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Comment by feverishaaron | Hacker News Reader

Be careful about chasing a dollar amount. $100K is pretty baseline for someone who has technical/design etc. skills. Moving into the $200K+ salary range often means working a lot of overtime, which leaves little time for enjoyable pursuits, or side projects which may eventually earn far more than that extra $100K a year.

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$100K baseline? That sounds like you're talking about entry-level, which can't be right regardless of where you live. I believe that the mean annual income for a software developer in the USA is about USD 75k. I found one estimate as high as 90k. In non-coastal areas (even big cities in the Midwest, Texas, etc.), entry level positions requiring a 4-year CS degree are commonly 45k-60k.

Career baseline, not entry-level. Making 100k these days with 5-7 years of experience is not all that unusual.

Depending where actually. Most companies will adjust based on the cost of living. So 100k in NY might be on the entry level but in Kansas it is a top salary.

Baseline and "not all that unusual" are very different things.

Entry level at top tier companies such as Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft will break $100K if you include signing bonuses and stocks.

I suppose those are the exception though.

By "entry-level," I mean a first job for an individual. Do those companies often employee programmers with no previous job experience?

At any rate, those are "lowest-level" SDE jobs available at such companies. They hire _many_ recent grads with nothing but a few internships worth of experience too.

Of course. Microsoft and Google are likely the biggest recruiters for cs students.

Usually those CS students have had multiple internships and/or research experience, however.

College recruiting is pretty important for Facebook, Google and Microsoft at least. In programming world "previous job experience" is a bit vague, as contributing to an open source project or building some non-trivial Web/iOS/Android apps is not "job experience" in classical sense, but adds significant bonus points to one's resume.

45k-60k? No. You may be thinking of wages accepted by H1B holders who have just arrived and will take anything they can get. Or people who just don't know better.

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