<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, from what I’ve heard from every veteran Prof who has taught for 20+ years, it has been quite the opposite. While it is getting more competitive to get into their respective colleges/universities…especially the elites…the level of preparation to actually tackle actual college level work has declined. </p>
<p>There’s a reason why there’s been a great increase in the number and amount of remedial classes within the last 20+…even at the elite colleges/universities…</p>
<p>Re=60
Lunch…expect big layoffs
Whatever companies find lacking in their new hires, their treatment of new hires are worse. Unbelievable they can give 30% pay reduction to become a FT employee. Then to turn around a few weeks later to give a 50% increase. Remember, you heard it first on CC. :)</p>
<p>So the average salary at your F500 company is $200K??? Have you outsourced your administrative assistants and your maintenance staff? Sounds like too many chiefs and not enough indians to me. No company should have the average that high. Even medical offices paying doctors 300k having nurses and billing experts working for less than 100K. The average salary in the country is 60K W2. Add about 18k for health insurance and 7.5 % for social security plus whatever for unemployemt insurance paid to the state. and that is about all you can chaulk up to benefits. You don’t get to count their computer. Are you passing out company cars like candy! You are talking finance so you probably are!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>At which schools is this true?</p>
<p>Berkeley is not super-elite in admissions, although it has gotten more competitive over the years, but the percentage of entering freshmen who are placed into remedial English writing courses has fallen from over 50% a few decades ago to under 10% now.</p>
<p>^^’’ Unbelievable they can give 30% pay reduction to become a FT employee’’</p>
<p>I actually don’t find that unbelievable at all. Take the converse, which I have seen in practice. Company has to let go employees for whatever reason. Company still needs an ex-employee’s skills. So, company ‘hires’ ex employee as a contract employee. The pay rate( which my company usually used) was determined by taking the ex-employees annual rate and tacking on roughly 30%. The 30% was to compensate for both EE/EE FICA/social security taxes, (which are approximately 15%–self employed need to pay both EE and ER share), medical benefits, paid time off, 401k match etc etc. If ex-employee went back to becoming a full time employee, they then would take a 30% pay reduction in rate.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So its a fully loaded cost which includes everything from health insurance (super premium / cadillac plan - i.e. you never pay a single co-pay, etc. etc.), discounts on ESPP, 401K matching, free meals / drinks, allocations for facilities costs, gym membership, allocations for transportation (i.e. we have a private shuttle / bus system for the company that all full time employees can take to / from work everyday), cel phone bills (covered for all employees), home internet (covered for all employees), tech allocations (i.e. computers, monitors, etc.), among other things. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>that is the average non-benefits comp which includes base salary, end of year bonus, and stock options and yes most of the jobs you noted above are all outsourced / contract / temp employee based none of which are considered full time employees. The average is so high because as a top-tier tech company most of our employees are developers / engineers, etc. and the competition for talent between companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook, etc. is very high. The average college hire (undergrad) has a salary of ~$80K with a bonus of 0-20% and annual stock worth $10-15K per year…so the average college hire’s total comp is ~$100K.</p>
<p>If I’d be looking for an exit plan, faster.
Stockholders, would not be pleased with these expenses, although the maybe less expensive than giving a larger pay. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The current tax laws in the US make it cheaper to buy benefits for employees than to pay employees more to buy their own benefits. Also, some benefits (disability insurance, medical insurance for the significant number of people with pre-existing conditions like asthma or diabetes) are difficult to buy individually.</p>
<p>Of course, if the employer goes too deluxe with the benefits, it may end up spending more than the value that the employees view the benefits as being worth (since not every employee will use every benefit), even after accounting for the tax distortions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some schools have - I recently reviewed class projects done by students of the same school I attended (Purdue) as part of an industry - academia program; I had taken the class myself in the mid - late 90’s. The difference in project demands and quality of student output in these 15 years was very noticeable. I do similar reports as part of my work and was very impressed with the quality and professionalism of the reports, as well as with the focus on industry practices.</p>
<p>Missscarlett, 65;</p>
<p>that is the most enlightening. We never thought of this approach. I am copying your explanation to DS. If he had known that this was the case, he would have taken the other offer on the table, and amounted to 100% more + immediate benefits, over his current reduced FT pay. Would have been in SJ area, but pay is pay, and airline fare to the PNW is frequent and affordable. </p>
<p>Thinking about this, if he found something in SJ, he could fly home 6x/yr plus 20x/yr to ski- hike in the PNW, DS would still be ahead $$ compared to his current and future situation at this company. [Ignore taxes and cost of living in CA vs WA] </p>
<p>thx.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>which is how DS sees his benefit package.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>When I was doing IT consulting back in the Stone Ages (2000-2002), it was common for contractors to have a significantly higher base rate than did employees with comparable skill sets and experience levels. Of course the contractors had no medical coverage, paid vacations, 401K contributions - and while nobody had great job security, when work got cut back, the contractors were the first ones on the street.</p>
<p>I worked a brief contract job back in 2000-ish. They converted me to full-time after the contract ran out.</p>
<p>My hourly contract rate was 80% higher than my salaried rate.</p>
<p>On top of that, I had to go through an agency, which added 50% of of my hourly rate as their fee.</p>
<p>So the company was paying 2.7x the salaried hourly rate to have me as a contractor.</p>
<p>And this was not all that unusual.</p>
<p>Thank you folks who have posted recently. I think this is beginning to make sense to LP.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>DS when he worked as a staff engineer in the grad school, at State University, discovered that there was marked difference in the student work from his highly rated undergrad and grad schools. </p>
<p>Most of the employees at his company are from the local State U, which may account for his predicament.</p>
<p>MrK,
DS is banking considerable sums of money that are nonqualified, even at the reduced pay. His retirement and investment accounts are considerable for someone of his age. Matching $$ in a 401k may be free and pretax, but that amount is small compared to what his doing now,</p>
<p>IOW, any benefit package is just that a benefit package, nice but not material to the job selection.</p>
<p>In my first job at the research labs of a major industrial concern we (the soon-to-be green card holders :-)) were a relatively tight knit community that figured out fairly quickly how to find out everyone’s salary; the labor certification process requires employers to post internally and externally the position with details AND salary…</p>
<p>So, we found out that the difference between one MS degree and two was fairly trivial, $1-2k, the difference between MS and PhD was quite substantial (20% more), and there was little premium for ‘brand name’ versus ho-hum universities. There was, of course, but in the grand scheme of things, not much. </p>
<p>Back then we also got to compare salaries with classmates across the country - found out Intel was paying in California what we were making in the Midwest with laughable cost of living… </p>
<p>The expectations, ironically, and the job requirements were drastically different. Those who went to Intel, HP, the defense and space contractors, and the like, rarely got to do serious programming from day one, or be involved with anything serious. One of my classmates literally spent his working hours qualifying standard Duracell batteries for some fighter jet project; others spent long hours writing documentation or producing busywork. They called it training :-)</p>
<p>Meanwhile, we were busy coding our brains out working to develop stuff that today would out-Google Google itself (the beauty of having money). So, the reward for us was (a) lower cost of living and good money versus California or Boston (b) better benefits (Kaiser etc were far below what we had) (c) more fun projects assuming anybody would believe what we did for a living at Big Industrial Concern Co.</p>
<p>We also had serious mentoring by the senior staff engineers, and that alone was priceless. </p>
<p>So, it is not too difficult to believe that we figured out very quickly that there was more to a company than the salary, and that everyone often adjusted their output, capability, and expectations in response to a salary offer. Today, it’s all about having THE skill, no development, no ‘fun time’ assigned to daydreaming cool ideas, etc. We had all that, and more…</p>
<p>On reviewing DS situation:</p>
<ol>
<li>DS was a direct hire from a employee referral. No agencies. </li>
<li>DS was originally offered a contractor’s status but by the end of the week, was encouraged by company to have payroll taxes withheld-they didn’t outright say he was to be a temp or probationary. He then did the W2. </li>
<li>No contractor’s paper/agreement offered. .<br></li>
<li>He accrued vacation time.
5, He received all employee benefits except medical, life, disability, 401k.</li>
<li>He worked directly with clients.</li>
<li>Mentored new hires, although he was a relatively new hire. </li>
<li>He was working at time of hire. </li>
<li>We should have assumed that he was a contractor when they didn’t give him a computer or monitor.</li>
<li>He was told that he would have a performance review after 3 months. He had to prod them for that review and eventually they agreed to have a review after a 2 month delay.</li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>Whether the benefit package is material to the job selection depends on both the benefits and the employee. For example, consider medical insurance. A young healthy man would not attach a very high value to it, since he can probably buy his own much less expensively than what the employer will buy for him (even after accounting for the tax distortion). But someone with asthma (or other uninsurable pre-existing condition), a woman who may become pregnant, or someone a few years away from the age of socialized medical insurance but needing lots of medical care sooner than that may well place a very high value on the medical insurance included in the benefit package.</p>
<p>Each person must make his/her own valuation of any offered benefits and consider that as part of the total compensation in any offer or comparison between two jobs. Other factors, like commuting costs, may also factor into compensation comparisons between two jobs. And, of course, additional taxes to pay in a contractor job would also have to be considered.</p>
<p>^I don’t disagree with you or rather I understand the facts of life; But until we have universal insurance or some type of equalization, it is better to be healthy, have your own insurances, etc, so that one can chose the opportunities be it a startup or corporate. </p>
<p>If DS had known that his position was contract and the pay was to compensate him for his own acquisition of insurances and payroll taxes, he would have done something different.</p>