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Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

It must really suck to be a senior software engineer making less than 95k knowing that there are probably some new grads that get an initial offer of more than that.

Wait, really? By "some" we're talking "very, very few" right? Surely salaries haven't come that far since when I graduated.

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I'm a senior in college, and Google offered me $100K + $30K bonus (on average, could be more or less) + $10K relocation to start.

Yup, seems about right. I didn't apply to Google, but I did get an offer from Amazon at $90k base + $25k bonus and $7500 for relocation.Where was your offer for? Mountain view?

The number has been anecdotally creeping up. It was less than a year ago that I was reading a really good software dev could expect to make a little over 80k straight out of college.

Either the competition for good programmers really did get that fierce, or HN's collective estimation of a good programmer salary has been undergoing self-inflation.

As another anecdote, I was offered $115k/yr + $10k relocation from Groupon right out of college (I didn't accept, but that was the highest offer monetarily).

Graduate degree, or undergrad?

Undergrad, and I didn't go to a prestigious school.

Frankly, that's amazing. I hope you took/get to take something that's not too far off that mark.

I do alright. I went with something that's lower salary, but there are things in life that are more important to me than money. Dailybooth, the company whose offer I accepted, seemed to have the maximal overall combination of the things I was looking for.

What I did wasn't magic, though. I worked my ass off to get relevant work experience starting as soon as I could. I used that to get into a YC company. They liked me and my work enough to write me a letter of rec and forward my resume to the YC founder's list. FWIW, no one even asked about college beyond "how's college going?" as I was in final's week of my last semester when I interviewed with a bunch of companies after the forward.

I have heard from a friend at Zynga that highliy-skilled grads are being hired straight out of college on 100k or slightly more.

Which may be more indicative of the cost of living in the valley rather than a rise in average salaries for grads.

$100K for fresh college grads is par for the course in Seattle too, so it's not just SV.

highliy-skilled grads

I can't help but find that rather contradictory.

That was my exact same thought. I've met some bright grads, but they still are way less effective in the real world than an experienced software engineer. I can't believe we are back to the boom days of 100k + bonus straight out of school. Hey, good for them, if I was a student right now I'd be stoked.

Well anecdotally people can get near 90 at Microsoft it seems. So it's not that far off.

Of course the offer depends on previous experience such a internships and your job position (I imagine SDEs probably make more than SDETs and some teams pay better than others) but it's not unheard of.

Here are some stats for starting salaries of Cornell CS grads http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services...

The Mean salaries are around 85k $ not including the bonus, most get bonus around 10k - 30k depending on the company

Yeah, I agree here. I think that kind of offer is way above the norm, but don't forget, college kids often think they are going to make a killing right after school, and it usually doesn't pan out that way. But still, I think 95k for a senior software engineer at msft is pretty lowball, unless something is left out, like bonuses or something.

My annual bonus (cash and stock) at MS was about 30% of my salary. I dunno if that's the norm for the big/lucrative software companies or not.

I'm a CS senior, and just speaking anecdotally, my friends who interned at $BigTech all received offers above 100k.

95k's pretty good life already and data is 2 years old.

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