My post lists most common employers. Facebook and Google composed 25% of grads. AAN had much fewer hires (Netflix had zero). There does not appear to be a sharp distinction in reported salary between FAANG and others. CMU’s website probably lists the survey instrument wording about earnings vs salary vs bonuses vs stock options, if you are really interested.
I can see that the numbers don’t include bonus etc. I don’t need to go looking for it. For example, in the reported salaries for 2021 on the CMU SCS outcomes website, I know that the 200k number is the Jane Street base pay:
There is nothing unusual about their guaranteed bonus etc to warrant exclusion. They add other numbers to that 200k. This is just an example.
But then isn’t it true that in many fields of work, the elite practitioners are very well compensated, whether or not most practitioners are?
Most college students who graduate (in any major) and go to work (in any field of work) will not be elite practitioners. So it would not be a good idea for a college student or prospective college student to use elite pay levels as an expectation when doing financial planning (including how much debt to take to pay for college).
“Sorry, Full Pay College Student at Private University, you are not likely to be immediately earning the pay level that your Middle Class but Ineligible for Financial Aid parents have even if you graduate in the major associated with the highest paid jobs at the time your graduate.”
Indeed, PhD students are typically attending with tuition waivers and stipends in order to be apprentice researchers and teachers. For the international students, that is quite a bit different from undergraduate study in the US, which is typically expensive at list price without financial aid for them.
This is true by definition.
But when it comes to CS, for better or worse, a significant part of the hiring decision for fresh grads is based upon performance on LeetCode style problems. Since students can guage their performance relative to others, they can estimate where they are, percentile wise on this important metric.
6 CS majors worked for Jane Street. 6 did not have $200k since the number at $200k was too small to graph. It was likely only a single student. If it is only a single student who self-reported a higher salary than anyone else, that is not necessarily a reliable data point. I’ve never understand why CC posters often seem to focus on the one anomalous highest salary than the typical range of salaries. It looks like reported 95th percentile salary was $150-$160k in 2021, among CMU SCS CS majors.
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We don’t need to discuss this. I am not sure you understand. I am not eyeballing the Jane Street number from that chart. They themselves list the cut off as being 4 to be on the graph. So the red line, nominally drawn, is their base pay. Unless the kids didn’t report their numbers. Only 90 numbers have been reported out of a class size of about 200. Anyway I am not speaking about these numbers, or the numbers at the FAANGs from what CMU is reporting. I am telling you from personal knowledge. CMU in 2021 has 48 grads in just G, FB, AMZN and MSFT. Their numbers are ~200k. The Jane Street full comp is 375-425. This discussion is not interesting for me anymore. We can leave it here :-).
Sounds like CS is the way to go 
But, more than just CS, what specialty? Because not all new grad CS hires make the same starting base/bonus/equity………….(at least in typical SV companies)
That matters less for the big guys. They usually hire generalists. The pay at the big guys is usually standardized with small variation based on the negotiation power you have.
The quants are hiring people with low level systems skillset – OS, Latency, and regular Algo stuff.
Not business applications like Salesforce etc, although you could go and work for Salesforce. Not as much pay progression for front end work. Some preference for AI/ML, but I don’t think they pay a lot of extra stuff for it, unless you have a PhD.
Distributed systems background is good for Cloud Infra.
But you progress in the company only if your engineering fundamentals are sound, and you are able to move into design etc within the first 2-3 years. Promotions get challenging after the first two.
Actually, in some cases it makes a significant difference. Many of the larger companies do indeed hire many generalists, but it is the the specialists that garner the higher end offers.
There is one other dimension to consider here. You can go to a place like CMU and pick an area like AI and specialize. Alternately, you can go to a place like Harvard or Brown or some similar Liberal Artsy place, and keep your options open regarding whether you even want to go into engineering or finance or consulting or a whole other set of careers.
The graph display from your post shows a maximum of $170-$180k. However, the range figure at the top instead lists the maximum as $200k. As you note, this occurs because they require 4+ kids to graph. It’s possible that it’s 1 kid at $200k or possible that it’s 3 kid.s I suspect the former is far more likely given the graph distribution, with a near negligible portion of salaries above $150-$160k – mostly likely just one rare outlier.
As noted earlier, I don’t understand why the focus is these rare outliers. Maybe the 1 (or possibly 3) kids at $200k included total compensation rather than base when self-reporting. Maybe he/she is exaggerating. Maybe he/she has several years of past work experience and is started above entry level. There are countless explanations why 1 (or possibly 3) might report a salary well above everyone else at the college. Far more relevant is the typical salaries, the overwhelming majority of which seem to be in the $100k to $140k range on the graph. Other colleges with a large portion of grads working in Silicon Valley (or similar very high cost of living tech centers) and high concentration of high achieving students, generally report similar numbers in their outcomes/salary docs, with most CS major in the $100k-$130k range. I realize that this generally doesn’t include stock options or certain other compensations, but it’s the standard format used by both colleges and the ROI tables that are the subject of this thread.
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Except that you do not necessarily know which specialty will be in greater demand at the time you graduate (and whether employers are looking for it at the new BA/BS level, versus the new MA/MS or PhD level or the experienced employee level). Someone who wants to specialize within a major can certainly do so, but it would also be a good idea to get a good generalist’s base in order to be more flexible within the field if necessary.
25% of that class is at 200k. Maybe more if you count other non big 4 names. And some smaller proportion at JSC, HRT, Citadel etc are (about 17 out of 200 in quant) 300-400k. It is not rare. I can’t explain this ad nauseum. Sorry :-).
Saying to take your word for it and ignore all the published numbers that have been repeated ad naseum and often conflict with your comments is not a convincing argument. Sorry :-).
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The disconnect seems to come from ignoring the non salary components of compensation, mainly the value of RSOs for tech companies, and guaranteed bonuses for finance companies.
Listed base salary numbers also differ from other sources, prior to including additional compensation. Regardless of what components are included, simply saying “I am telling you from personal knowledge” does not make it a reliable source. Maybe if that comment was expanded to give some more background such as CS son received $400k compensation in first year at one of employers that was listed as $400k compensation, work at the listed companies and am involved in hiring, etc.
While information about stock options/compensation is generally not available, a few colleges do list both 95th percentile salary and sign-up bonus. An example is GeorgiaTech at https://academiceffectiveness.gatech.edu/surveys/reports/georgia-tech-career-survey-salary-report-ay-2019-2020/ . Some numbers are below:
GeorgiaTech CS Outcomes: 2019-20
87% Accepted Offers
Median Salary = $100k
95th Percentile Salary = $142k
70% Report Bonus, Median Bonus = $16k
~Median Salary + Bonus = $100k + 70% * $16k = $111k
CollegeScorecard database lists tax reported earnings, which also include bonuses. The median CS 1st year tax reported earnings (not the default 3rd year listed on website) across all colleges for CS majors was approximately $70k. The colleges that we have been focusing on are among a small handful that had medians 1st year tax reported earnings over $100k. The college that had by far the highest reporting earnings for CS majors among all colleges in the CollegeScorecard database was CMU. Nobody else even comes close. At what is likely the highest median CS earnings college in the United States, the 95th percentile median reported salary appears to be ~$150 to $160k. Maybe if you include stock compensation and other bonuses then the 95th percentile at CMU increases to $200k. CMU should not be considered a good representation of CS earnings in general. The 95th percentile across all of the thousands of colleges that unlike CMU do not have the highest median reported median earnings for CS majors will no doubt be quite different.
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Since this thread is about ROI, there needs to be some predictability about the income streams. The few most highly compensating firms mentioned above (and others like them) are notorious for their pay-for-performance models. The bulk of the compensation comes from less predictable bonuses and/or equity options.
Whatever the signing bonus (or 1-year guaranteed bonus) is, it isn’t guaranteed for subsequent years (no firm offers multi-year guaranteed bonuses to new college graduates). It is financially irresponsible to assume it is. Mortgage companies/banks, for example, assume only a fraction of that bonus to be predictable income in calculating income eligibility for a mortgage.
For equity options, they’re even less predictable. Besides being highly volatile, their values are difficult to evaluate. They depend not only on their target/exercise prices, but also on the volatilities of the underlying equity positions (these firms generally don’t have publicly-traded options to imply such volatilities, with very few exceptions), on the path of future interest rates, and on the imposed restrictions in exercising such options.
This. For any students reading this thread, you are better off using just your base salary to qualify for your mortgage. You don’t want to be in a situation where you have a bad year and stretched so much that you can’t meet your payment.
My H has always had a bonus component to his salary but we always have left it off our when applying for a mortgage.
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Last week a flatbed truck pulled up early in the morning to load a neighbor’s car onto it. I assumed they were having car trouble… but no, repossessed. I’m going to guess they are not the only people around here who assumed that salaries and bonuses only go up, never down…if they were counting on a year-end payout to bail them out- and it didn’t come-- I guess end of March is when you need to pay the piper…