Still, a pay level of $170k per year (or even a “more typical” $110k as reported in UCB/CMU/MIT career surveys) should be more than enough to cover living expenses in that area with plenty left over for savings and investment ($110k is about $77k after federal and state income and payroll taxes; $170k is about $115k after those taxes).
I’m not sure the choice is idealism or money. Many can achieve both. A growing number of students are actually avoiding some companies that have long represented the “dream job”, opting instead for newer up and coming companies without all the baggage. Having the choice is the important thing. In this market, a graduate with desired skills commands mucho $$.
Of course, heavy debt can force the issue for some students, in that they “need” to choose the highest paying job to pay down their debt, or take whatever they can get (no “gap time” between graduation and working) if they are not in the position to choose from several offers before graduation.
@Rivet2000 - Indeed. Or choosing a certain job that will give/improve skills wanted by the more idealistic job.
I get that @websensation - maybe one more reason to plan to move into management, save like a fiend, or gain whatever experience is required to code less at the next gig.
Saving like a fiend is not mutually exclusive to any other career planning. However, if you like writing software and do not want to move into management or some other less technical role, better be elite at what you do (either software in general or in some in-demand specialty area) by the time you get to high levels of seniority.
These average salaries can be misleading for several reasons. In the 35-44 age bracket, males with at least a bachelor’s have average earnings of $110,761. Males with only a bachelor’s degrees have average earnings of $97,145. Then, because our income distribution is so skewed, the average tends to be much higher than the median. The 35-44 male with only a bachelor’s has a median income of $80,272. The real lesson to take away from the data may be the English major gets ahead if they go to law or med school.
Unfortunately Stanford no longer makes salary survey information public. When they did publish such information, their SV CS salaries were similar to other selective colleges. As I recall, Stanford was slightly less than Berkeley, which likely relates to Berkeley having a larger portion of students who choose to stay in the SV area and co-terms being separated from other bachelor’s students. Other colleges that do publish salary information show new SV CS grads typically have starting salaries in the low 6 figures. I’d expect $170k would be an extreme outlier at Stanford or any other college, unless counting value of sign-on bonus + stock options + … It’s also possible he had some previous job experience beyond typical new grads. Many CS workers in SV with years experience have salaries well above the range listed, including ones who attended much less selective colleges than Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, …
For example, some numbers from Berkeley 2018 EECS are below:
170 Participants (51% response rate)
70% Employed / 19% Grad School / 10% Seeking Employment
Average Salary = $111k
Most Common Employers: Google (10), Facebook (8), Amazon (6)
MIT publishes a full range. Nobody in the 2018 survey reported over $160k for CS.
Average CS Salary = $114k
Median CS Salary = $115k
Min CS Salary = $60k
Max CS Salary = $160k.
Carnegie Mellon has a similar if not higher portion of students going to SV after graduation as MIT. They also don’t report any students with $170k salaries in their 2108 survey and instead match nearly the same salaries as Berkeley and MIT. I am 2018 listing CMU SCS.
Average CS Salary = $114k
Median CS Salary = $110k
Min CS Salary = $60k
Max CS Salary = $150k.
If you visit the campus of any high tech company, or the trading floor of any Wall Street firm, you’ll notice that there’re very few people over the age of 40. Someone with a family will find it hard to compete with twenty-something in terms of the amount of commitment these jobs require. Besides, some of these jobs are being, or have been planned to be, automated away too, and the pace will only quicken.
I think that graduates in many fields find the M-F work schedule a grind. Even the ones who worked REALLY hard in college did have some flexibility on how to use their non-classroom hours.
There are too many types of tech employees to generalize. By most measures, the bulk of tech employees are very different from wall street bankers and should not be grouped together.
For example, I assume by commitment, you are implying long hours. The survey at https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019&utm_content=launch-blog#work found software developers in the uS worked an average of 42 hours per week. This fits well with my personal experience. Most tech employees I know work close to 40 hours per week. I know some who get paid overtime for the rare weeks in which they work more than 40 hours. However, I could also give examples of specific companies (often startups) or specific employees where working long hours or weekends is common.
There is also a wide variety of age distributions at different tech companies and within different departments of those companies. At most companies where I have worked, the bulk of tech employees have been 40+. However, there are also plenty of companies where the bulk of tech employees are in their 20s. Internet companies, particularly internet startups, are often in the latter group. I could go in to more specific detail about specific companies.
The number of tech positions has been increasing rapidly in recent years and all predictions I have seen suggest that they will continue to increase rapidly. This high demand relates to why salary tends to be so high. One difference is an increasing portion of tech employees were born outside of the US and in some cases work remotely from outside the US. For example, the article at https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens-make-up-nearly-three-quarters-of-silicon-valley-tech-workforce-report-says/ and report at https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf found that ~70% of SV tech employees were born outside of the US. The percentage born outside of the US increased to ~80% for women. If you limit to software/CS, I’d expect the percentages to be higher.
The comparisons of median earnings by persons with different undergraduate majors are interesting. But most kids can’t choose between STEM and non-STEM because their basic talents drive them in one direction or the other.
Nonetheless, I would always advise non-stem majors to maximize the amount of math and statistics and science courses that they can manage (with a B or better grade), because the skills may come into play at some point in their career. Becoming a spreadsheet maven is a real plus for the social science or humanities oriented students.
Similarly, I would tell stem-type majors to develop good writing and speaking skills (as well as habits of playing well with and teaming up with others). Administrative and managerial promotions will be influenced by social and verbal skills, interpersonal skills, and teamwork, not just the core technical skills in the field of interest.
They’re comparable because they share these same characteristics: relatively long hours, relatively high compensations, and relatively short careers. I’m, of course, talking about those in high tech that make comparable salaries (which is what this thread is about), not necessarily only in SV, but also in places like Silicon Alley, or even outside the US (such as DeepMind in UK where the average salary is $350k). As a matter of fact, these two industries are encroaching on each other’s traditional territory. High tech is looking to disrupt financial services, and Wall Street today hires more tech workers than any other types of employees, trying to stay ahead of the curve.
Maybe in addition to Excel, learning Python (a very popular and easy-to-learn general purpose programming language) or R (a popular statistical programming language) would be a good idea.
Ir seems an average first year Investment Banking analyst with a history degree in NYC makes more than an average first year CS graduate of prestigious college in SV.
However IB analysts work much longer hours and their life is pretty miserable.
I think the English major at Stanford or Harvard will be fine. Some employers that are focused on pedigree will only recruit at the tippy top schools.
Carlsen- agree with your suggestion about R. Even a solid understanding of SAS (which should be required for every business major, but I’m howling at the wind here) makes a young grad much more marketable. I see red when I interview a “business major” from a reputable college who claims “solid statistical training” on the resume… which turns out to be “solid” understanding of the underlying concepts-- but zero experience actually doing statistical analysis.
Your typical Poli Sci major is going to have more advanced skills manipulating and interpreting large data-sets (census data on income and voting patterns, voter registration broken out by age or other demographics) than many “business majors”. Interviewers don’t care what you analyzed- voting patterns or preferences in toothpaste flavors is pretty much the same animal. But reading an executive summary is NOT the same thing as understanding what the numbers tell you- or why they tell you that- or how the sample was assembled- and what you did with the outlier results.
Relatively few history majors go into investment banking, though, and far more graduate with little job experience and few hard skills. This is entirely avoidable if students don’t wait until senior year to figure out post-graduation plans, but unfortunately many do.
Career centers are all well and good, but departments of English, history, etc. could do a much better job of prepping their students for the job market. Many history professors have little interest in preparing their PhD students for anything other than a career in academia, let alone undergraduates.
The $170K definitely is not typical, at least for the larger firms I’m familiar with. Hiring managers have budgets and say you get a budget of $250K for two entry level CS grads, spending $170K on one and $80K on the other almost never happens. You’re not going to pay each the same as how you do in the interviews impacts your salary. And if the average salary in the team is person is $150K, bringing in someone at 170K will for sure lower morale, and trust me, word gets around. You have more flexibility in how many options you give, so if you really like a candidate, and you have say a 1000 options to give, you can give 800 to one and 200 to the other.
“The kid was telling me that there is a premium on writing short, elegant coding, as opposed to lengthy ones,”
There’s always been a premium on that, even when I was college as a computer engineering major in the mid 80’s. I recall coders getting criticized for writing spaghetti code.
One field in which it is repeatedly reported to have a terrible life work balance is the video game industry where “crunch” is built into the business model. It’s a field that has high burnout and turnover rates with the employees strongly skewing towards to younger.