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Comment by purewater | Hacker News Reader

$80-100k understates the salaries in Silicon Valley. $100k isn't even a recent college grad salary, it's usually closer to $110k + $40k in other compensation == $150k right out of college. A few years of experience pushes you well over the $200k mark. Heck, interns even get paid $8k/month which is almost $100k/year.

Seriously, brush up your resume and apply to the major firms.

By the way, I should note that cost of living and taxes are much higher here. Standard rent is >$2k (which is nothing compared to some parts of NYC, I guess...)

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Interesting - I'm only a year and a half out of college, and I don't think any of my undergrad CS friends were making a $110k salary right after graduation (more in the 60-90 range).

I've always used a rule of thumb that rent is $1k/month/bedroom around Palo Alto, a bit less in Mountain View / Sunnyvale / Redwood City, and a bit more in SF. >$2k/month/bedroom sounds extraordinarily high - where were you seeing that?

60-90k is what I'd expect to see from something outside the San Fran area as a college grad. I don't have personal experience with starting salaries there, but I would expect them to be much higher due to a higher cost of living.

From the Stanford CS department for 2009-2010, regarding CS/EE undergrads, size = 140 students:

> Salary offers ranged from $65,000 to $95,000. The average salary offer was $79,333. The median salary offer was $ 80,000.

Granted (heh), this doesn't include stock options.

Those numbers seem pretty high compared to Glassdoor.com reports. In their San Jose area offices, Google, Apple, and Microsoft seem to be paying software engineers with 0-3 years of experience between $70K-130K:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-San-Jose-Salaries-EI_...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cupertino-apple-salary-SRC...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-microsoft-salary-...

I think you're quoting the salaries from the big firms who are only looking to hire the best people, and even then that might be a starting MS/Ph.D salary for a specific role (e.g., machine learning) as opposed to general dev. I can see the Googles, Amazons, Apples and Facebooks of the world paying that for newly-graduated grad students, but that's hardly the norm.

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