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

Total

[crow_t_robot]

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

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

Re:Total

[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.

geography is key

[swan5566]

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

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?

[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: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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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]

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.

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

[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

[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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

In Other News

[0xG]

13% of CompSci Grads are Routinely Lying in Surveys

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.

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: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.