more than $20.

The gross income of China ain't bad, but I don't want to live off it on a per capita basis. What's the median household size? If its 4, your "rebuttal" to his $20 comment is "It's $24 and change" pre tax. Also, Sales tax disproportionately hits the poor. My sales tax is maybe 1% effective, people making less pay 5-10x that depending on their state and city.

So you are agreeing with his figures, and claiming he's wrong for saying them.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and? Most of those people are stupid. I got made fun of by those people too many times for reading books in school to give a shit about them.

Re:I hope they realize...

[jmcbain]

Since this report is about US students, then these students already have far more opportunity than those in foreign countries. In practical terms, here are the "opportunities" and decisions that US students have:

1. Do I spend another hour watching TV after school, or do I study?
2. Do I go out on Friday to party, or do I work on my homework?
3. Do I choose to focus on getting into college, or not?
4. Do I choose to major in a STEM field, or do I major in a humanities field?

Those are the opportunities and the decisions. Those who can obtain a high-paying software job apparently made the most with what opportunities they had and made the right choices.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok enlighten me how it is my fault. Because I grew up in a ghetto filled with drugs and criminals, house full of abusive alcoholics... Was the wrong color (white in minority filled ghettos, I swear you would think my name was whiteboy because that's what everyone called me), but somehow managed to rise above my shitty surroundings, get college education. And not in a bullshit field either, something hard that required summers of back to back calculus courses. So now I have to feel sorry for other people? Give me a fuckin break.

Re:I hope they realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

Outcomes are the product of hard work and opportunity, and the inequality of opportunities is where privilege comes in.

Having had the deck stacked against myself in nearly every possible way and having beat the odds anyway, I am not remotely sympathetic to that viewpoint. There is more than enough opportunity out there in the first world for those with the vision and drive to reach out and grab it and for those that lack those qualities, no amount of opportunity showered upon them will make a difference.

Re:I hope they realize...

[DNS-and-BIND]

The two are synonyms.

"A Communist Party that does not crush the masses is certainly not a Marxist Communist Party"
-- Deng Xiaoping

50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying to undo bad moderation. Sorry about that.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[bobbied]

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.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Pfhorrest]

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.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Pfhorrest]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this reflects the high variance in skills, native ability and interest. A substantial percentage of freshouts wouldn't earn their keep if they worked for free as they actually do net damage. I've even had experienced employees working for me (mostly pushed on me w/o my approval from internal transfers and it takes me a few months to get rid of them) that I would have given a raise to if they just promised not to come to work or log on to the dev systems.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[TooManyNames]

That statistic is for all college grads, though; not just those graduating with a CS degree. While that is noteworthy, it's not really relevant to the discussion on how CS grads are fairing.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah, when I graduated in 2002 during the recession, about half of the CS/CE grads looking for employment (as opposed to those planning to go to grad school) got jobs in the 50-70k range. The rest did not find anything in the field (unless you count data entry jobs). 3 years later, less than 65% total were employed in their chosen field. It was not a great economic time when we graduated, and those of us who did not get jobs in the field in those years were, basically, screwed. You did a few internships before you graduated? Great! Oh, three years ago? And you work where, now?

The most important thing when going to college is to carefully time your exit to a boom time for jobs. I'm kidding of course, you're going to be screwed, no matter what, now.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[tompaulco]

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.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry libtard your excuses for the unemployed grads don't hold water. The real storyline is that if those unemployed college grads wanted to work there's nothing wrong with being a janitor for a year. Work builds character.

But of course you'd rather just whine with your chardonay-sipping obamadolt friends about how the media doesn't care about them...boo hoo.

Re:50%+ Unemployed/Underemployed

[bobbied]

I think you missed the sarcasm in my voice....

What kind of grads?

[asylumx]

Bachelor's? Master's? Ph.D? All of them combined?

Re:What kind of grads?

[byteherder]

For this survey, it is refers to students graduating with a Bachelor's degree.

Re:What kind of grads?

[asylumx]

That's not the answer I expected! Thanks for the info.

65K here

[Anonymous Coward]

Top 10% of my class, 65K starting after rejecting a dozen or so 50K offers from "recruiters." I'd say I was lucky, but it was more to do with my capabilities. (This is in New Jersey)

Not in Canada

[iONiUM]

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.

Re:Not in Canada

[Fire_Wraith]

To be fair, 60-70k in most parts Canada probably goes as far or farther than 100k in the Silicon Valley area (Vancouver with its insane real estate market might be an exception). That's assuming a roughly equivalent exchange rate of course (I know it's fallen off a little in the past year or so, but as recently as 2 years ago it was roughly on par with $1CA to $1US).

Re:Not in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

> "junior"...the starting salary is between $55-70k

Even here in Seattle, that is much more than we pay. With the recent group of eleven new grads we hired, I think we're paying an average of about $30k. That's because we call them interns rather than junior developers. Most of them are pretty bad. The two new ones working for me don't even know the difference between, for example, a Map and a List. For all of them, using the command line is something they have no experience with. The past five years, I think out of the fifty+ new grads we hired, only three were worth keeping. Universities are just not teaching comp sci students how to program. Most of our interns come from Cal State schools (which have over 450,000 students, so the quality is understandably uneven), but almost as many come from the Univ of Washington which seems like it should be a good school, but it isn't.

Re:Not in Canada

[ArcadeMan]

You call a 20% drop a little?

Re:Not in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked with dozens, maybe hundreds of developers over the years the only consistent observation I can make is that education level means almost nothing in projecting the value of any particular developer. We've had some of the best and brightest prospects, from the most prestigious universities come through our organization only to watch them crash in burn or get steam-rolled by other developers who are self-taught. Experience is the only barometer from which to determine compensation.

Re:Not in Canada

[iONiUM]

My company is in Toronto. But you're right, pay is relative to area as well.

Re:Not in Canada

[tompaulco]

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 they decided they were paying too much for me and let me go as well. I heard they are trying unsuccessfully to find new developers and are not finding anybody in their price range. So they say "there are no developers out there", when all they would have to do is add another $20k to their salary and they would be getting all kinds of resumes.

Re:Not in Canada

[tompaulco]

Universities are just not teaching comp sci students how to program.

Universities are not there to teach students how to program. They are there to teach students the theory of programming. If a university student already knows a programming language upon graduation it is because a course required they learn some of it to teach a concept (such as OO) or they learned it on their own. They probably should know the difference in concept between a map and a list (should have been taught in Data Structures and Algorithms), but not necessarily how to code them.
Trade school graduates should know languages coming out, so it all depends on what you are looking for. A code monkey that can start right now, or a long term software engineer.
In today's society, of course, the answer is clear. Better a bird in the hand than 1,000 in bush. Better a 2% growth this quarter than 1000% over the next 3 years. Live for today and screw tomorrow.

Re:Not in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that goes a little too far. Universities tend to have practice labs, and tests tend to contain at least pseudocode. You might not know any *practical* programming language, but you absolutely should be able to code a map or a list in terms of some other reasonable choice of data structure or primitive. Maybe not on a whiteboard under pressure, but you should be able to do it.

Re:Not in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

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 they decided they were paying too much for me and let me go as well. I heard they are trying unsuccessfully to find new developers and are not finding anybody in their price range. So they say "there are no developers out there", when all they would have to do is add another $20k to their salary and they would be getting all kinds of resumes.

And then they complain that they need more H1Bs because they can't find any qualified local talent.

Alternate title:

[Loki_1929]

"13% of CompSci Grads Get Jobs in Silicon Valley or Redmond"

Re:Alternate title:

[Anonymous Coward]

> Redmond

Not quite. Our new round of recent grad hires are making $17/hour as SDETs here in Redmond, WA. That's a little over $35k, and they have to pay for their own benefits and are contractors. I think they average about $12 net after vacation (we subtract the cost of the time off that they want over the entire contract period, so, for example, if they want three weeks off then we subtract $0.98 per hour (yearly total of $2,040) from their hourly pay), dental insurance, health insurance, paying both parts of the FICA, etc..

Well sort of accurate

[foxalopex]

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 is a major problem for a lot of graduates in my experience.

I think a good summary is that you can make a reasonable living with a computer science education as long as you can find a job after you graduate. I dislike how the article seems to say it's an "Easy Street" job. To be good at this field, you need to have a certain love for it that extends into your personal life. I've seen some CS Majors who went in entirely thinking they would be paid well but without any of the commitment to continue learning about it. I suspect many of those poor graduates won't survive their field in the real world.

Re:Well sort of accurate

[ageoffri]

Actually since they used average we don't know the distribution. If they said median you would be correct, but with average there could be several large or small outliers that impacted the distribution.

Re:Well sort of accurate

[jmcbain]

The average starting salary is $66K. Being average, it means that half the graduates are paid far less than that amount.

The fact that you don't understand the difference between "average" and "median" closely correlates with your other statement:

I'm paid well under that average

210k here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I started at 42k

8 months later 65k

8 months later 95k

3 months later 160k

3 YEARS later 210k

Re:210k here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I should note that this is in the midwest (MN)

Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[glennrrr]

I live in New Hampshire, we don't have 10% state income tax and 10% sales tax, so no, the money you earn isn't the same.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

The money you SAVE is the same thou. Yeah, state tax affects this, but not to make up for the difference. Then again, I guess that matters to me because I don't pretend to be here forever. I can save a ton of money now and spend later somewhere cheaper. I'm definitely not going to be buying a 1.5M house over here for example.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[mattack2]

Well, you have *some* income tax..
From http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/05/05/the-5-states-with-no-sales-tax/

With the moniker "Live Free or Die," New Hampshire gives residents a double-tax break, with no sales tax and an income tax that applies only to interest and dividend income.

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.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[khallow]

But still, how does the state pay for things, with low income tax and no sales tax?

Probably by spending less. When you don't dump piles of money on things you don't need, then you can more easily pay for the things you do need.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Well we used to get by with a frugal government, that has gone by the wayside recently. Hell I hear some of our state legislators are wanting a pay raise, Not happy with the 100$ per year we pay them. http://ballotpedia.org/Comparison_of_state_legislative_salaries

We are a small state (greater Boston has more people then our state) and when My parents moved up here the town had 1 stop light. And few services. I've been alive longer then our town has had curbside trash pickup by the town. Used to have to hire someone or take it to the dump yourself.

How do we pay Massive property taxes.

Oh and state liquor stores. Witch we plant out on the highways. Seriously, turn off the highway to state liquor store and get right back on. avoid the mass state excise taxes.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably by spending less.

Probably, but not for the reason you stated. New Hampshire is small, both in size and population. Smaller states have less land and less people to spend things on, both in things you need and things you don't need.

It's the same way with tiny European countries that socialists love to point to as examples of how US as a whole could learn from.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[khallow]

Probably, but not for the reason you stated. New Hampshire is small, both in size and population. Smaller states have less land and less people to spend things on, both in things you need and things you don't need.

Sounds very comforting, but there are economies of scale to having lots of people. Most services are easier and cheaper to provide per capita in high population density environments.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds very comforting, but there are economies of scale to having lots of people.

Economies of scale is something private businesses discover via the market. but we're not talking about private businesses on the free market here.

Telling government they have lots of people just means they think they got more of other people's money to spend. This is one of the objections to federal government (hey, they can take advantage of economies of scale for the entire nation! How's that national healthcare going for ya?)

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[khallow]

Telling government they have lots of people just means they think they got more of other people's money to spend. This is one of the objections to federal government (hey, they can take advantage of economies of scale for the entire nation! How's that national healthcare going for ya?)

OK, I see where you're going with this. There's probably some such effect in a more than order of magnitude increase in size going from New Hampshire to California. But there's also a huge variation in government outcome that has nothing to do with size.

Re:Some Places Don't Have 10% Income and 10% Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you have *some* income tax..
From http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/05/05/the-5-states-with-no-sales-tax/

With the moniker "Live Free or Die," New Hampshire gives residents a double-tax break, with no sales tax and an income tax that applies only to interest and dividend income.

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.

New Hampshire resident here (happily a s/w engineer too)... high property tax, high registration fees on cars, toll roads, and some taxes on things like prepared meals.
Overall it averages out that we don't really pay much less tax than (say) neighboring Massachusetts. If you are a home owner.

The state is also, in general, very hesitant to spend any money.

For example... on a $500,000 house I pay $12,000 a year in property tax. But that $500k gets me 3000 square feet in the second largest city in the state with only 50 minutes to Boston. And I pay $600 a year on two cars worth roughly $40k.

With that said, I love living in New Hampshire! I moved here from Boston and it is so much better. In Boston I'd be lucky to buy a 50 year old two bedroom home with no yard for the same price (and that's in the suburbs). I've considered moving to California a few times but I like Boston and New Hampshire too much (I don't mind the snow... buy a snow blower).

Back to the article since...
I made $72k straight out of school in Boston after paying $80k+ in tuition and hit $100k in less than three years and Greater Boston is lower cost of living (barely) than San Fransisco. So to hear that 13% of students make over $100k doesn't seem that odd to me.

In Silicon Valley?

[NotDrWho]

Yeah, a $100,000/yr. salary there is barely enough to pay the rent.

For how long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, they may have a special hot skill right now, but how long will it stay hot before it becomes a commodity skill? They're not in college any longer, so they're not going to have the same amount of time to learn the next hot skill because they'll be working startup burnout hours. How long is that 100+k salary going to last?

Salaries meaningless unlocalized

[Theovon]

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?

New Hampshire Doesn't Have Income or Sales Taxes

[glennrrr]

Sorry forgot to point out that out in my above post.

You're at work all the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that many silicon valley companies offset many other costs like food during the week, transportation, etc.... I save A TON of money.

Of course you do because you have no life. SV companies keep you at work all the time.

For me to move to SV from metro Atlanta AND keep my lifestyle would require a minimum of $160K per year - and that's not including the fact I own a home.

But that will never happen because employers out there don't understand that I work to live. I need leisure time: tennis, swimming and other hobbies. I cannot stand sitting in front of a computer for more than 6 hours a day.

Sioux City Iowa

[Anonymous Coward]

Silicon Valley/NY salaries with fly-over state cost of living.

Downside: you're in fucking Iowa.

Re:Sioux City Iowa

[Theovon]

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

[hlee]

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.

Re:Potential can be incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'd concur with your advice about starting with a relatively stable medium or large corporation. Startups often have rampant cowboy coding and other crappy software engineering processes, exactly the kind of habits that a impressionable young graduate should not be absorbing lest they become ingrained.

It's all relative.

[goldcd]

So let's ignore prices - why is a US graduate in IT worth 100k? Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?
I'm in the UK, working with great people offshore, who are as good as me.
Only thing I can think of that justifies my salary versus my production, is racism (white guy in a decent suit) or my accompanying "Sense of privilege" in that I'll blurt out any idea that comes into my head (based upon turning up without having to have fought my way through all manner of useless numpties and have been politically-scarred) or...
I don't know. Just seems horrifically f'ed up and liable to be rightfully corrected in the near future.

Re:It's all relative.

[rwa2]

Well, apparently there's money to be made in products that people can use worldwide.
http://www.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.

Re:It's all relative.

[fustakrakich]

You can't ignore prices, unless the walls come down and they're the same everywhere. I base my salary demands on the cost of living. I use beer as the reference, because it can apply to any country where you can buy it. No matter where you are, the equivalent of one case/hour will provided for a pretty good living. And it covers for inflation automatically.

Re:It's all relative.

[ShanghaiBill]

Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?

No. The Mythical Man Month 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.

Re:It's all relative.

[allcoolnameswheretak]

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 years.

Re:It's all relative.

[Cederic]

Your 'straight out of university' grad is not ten times as productive as the average programmer.

For those rare few, maybe within a couple of years, more likely five. Not before you fucking hire them, which is when you're setting salaries.

Re:It's all relative.

[Cederic]

- their culture is different, as in "Everything is OK!" when actually it's not

I find the cultural issues are the biggest ones.

Timezones even out - the challenge of working in disparate timezones is balanced by the ability to lengthen the working day without directly impacting on the individuals involved.

Re:It's all relative.

[Anonymous Coward]

Could their job be done by 3 people elsewhere for 30k each?

No. The Mythical Man Month 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.

The same thing applies to off-shoring but to many bean counter just don't see that it doesn't make sense to ship out the work, then have us redo much of it because the quality is such crap. Maybe it can be somewhat cheaper but it definitely takes much more time than just having us do it right the first time.

Only paystub you're entitled to see is your own

[jmcbain]

This report is like any news article. You can believe it, or you can refuse to believe it. Whatever makes you feel better about your career and your salary.

Re:Only paystub you're entitled to see is your own

[Anonymous Coward]

This report is like any news article. You can believe it, or you can refuse to believe it. Whatever makes you feel better about your career and your salary.

Yes, if the Headline was "26 recent CS graduates have incomes over 100k" that would make me feel better.

By Neruos

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshyt.

If your a manager hiring juniors for $50k base starting out, you should be fired.

In Other News

[0xG]

13% of CompSci Grads are Routinely Lying in Surveys

Re: In Other News

[Anonymous Coward]

I know several people who had north of 100K for their starting jobs. Actually, a few started at around 120K. These were all on the west coast -- Seattle and San Francisco.

I started around 85K in Denver with a lower cost of living, but make just as much as them now.

Of course, I went to Carnegie Mellon, a top tier CS school, and we were all highly in demand and had great internships. Your muleage at vary, but these salaries aren't out of the realm of realistic.

Re: In Other News

[Anonymous Coward]

In Seattle, interns at Google & Microsoft made 65k two years ago, when I worked there. I am sure they make more now. 100k is possible for a new dev here. An experienced programmer should make over 150 plus bonus and hefty stock.

Factor in cost of living

[Codeyman]

$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 area.

German Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

In case anyone is interested, my European salary, converted to current USD:
I work as a Software Engineer in West Germany for a large American company, with a masters degree in CS. I
I started out making 54000$ after college.
After 5 years, I'm at about 68000$.

Things to consider:
- The German state takes a total of 40% of that money via taxes and social security.
- Due to social security, health-care, etc. being included in the tax, I really get to keep most of the remaining 60%. I pay approximately 16000$ for rent and water, power, gas. Leaving me with a net of 24800$ per year.

I *think* my salary is considered above-average for a German SW Engineer. However I still think that I'm underpaid because I'm actually very good at what I do, but I guess I earn about the same as my peers, which have on average a much lower productivity than me.

I guess that's what everyone says. But in my case, it's true. ;)

how low am I?

[rilian4]

I must be really low then. I barely make the average starting salary and I've been working for 17 years since getting my CS degree.

Re:how low am I?

[AuMatar]

You're low, on any scale. If you're way the fuck out in the boonies you should be making a good chunk more than that. If you live in an actual city, double that. And that's just salary, not equity.

Not true and not representative

[WillAffleckUW]

Nice try, but the cost of living in certain cities is what drives up salaries.

If you live in Spokane WA, you're going to get paid a LOT less than if you live in Seattle WA.

If you live in NYC or San Francisco or San Diego, same thing.

They say things like this to justify sending more H1-B visas to firms like Tata to get cheaper employees while it's the literal cost of living that's actually driving up the prices.

To someone in Podunk, Illinois, they hear this and believe it, but you can hire someone you'd pay $100k for in SF for only $26K there. And salaries done by averages tend to inflate it by adding total compensation - retirement, sick leave, vacations, health insurance, etc. So you won't clear $100k, you'll be lucky to get $60k.

The "B" word

[Tablizer]

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 Emptor.

Sounds low

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty years ago, I started a job as a computer science graduate at $40k -- and I think that was kind of low. I heard about someone taking a job in NYC for a bit over $100k.

Honestly, it doesn't sound like computer science salaries have grown much since then.

87% of Compsci grads start at less then 100K

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the humanity of it all.

big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

you can make 90-100 in Wisconsin too starting and where the houses around around 200k.

$65K? That's not much of a salary...

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You can make considerably more money operating a nail salon or a hair styling place. Seriously. And buying/building one costs a hell of a lot less than a 4-year college degree does.

Not everyone wants a house with a yard.

[Brannon]

You will never understand why people choose to live in San Francisco or Manhattan until you understand that people value different things.

Re:Not everyone wants a house with a yard.

[byteherder]

I understand why people would want to live in San Francisco or Manhattan. I used to live in Boston and Los Angeles. These cities are culturally diverse and offer a multitude of activities for everyone. What I don't understand is why someone would pay $1M for an apartment!!!

Re:Not everyone wants a house with a yard.

[JoeMerchant]

Lived in Manhattan for a month, three up in a one bedroom apartment. Actually, the overnight sleeping population of the apartment varied wildly throughout the month, some nights I was sleeping there alone, other nights we had 3 in the bedroom and 3 more on the sleeper sofa + chair in the living room. And, yeah, early 20s there's some appeal to the "social melting pot" that is a mega-city. Wouldn't want to raise a family in those conditions. What I would consider "minimal" accommodation for a family of 4 in Manhattan in those days cost 4x what a "decent" house cost in Miami. Miami has gone a little crazy on the real-estate front lately, those "decent" houses are getting close to the cost of a 3 bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but I'd still rather have cockroaches and a yard, instead of cockroaches and living in a tower with upstairs neighbors, minimal if any terrace, etc.

Equivalent lifestyles?

[Brannon]

How do you compare lifestyles between SF and suburban Chicago? What if I have a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge in SF and I go jogging through the Presidio in the morning and have lunch in Chinatown? How much does the home cost in Kansas that affords me that same lifestyle? Oh, yeah, right, infinity dollars.

As hard as this may be to believe for the suburban castle folk, there are things that weigh heavier on someone's quality of life than how many square feet (or bathrooms or garages) their home has. People are different, they care about different things.

Sounds about right

[goosesensor]

Speaking as somebody with a CS B.S. in the SV area, and with a handful of friends the same, I think this sounds about right. If anything 66k for an entry salary is a bit low. I would have expected more like 75 as an average entry salary.

What do you say to $40k?

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine graduated at the start of summer. He said he'd already gotten an offer. He's got a CS degree from eastern michigan university, I didn't ask his GPA but he was doing rather well in his classes so I can't believe it was anything less than a 3. He got offered $40k from a company in Ann Arbor, MI and told me he was going to take it. I told him he got lowballed and that he should try applying to a few more places. When I graduate I'm holding out for at least $50k in MI. (I can't move)

So do police academy graduates

[Anonymous Coward]

Starting salary for the Police Department in Campbell, CA is $105K.

meanwhile in the real world

[Osgeld]

you can take a 2 year technical course and start off at 40K and rise to 60K in 2-3 years in a place that cost half as much as the techy centers of the world

You literally just answered your own question (nt)

[Brannon]

nt

What?

[antdude]

My first salary was nowhere like that. $30K per year with a dotcom/startup company back in the late (19)90s. :(

Houses Are Money Pits

[glennrrr]

First of all, it's a bad idea to take out a 30 year mortgage. A 30 year mortgage is for someone who is buying too much house for their income. Imagine a 3rd person who buys a house for 3x their income, pays it off in 10-15 years, and then spends the remaining 15-20 years investing his housing money. (As it happens, I took out a 30 year mortgage, but refinanced it to a 10 year mortgage after 5 years). Second, you probably shouldn't expect to get twice the salary moving to SV.