

Ask YC:  What are starting salaries for CS grads this year? - iamelgringo

I'm curious to find out what grads from CS programs are getting offered.  The last post by Spolsky seemed to say that MSFT is offering starting salaries close to 6 figures.<p>s this accurate?  Can anyone corroborate?  If you're graduating and have offers on the table, would you mind posting a ball-park figure of what you're getting offered?  I'd love to hear it.
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natch
For anyone wondering the other question, what about salaries for experienced
developers, keep in mind the numbers others are sharing here are just what was
asked for, -starting- salaries. After a few years, the salaries are much
higher, but still under $150K. $130K plus options is pretty standard in the
West Coast for an experienced developer with or without any degree. Seems to
have jumped up some in the last couple years along with gas prices. Google,
though, pays less.

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culley
100k plus options. 10 yrs experience. NM. Nice House in city center $800 a
month. 20 min commute. But no comparable companies to move to in town.

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phaedrus
In Oklahoma it seems to be more like $40K. :( When I went to make some job
applications, I realized none of my professors gave any of the new CS
graduates any advice on what salary to ask for. It's a moot point because I'm
not convinced there _are_ any CS jobs out here. I'm graduating top in my
class, have 3 years experience working at a (folded) software development
startup, and I've even done a NASA intership - and even with a resume like
that I haven't even so much as gotten an interview yet: the job market out
here is just so low-tech...

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brianr
Sounds like it's time to move?

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simianstyle
I just graduated with a business degree, but I was hired at a startup in
Boston as a Rails coder making $65K. I turned down an offer of $100k at a big
corporation for obvious reasons.

I figured it's enough for me to live comfortably and continue to work on my
side projects :)

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fool
Academia, of course, gives you entirely different salaries. For an Assistant
Prof. job at a good university you are looking at ~65,000 +/- 10k depending on
location. This of course is supposed to be for 9 months, but good luck telling
your tenure review committee you didn't do any work during the summers. Word
is lucrative part-time consulting gigs can be had if you are enterprising. It
looks as if you are at about 1/2 of what an industrial lab will pay. But then
if you are in the academy, supposedly you care more about freedom than money.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Salary for the summer comes from grants. Universities like it that way, it
gives you good motivation to go bring home the bacon.

By the way, even your salary number seems low. Perhaps your numbers include
teaching colleges?

As for summers, they are also a good time to build a startup. Most tenure
review committees don't mind that sort of thing.

~~~
hugh
I've heard of offers as low as $48K for assistant professors in biological
sciences. That's at a real PhD-granting research university, though admittedly
not a particularly good one. Even lower for fields like English and History.
Higher for hard sciences, and even higher for CS.

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donw
$85k +/- 5k seems to be the average here out on the West Coast. I'm curious as
to what the difference is for people with masters degrees or doctorates,
though.

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cperciva
I haven't seen anyone even suggest less than $100k for a newly minted
doctorate in CS from a good university, and I've seen numbers in the $120k -
$140k range thrown around. It sounds like East Coast hedge funds are even more
generous.

~~~
menloparkbum
I have. HR knows that CS PhDs will work for peanuts because they've had their
financial self-esteem slowly beaten out of them over the past five years. East
Coast hedge funds mostly hire physics and applied math PhDs. Masters +10 PhD
-30 but YMMV.

~~~
carterschonwald
is that supposed to be +30? else that doesn't make sense?

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suboptimal
I think he means the PhDs have been flogged by academia longer than the
Masters, who thus retain a modicum of self-worth.

I don't know about starting salaries, but DC-area hiring is plentiful, and you
should be able to hit $100k in a few years (if not sooner). Of course if you
want to be under the bright lights, and not spend your career backstage, then:
Go west, young man.

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r0bert0
Bachelor's CS from Rutgers: IBM $75K, MS $90K offers. Took IBM because of a
signing bonus and you work less hours (doing a startup in the other hours),
and work from home. Living in East Village in Manhattan for $1900/month studio
and i'm fine (except when a girlfriend is in the picture).

Know a few others for IBM BS CS (all over US) that start at approximately
$60-$65K. If you want higher, do an internship with the group you want to go
fulltime with, then get your manager to go to your VP for a higher starting
(that's the only way in IBM).

Know a few Rutgers BS CS who started with financial companies in Manhattan
(e.g. Merril Lynch), and they started at $60K, which was a bit surprising b/c
NYC ain't cheap. Apparently, you get whipped around for a few years in the
financial district and then you start getting huge bonuses and raises.

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nuggien
I've seen it vary greatly here in the SF bay area. I've seen offers as low as
65k and as high as 95k. The two most important factors that decide where in
the range you fall are the company making the offer, and the school you
graduated from. You probably have a lot more leverage in asking for 5-10k
extra if you are graduating from a place like stanford/berkeley as opposed to
sjsu. But then again, 5-10k is nothing to a company if you are an impressive
candidate.

~~~
jmzachary
That $5-10k delta could be made up within a year or two for a good developer
coming from a non-namebrand CS school who puts his/her nose to the grindstone.

~~~
nuggien
That is true. Good engineers will always rise above the bad ones, regardless
of what background they have. But we are talking about starting salaries here.

~~~
jmzachary
I understand that. And it's true that it is best to negotiate the highest
starting salary as possible because most people, on average, will get a
standard "cost of living" (whatever that means anymore) raise increase on an
annual basis. But, I wanted to point out that there is definitely hope for
non-namebrand CS program graduates, too.

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cousin_it
Wow, just wow. I live in Moscow and earn about 30K a year. 25 years old, 10 of
them coding for money. Maths degree.

~~~
iamelgringo
Moscow's supposed to be about as expensive to live in as the Bay Area or
Manhattan from what I've read. Rents here in the Bay area are around $1400 for
a 1 bedroom apartment. What are they in Moscow?

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cousin_it
I pay around $1300 for a 1 bedroom apartment. This is a bit on the high side,
but I like living in the city center, in summer it's almost European.

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tomh
Salaries for grads outside of Moscow are probably half that - I think PHP
coders in Kharkov, Ukraine for example would be pretty happy with 12-15K. QA
positions could be as low as 8-10K.

And $1300 for a 1-bedroom in Moscow center...what can I say you got off light.
All my friends had to go through realtors for $2K places (2-3 rooms through)
near Kitai-Gorod.

~~~
vtx
How about $5K for 2 years experience PHP developer in Dnepr, Ukraine. I work
for this now and my motivation is lost completely. May be I will try to
relocate. Now i see even in Dnepropetrovsk salary for html coder for $10K and
php dev $14K, but they require strong knowledge of all what can imagine, even
speaking english. My bad, need better education.

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dmnd
80k to start in 2009 at MSFT. Makes me think I should've thought more about
inflation before signing.

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menloparkbum
$80K +/- 5K at GOOG for Stanford grads and $85K at Amazon for a Berkeley grad.

~~~
mrtron
Roughly the same numbers for Waterloo grads at those places.

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mpc
60~70 in Cambridge/Boston. There are some major companies here (Google,
Microsoft, ITA) that probably offer more to really good hacker candidates.

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lyime
Friend just got offered 90K from both Adobe and Amazon. Got rejected from
Google and MSFT. Has had quite a few good internships.

~~~
humanlever
According to Fortune's best places to work (<http://tinyurl.com/3dofj9>),
Adobe isn't a bad gig.

You can use the same list to see what people are making at different companies
and what kinds of perks they're getting. i.e. A software developer at the SAS
Institute pulls down $104,566/yr.

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aggieben
In 2005, I had two offers upon finishing my master's: one in Austin for $61K
and one in the Dallas area for $64K.

My officemate took an offer in Baltimore for $75K-ish, I think.

~~~
ia
did you have any professional experience prior to that? i graduated in 05 with
a ba in english, but will have my MS in CS in early 09 (so it'll have been
about 3.5yrs of CS)... my professional experience is limited, so i anticipate
a weird situation where i'm looking for jobs that i seem over qualified for
(on paper) but may be under qualified for because i don't have the 3-5 years
professional experience required...

~~~
aggieben
I've had that problem before too. It's just the basic bootstrapping problem of
starting a career that everyone goes through.

To answer your question, my only professional experience before finishing
school was through internships, including one at Microsoft which I am sure has
opened doors for me (although I can't be sure which ones), and my graduate
assistantship.

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jomunculus
I'll let you know. I'm currently outsourcing my education to a 20 year old in
Bangalore. If all goes well I'll have my BS in CS by the end of 2009 and at a
huge savings.

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rms
A friend of mine just took a menial enterprise programming job (in Pittsburgh)
that is paying 55k. And I mean menial, it's converting legacy systems from
Cobol to Java.

~~~
tomjen
Just write a cobol to java compiler and be done with it.

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NonEUCitizen
he may not have to write one himself:

    
    
      http://www.jazillian.com/howCOBOL.html
    

disclaimer: i don't know cobol and have never tried this.

~~~
rms
That is a consulting company, not a software product.

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csmajorfive
On this note, I have a question that I (as a new grad) don't know anything
about. What are raises like? How often do they happen? How much? What does it
take?

~~~
swombat
Don't count on quick raises from a very low salary unless you've explicitly
discussed that with your boss or at your interview. In most places I've seen,
they're happy to calculate raises using %, which means you get a whopping 20%
raise on a £20k salary - which still amounts to peanuts (£24k is not much
different from £20k).

Negotiate your starting salary as high as you can, and don't count on quick
raises.

Here's a useful article on the topic from ever-helpful Rands:

[http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/04/11/the_busines...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/04/11/the_business.html)

Daniel

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utnick
haha ya... my first post grad programming job raise was smaller in $'s per
hour than the raises I got as a lifeguard when I was 15 :(

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wallflower
So if we take into account cost-of-living adjustments (ignoring quality of
life +/- adjustments), the average starting salary is around $50K

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azsromej
For Atlanta, salary.com says 53-56K; median for Georgia Tech in 2007 was 60K.
This is in line with anecdotal evidence I've culled.

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lunchbox
Try salary.com for statistics on this. -- enter "Software Engineer I" or "web
developer".

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tonyvt2005
In D.C. it's about 55-65, but if you have clearance it can go 5-10 more.

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AndyKelley
Am I going to be screwed over because I go to Arizona State?

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Todd
Not at all. Unless you went to a top school, where you went to school becomes
irrelevant after a few years. Where you worked and what you did become much
more important.

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projectileboy
I would say that after a few years, even if you went to a top-flight school,
no one cares. The only lasting benefit is the collection of connections that
you made while you were there.

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wensing
In Chicago, 55-60k.

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hbien
starting at 50-60 in San Diego, CA, graduated from UCSD. Mostly from web
programming jobs (php, rails, and java).

~~~
iamelgringo
Wow. And living in San Diego is expensive, too. Probably a lot more expensive
than in Dallas or Austin that have comparable salaries.

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jon_dahl
Man - my first job out of college was $16/hour. That's what I get for majoring
in philosophy.

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crxnamja
as a biz major i was offered $100k after 1 year out of college in a pm role by
a major ocmpany.

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monological
my buddy just got a job in san jose w/ a salary around ~$86K

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fishhead
dallas 65

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goofygrin
I think that's likely high (I'm in Dallas and have some experience in the last
couple years with recruiting college people).

I'd say the average is around 50k, only people with real experience getting
more than that. Some companies are paying higher, but they are turning around
and billing them out at a stupid high rate (EDS I'm looking at you).

~~~
matthavener
I'd agree, the average is 50 but any decent grad should be able to grab 60-65

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fishhead
I'm an ms grad so probably you're right.

