Expected New Grad Salary

@ucbalumnus Ya the company has generous benefits including multiple health plans, health savings accounts, 401k plus up to 8% match, life insurance, and tuition reimbursement. There is also a bonus plan for employees that are below the manager/exec level.

SOLD! Congrats!

Sounds great! Hope some of this rubs off on my son 2 years from now… Lol…
Congratulations on your new job.

Congratulations! Those things add a lot of $ to the base salary, for sure. Some you will use and some you won’t, but they have significant value.

@10s4life Congratulations! Well done!

As a retired engineering manager who hired many a college grad, it usually doesn’t pay to negotiate your starting salary as a new grad in a big company. Maybe in a small company it would be OK. The big company will be hiring many new grads and will have a set scale typically based on your school and whatever experience (internships, etc.) you have. My company wouldn’t want to budge off their scale as it would put the other offers out of balance.

Some new grads would try to negotiate and they would usually get the “take it or leave it” response. We would get many more well qualified candidates than we had job openings, so one person not accepting an offer wasn’t a big deal. Even if the person then accepted the offer, it set a real bad tone for the hiring manager (i.e. me).

You have to put the offer in perspective. It sounds like a great offer.

Once you start working, most companies have a “pay for performance” type of raise system. We would rank and rate all employees and compare that to their pay. If you are under paid, you get a bigger raise; overpaid and your raise could be zero. So even if you negotiated a higher starting salary, it would wash out over time.

Experienced engineers is a whole different game for your starting salary.

@HPuck35 Great advice, thank you!

I can’t comment on EE major, but CS new grads do negotiate with large companies. Some companies have standard offers but others will offer compensation within a range and it’s negotiable. Others will match an offer from another company. It all depends how much they want you. Also it’s very early to commit to an offer for 2020 graduate. I hope they gave you enough time to think. Glassdoor seems to be on a lower side. The offer my DD got was 40% higher then average on Glassdoor. My DD is using site called teamblind to get more accurate information. Please also consider COL expenses.

Yes, Cost of Living is a huge factor.

CS/SE salaries are completely separate from all other engineering salaries. They are commanding a nice premium right now. It’s nice while it lasts, but because it’s easily outsourced, it probably won’t.

Outsourcing, or global competition, is here to stay and there will always be peaks and valleys in hiring of all types. S is experiencing, first hand, the premiums being offered in specific CS fields that even make living in SV attractive (in spite of the expense). As long at the US remains a leader in innovation there will be demand for skilled CS/SE types. Run-rate tasks are easy to outsource - innovation and bleeding edge development are hard to export. As long as the tech business environment in the US remains attractive all will be good.

CS runs a gamut, ranging from the really pedestrian to the truly cutting-edge. Just like everything else, the vast majority won’t be on the cutting-edge. Their jobs could eventually be outsourced, or more likely, automated away by the cutting-edge technologies themselves. The supply-demand imbalance, currently in favor of demand, will likely tip in the other direction in a not-too-distant future as more students chase their CS dreams.

So what should students entering or attending college do? A couple of suggestions:

  • Don't just take the easiest classes to get your CS/SE degree, take the hardest.
  • Dive into undergrad research as a way to get exposed to cutting edge work. As you learn more about what is at the cutting edge, adjust your classes to build your skills in those areas.
  • Seek out summer internships not just to have a job, but to gain experience in non-run-rate skills.

Doesn’t cutting edge involve a certain degree of creativity and can that be easily cultivated or is it more of a gift?

One needs all of the following:

  1. giftedness;
  2. passion and hard work; and
  3. a little bit of luck.

Originating a cutting edge idea requires all the above. However, positioning yourself to be able to apply the “cutting edge” to the real world is also valuable. For example, if you consider CS right now, just about every skill is in demand. However, within that overall environment of demand there are several skills that are in extreme demand. I think it’s always that way for just about anything come to thin of it.

Often real world projects require good teamwork, not just a cutting edge idea. Project Management / teamwork learned in STEM programs (some schools more than others) can be applied in many ways.