Fresh CS graduate wages down 20 percent

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/12/03/fresh-cs-graduate-wages-down-20-percent/

by jasonlbaptiste • 18 years ago

18 36 18 years ago

blogs.law.harvard.edu

secorp• 18 years ago

I mis-read this as "French" CS graduate wages down 20 percent :)

awad• 18 years ago

same here

pietro• 18 years ago

So did I, and it didn't make any sense. Wages don't adapt to changing market conditions that easily in France.

aneesh• 18 years ago

That's just one data point. I don't have any numbers, but this doesn't seem to be the case at the big software companies.

poshj4• 18 years ago

Hi guys, I want to know how much exactly do fresh CS graduate(B.Sc) gets in US nowadays? I'm based in Japan, and we will get 2147 USD(200k yen) for base salary only no matter how good you are. It seems very cheap :( since the high living cost here. The yearly bonus is about 4~5 months of base salary, but you don't usually get it unless you are really recognized by the management team.

EDIT: I must say, this is also the same for big companies like IBM Japan, SAP, etc.

smanek3• 18 years ago

It varies greatly on skill/pedigree (the two often, but not always, correlate). If you are poor to average you'll start at $50K-70k/year. If you're average to good you'll start at 70k-90k, and 90k+ if you're particularly good (about 150K is the maximum I've heard of, and that's more in modeling or quantitative development than straight programming). About a 10% bonus is normal in my experience, but that obviously varies based on skill/industry. There is also some give based on what sort of company/industry you want (e.g., I personally know someone who just this week turned down a six figure offer at a hedge fund for ~20k less doing AI research).

Those numbers are for a programmer in/near big cities (Boston, Silicon Valley, NY, etc). Revise them down ~10% for more rural/suburban areas (but it's harder to find work beyond code-monkey level at all in many of those places). And all this is based on my anecdotal experience, so figure there is likely some selection bias.

In my experience, between federal and state income taxes, FICA, and sales tax you'll lose ~50% of your of your income to the government. And we have to save for our own retirement (we expect nothing from social security) and our kids' college education (currently ~15k-30K/year tuition).

How are your taxes/retirement/etc in Japan?

litewulf2• 18 years ago

+1 sounds about right. My offers were 80k to 120k. (I'd say I went to a pretty decent university, but I wasn't too amazing.) There is massive massive variance based on the kind of position you are talking about.

I would say your numbers seem about right, though with the caveat that CS graduates can end up doing all sorts of things from IT-gruntwork-level tasks to rank and file software engineers, all the way to, yes, quants who are offered lots and lots of money.

dats• 18 years ago

The total effective tax-rate (national+municipal) in Japan for entry-level workers is under 20% unless you work a ridiculous amount of overtime, and even then it wont be much more. Unlike US jobs, most salaried positions in Japan pay overtime after the 40th hour.

poshj4• 18 years ago

Thanks. If I read your comment right, poor to average programmers in big cities will get $40k~/year after taxes, etc. Hmm... I guess it's not so different after all, I was thinking fresh programmers're getting $70k/year after taxes.

In my experience (I'm still in univ. but got some offers from companies), we will get base salary: $2k ~ 2.5k/month after taxes etc, plus apartment(simple one) and transport fee. The yearly bonus is 5 times of base salary, but usually we get only 4 times. This is from fairly big Japanese company, slightly lower than SONY or HONDA. The job being talked is core software development at company's main business. Too bad we don't have 401k plan like in other countries.

I went to Deutsche Bank last year, and it's alot different. We'll get $64k/year after tax, almost no yearly bonus and small allowance for apartment. The job being talked is the usual software development for desktop products.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Don't pull numbers out of nowhere.

http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresu...

There's no way that an "average" starting salary is 70k. Salary.com is famously inflationary and they have the median at 54K--and that's not just fresh grads. My guess would be more like 40K, with huge variations depending on where you live and whether you went to a well-known school. But then, "average" people don't go to well-known schools for the most part.

utnick• 18 years ago

sounds correct

also, it seems like a large % of cs graduates are unable to get jobs in programming due to lack of experience

pg• 18 years ago

$2100 a month? That is extremely cheap by US standards.

poshj4• 18 years ago

Yeah, I feel cheap too, but it's almost like the standard here :( Unless you enter google or bulge bracket banks, you won't get too far from $2k/month base salary here.

Just my curiosity, did you find this cheap after reading my other comment too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385479 ? And btw, by CS graduate I meant B.Eng. or B.Sc. not M.Eng or M.Sc.

So, Is it save to assume that entry level programmer will get above $50k/year in US?

timr• 18 years ago

I made more than $2100 a month as a grad student -- and we weren't paid very well.

poshj4• 18 years ago

Hmm.. What can I say man :(

for CS grad student, the base salary is only $200/month different from undergrad (without calculating the yearly bonus).

PStamatiou• 18 years ago

I wouldn't put much weight on this.. it's a 3 sentence blog post without much backing.

wheels2• 18 years ago

"Technology sales are down 20%! ... I know 'cause I talked to my buddy who works at a computer store and he said he normally sells 5 laptops a day, but yesterday when we met for a beer he said he only sold 4."

That would be about as worthwhile of a generalization.

That said, I'd be surprised if wages weren't down across the board, with more emphasis on fresh graduates. This is hardly a surprise with lots of layoffs and a depressed economy.

volida• 18 years ago

so you need 3 pages of a blog post to sound convincing? I suppose that's the reason I don't read the majority of blogs out there...

bd2• 18 years ago

This is from Phillip Greenspun's blog, so it has more credibility than if it would be just some random blogger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Greenspun

wheels2• 18 years ago

No it doesn't. It's still just an anecdote.

kqr2• 18 years ago

Employers / recruiters can use the bad economic news (Adobe layoffs, etc) in conjunction with the "exploding offer" to drive down wages of new graduates.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html

ig1• 18 years ago

I've done some research in this area (my startup is dev recruitment related) and from what I've seen that large tech companies aren't cutting fresh graduate wages because it complicated internal politics. If you pay this years grads less than last years, then they will find out about it and it creates ill-will and bad politics within the company.

However the number of grad roles at the top-end are being cut, so previously grads who could have got a high-paying job at a top-end company now have to take a lesser paying job at a slightly worse company.

decode• 18 years ago

Every year, the University of Michigan publishes a survey of salaries for its Engineering graduates:

http://career.engin.umich.edu/salary/

Average annual full-time salaries for computer science graduates finishing in the 2007-2008 school year, by degree:

Bachelors - $73,761

Masters - $79,762

PhD - $103,740

All of these amounts are up from the previous year.

Caveats: the sample size is small, it's a top Research I University in Engineering, and participation is on a volunteer basis, so the participants may self-select in certain unknown ways. Also, the most recent survey is from the class that graduated in April, which was before many of the scary economic things began happening.

Dilpil• 18 years ago

...for a sample size of one?

wd40• 18 years ago

Anyone know what yc startups like scribd pay their developers?

vlad• 18 years ago

Maybe if they stop cursing and start recursing. Sorry for the worst and most annoying joke ever.

Fresh CS graduate wages down 20 percent

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