<p>hi guys. I got selected in Amazon for SQA position. Could you please tell me how much I can negotiate on the salary + signing bonus + RSU? Shall I ask </p>
<p>$100k salary + 15k bonus + RSU?</p>
<p>I just find it so hard to believe, that a random kid with a bachelors in CS can just start at 90-95K. The average mechanical engineer PhD doesn’t get that much.</p>
<p>The silicon valley firms like Amazon, Google, etc. are competing for the same set of innovative types and are known for burning through new hires quite quickly. Something like 10% of Facebook’s new hires don’t survive past training. Unlike businesses built on more traditional models, they can’t profit by just doing the same old thing like updating last year’s car model slightly. It’s to their benefit to hire as many bright people as they can, throwing money at them, suck them dry of creative ideas, and discard the ones who don’t work out.</p>
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<p>Keep in mind that we’re not talking about just some ‘random kid’ with a BSCS, but rather the very best ones who (usually) attended the very best schools. </p>
<p>Put another way, in 2010, the salary for just the average CS graduates from Stanford was $83k, and the average from Berkeley was 77k. The MIT EECS graduates from 2009 (the last year with data) made $77k, and that includes some hardware-oriented EE graduates who make comparatively less. Hence, I think it is entirely reasonable that the better CS graduates could indeed make $90-95. </p>
<p>[Career</a> Development Center - Salary Statistics | Student Affairs](<a href=“http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads]Career”>http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads)</p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm</a></p>
<p>Personally, I think that paying top people comparatively highly is exactly as it should be, and the real problem lies with mechanical engineering (and other engineering disciplines) who refuse to do so. Sadly, star mechanical engineers do not really get paid much more than do mediocre ones, which serves as a disincentive for anybody to become a star.</p>
<p>That is very true. However, I find it interesting that Glassdoor.com reports Microsoft’s average Software Developer salary at $86k, and Software Developer in Test at $82k.</p>
<p>Perhaps their data is outdated, or flat out wrong. But if, as this thread suggests, that Microsoft starting salaries are $85k…you wonder how much you can grow from there.</p>
<p>Who knows, maybe Microsoft really is paying a huge premium for those Stanford grads, while the UCSD guys, or some other lower-ranked school, are making substantially less for the same job. I somehow doubt that is the case, but ya never know.</p>
<p>Well, another explanation is that Microsoft and other software firms may be experiencing salary inversion, where the newest employees are actually paid more than (or at least at a comparable level to) the experienced ones. But that doesn’t preclude those newer engineers from being continuing to receive raises as they progress throughout their careers.</p>
<p>As to why salary inversion would occur, one explanation is that when a job market becomes unusually hot - as in the software and especially the Web space right now - new employees will enjoy enhanced demand. New graduates are also often times precisely the employees in the best negotiating position as that’s one of the few times in your whole life where, in a inflamed job market, you can entertain, compare, and negotiate between a swath of competing job offers. By comparison, an experienced employee may have less salary negotiating power because he realistically may have only 1 or 2 competing offers. (Let’s face it: you can’t easily interview with multiple competitors while still holding down your current job.) That is further exacerbated when the newest employees are precisely the ones who are the most familiar with the most topical and cutting-edge skills compared to the older engineers who are using obsolete technologies, as is often times the case in the software/Internet space where technology turnover is rapid. </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that Microsoft is necessarily experiencing salary inversion. I don’t actually know. I’m simply saying that it’s not entirely implausible given that salary inversion was pervasive in the software industry in the past, notably during the dotcom boom.</p>
<p>I was hired a program manager at Microsoft and I’m getting the equivalent of 105-110k starting.</p>
<p>82k base
50k in stock over 3 years (16.67k a year)
Optical, medical and dental insurance (equivalent to ~ 5-8k a year at least)
5-20% cash bonus at the end of the year
7k a year for master’s programs
gym membership (2k)</p>
<p>so, I would say 81+17+8+2 = 108k</p>
<p>I was very surprised at this starting salary. I expected ~ 70-80k tops.</p>
<p>For the average employee of Google/Microsoft, government pays a lot better for a lot less work. Probably a LOT less work since my Army email doesn’t work half the time</p>
<p>Could I expect this much money graduating with a 3.9GPA from Purdue with a CS degree? I want to switch to Comp.E because I want to learn about hardware, but my main priority is taking care of my parents and siblings and I would need offers in the range if 70-80k so do that. Would I need to stay in CS or could I still work for Google/Amazon as a computer engineer and recieve the same pay?</p>
<p>The pay you receive is based on the job you are hired for, not the degree. In that sense, Computer Engineering would be fine.</p>
<p>Elegantly put. The GPA and the resume only gets you to that first interview. After that it’s up to how brilliant you are, and the competition is stiff for those top firms. To illustrate, here’s a question my roommate was asked during his google interview:</p>
<p>You are given two eggs. By dropping these eggs from the windows of a 100-story building, how can you find the highest floor you can drop these eggs from without breaking it in the least number of drops. For example, if the answer was 26 then the egg wouldn’t break when dropped from floor 26 but will when dropped from floor 27.</p>
<p>I guess the question I should have been asking is:
Can I get a software engineering job by pursuing a degree in computer engineering? If the answer is no - what is the average pay of computer engineers working for one of these companies? I have heard that the pay is lower, if so why because engineering is harder than comp sci(to me at least). Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>This is my personal opinion but it’s because engineering follows a slow development cycle with rather established methods for innovation. You design next year’s computer chips to be 5% more efficient, and to do that you follow some established procedure that they’ve been doing for years. It takes a long time and a lot of people to design a physical product and to see a return in profit.</p>
<p>With software you can put it out as quickly as you can write and debug it. You’re not limited by materials or any physical limitations. The limit is on the personnel–how quickly and how cleverly you can write a piece of code. Search engines existed before Google, but Google became a success because of its clever algorithm. That’s a quality they can’t teach you and it’s exactly what these companies are looking for.</p>
<p>I guess what I’m saying is that companies, both engineering and software firms, pay big money for people with innovative ideas that can deliver on them. The difference is that with engineering only the head guys can dictate what to research, develop, and design since it would be impossible to give everyone the physical resources to experiment on their own. They’re not gonna retool the factories to build a computer chip that some guy straight out of school thinks would work better. But with software everyone can follow through on their own ideas. Google docs and Google maps were both developed from side-projects regular employees started, not some dictate that came down from the head developer.</p>
<p>Just wanted to quickly follow up to my previous post. I don’t want to give off the impression that the offers I posted are common place and easy to get, but I do want to shed some more light on how the whole thing works:</p>
<ul>
<li>Keep in mind at all times that the salaries are posted for silicon valley companies and competing Seattle companies. Living costs in silicon valley are very high, so the offers while in themselves are very good offers, are not as mind-blowingly good as you’re imagining if you’re currently going to school away from the two expensive coasts.</li>
<li>The offers posted are for competitive software engineers. By that I don’t just mean people who can write great code. I mean people who know how to code but also have an entrepreneurial bent.</li>
<li>Building a company that delivers its solutions through software technology is much less cost-intensive than building one that delivers through any other medium. Software is available at every corner of the community, all the technology are widely available and open-sourced as soon as someone figures out how to do it. With this availability comes rapid building and innovation. Yes plenty of companies will flop but that’s the momentum required to sustain the development and growth of the sector.</li>
<li>You don’t need to study a specific discipline, software engineering is not like a traditional industry. For many there is no perfect way to do it right, you just have to start doing it. Being good at math, however, is required. If you don’t know what to study, study math. Computer Science is essentially applied math with a heavy bent on discrete math and sequence and series. Solving problems in the real world requires out-of-the-box thinking, so don’t depend on learning what you need in a university program, even a top-notched one, it’s only going to give you the necessary mathematical grounding so you know whether the direction you’re going into has merit or is a waste of time.</li>
<li>If you haven’t started building real world software by your Sophomore year, you should. RoR and Heroku, I’ve told you all with that. The rest you should be able to figure out.</li>
<li>The most valuable skill in real world software engineering is: I give you a problem that nobody has successfully solved before, now go figure it out. Anyone attempting to do Agile need people like that, hence the valuation.</li>
<li>If you are that, software companies will want you, and they will compete with each other to get you, that’s another reason why the offers are what they are. Quite frankly, they are good offers, but not superb. I’ve seen better.</li>
<li>Churn happens at established companies like Microsoft and Amazon, where the pipeline has been built and software engineers are monkeys. Much less so at smaller, more innovative companies. I have friends who left Facebook, Yelp and Palantir a few months in, but that’s not because of burnout. They left to do their own companies. Software engineers are uniquely armed with a powerful tool that has the potential to affect the world, literally at their fingertips. The question is whether the person in mind is talented enough to use it.</li>
</ul>
<p>If you’re only salivating over the offers I posted, you should dream bigger. The barrier to entry is shrinking by the day, and it takes a while before you learn how to swim.</p>
<p>I used this forum throughout my college years, and I always felt that there was too little information beyond the acceptance letter to a top school. Just wanted to give back a little. Your experience may vary, but I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure it out one way or another.</p>
<p>I’m a CS major at Carnegie. I’m working at QualComm this summer- -they hire lots of the CMU CS and ECE majors-- my salary for 3 months is 8000.
Google, Microsoft and FB all interview here and have a huge presentation before our career fairs-- but seems only those with very very high gpas are getting the internships or ft jobs. (and I know a few URM women were highly recruited)
The going rate for a 3 months summer stint seems to be $13 - 16k plus airfare, housing and the free food at Google and FB. a guy visited our frat who has been at google two years (graduated in 2009), - he earns over 135k now and started at 90k-- he’s been getting bonuses and promotions every few months–he was trying to get us to apply b/c he gets a 5k recruiting bonus if he can find a referral that joins the firm ft-- so he was really doing a sales pitch. This guy seemed to be a nutty workhoholic type-- gets to work at 7 am and leaves really late - what kind of life is that even for 135k-. I heard from a friend about another cmu student who was sent a xbox at another frat just for interviewing at microsoft–. I don’t know if that is really true. He is going to FB for the summer and got to keep the xbox. He was the only person people have talked about-- but he’s apparently a CMU genius perfect 4.0 type-- I dont’ know him personally.</p>
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<p>I’d give up at a binary search! I wonder how long they give you to solve such problems… I know people who are quick at thinking on their feet, but I also know people who are terrible at thinking quickly but, given time, will come up with exceptional solutions.</p>
<p>To be on topic though, I’m very surprised how much demand there is for software positions these days. Even traditionally hardware companies such as Intel are heavily recruiting software engineers. Well over 50% of the job postings on our internal campus recruitment board are software-related. By contrast, I have seen… five job postings for my area of ECE.</p>
<p>Ans: doesn’t matter what floor the egg will break/not break. If the eggs does break at 27, will it break at 28 or the 33rd floor. Eggs (anything) are designed to be highly impact resistant when struck at certain point but also easily broken at other points. You need to alter the way the egg will fall to insure that the egg will fall properly.</p>
<p>Ans: To achieve fewest tries, use first egg to eliminate as many options as possible. Since we have no prior information about the probability distribution of the egg breaking with height (even such distribution’s shape), we must make the naive assumption that every floor has equal probability of causing the egg to break, so 1/100. To eliminate the most floors, we drop the egg on the 50th floor (or 51st if you want, it stochastically doesn’t matter). If it breaks, we must do a linear search from bottom up. If it does not break, we must do a linear search with the second egg from 51st up. If you repeat the experiment a large number of times, the avg # drops (or total over all tests) for this method will be less than any other method you can think of. I guess you could call this the binary search as the other guy above said – the more eggs you have, the more you can divide. N eggs, you can do N-1 divisions, then the N-th egg is for the linear search.</p>
<p>This is a very typical CS sort of question. It has analogues, but I can’t remember what they are.</p>
<p>@LongPrime: by the law of large numbers, I think your method becomes moot. Do the experiment enough times and there is an “average drop method” But it might be non-linear with height because of wind and other interesting physical factors that we have completely unaccounted for. Introducing physics into this would be very interesting, but it is likely tangent to their goal. You have to remember that people in CS/ECE were not smart enough to stay in Physics.</p>
<p>Spicy, reread the question, you got 2 eggs. gthopeful has already done the binary approach. </p>
<p>Solution.
Find your self a ostrich hen.
Incubate the eggs, and let the chicks escape the shell. Throw the chicks over the edge.
Tape helium balloons to the eggs. As the helium escapes the eggs will eventually get to the ground.
Hard boil the eggs. at least the whites and yolk will be intact.
Eat the eggs and walk away. </p>
<p>The question is to elicit your command of instructions and language. Some people/companies look for conforming and some look for more inventive people.</p>
<p>The James T Kirk, solution.</p>