everyone is tweeting their salary with #talkpay

[Imp]

Shows what they know. People living in San Francisco are the dumb ones.

Making 700K in SF is like poverty level in other areas amirite?

Quiet, peasant.

 

[Printer Bandit]

#talkpeasants

 

[JMapleton]

700k as an engineer? That seems very inflated but if 10+ people from there say it is I'm inclined to believe but it sounds more like a fisherman's story.

There is a programmer at Google who allegedly makes $3m.

Why do you think 3 bedroom ranch houses are selling for $2m+ in Palo Alto?

 

[Farmer]

dang, new grads making 150$k + 50$k in stock options right out of college with a BS CS

Just some anecdotal facts from a few years back. You will have to be graduating from a very good CS program (MIT, CMU, Stanford, Berkeley or the like) and have a pretty good GPA (B+/A- minimum, not because they care about GPA that much, but because GPA is correlated with how well you can answer technical questions). This is not really a matter of ability, larger firms, particularly financial institutions and consultancies, simply do not recruit from lower ranked schools at all. They will throw your resume away for not having a brand name on it.

These salaries are for CS or programming-heavy electrical engineers only, as the current market dictates that their starting pay is significantly higher than other engineers (for MIT grads, I think average starting salary was $80K for CS majors, $60K for other engineering):

1.) Those who do not goto grad school or med/law school typically go to a bay area tech company (from startup to Google), their own startup, a finance firm, or a business consultancy.

2.) Large tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) pay anywhere from $80K to $110K for a fresh CS SB in a programming job. Smaller companies and startups typically pay less, probably $60K and up for a programmer.

3.) Startups obviously pay nothing, but VC funding is not terribly hard to get if you have a brand name degree and you work hard (even if your idea is questionable).

4.) In the finance sector, IT/programming or other back/mid office jobs in large firms don't pay that well, probably $80K to $100K in NYC. For small prop trading firms, they pay significantly higher, and this is where most of the ludicrous salaries come from. I've heard of $160K with signing and annual performance bonus for a back office programmer. If hired as a trader, sky is the limit.

6.) People who go into consulting (i.e., McKinsey) get paid nothing, $65K in Manhattan, but once they either are promoted or jump ship in 2 years, get very cushy salaries (probably over $200K) in private equity firms.