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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

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tmaly·

In 2000 the starting engineer salaries at Intel were 55k a year.

I am sure others could provide reference salaries. It seems like in 20 years salaries have more than doubled.

Cost of living has gone up quite a bit. Most meats are double per pound compared to pre-covid.

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Adjusted by inflation, a $55k salary in January 2000 is $98,347.04 right now.

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=55000&year1=20...

Yup, I remember my freshman year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2005. The computer science department boasted that its graduates had the second-highest starting salaries of Cal Poly alums: $50,000. The department with the highest average starting salary was aerospace engineering: $55,000. I remember being blown away around 2007 when I heard of a master's student making the equivalent of $70,000/yr during a summer internship. Those were the days.

I started at Intel in 1994, Electrical Engineer from Purdue, 44K.

My salary as a first-year analyst at Goldman Sachs in 1999 was $40K. In 2000, to compete with dotcom companies, salaries rose to $55/65/75K for first/second/third-year analysts.[1] The compensation scale remained despite the dotcom bubble bursting.

[1] All figures exclude bonus, which is a huge part of compensation on Wall Street.

It makes sense though. Huge, competing tech companies means higher stakes due to winner-take-all markets, moats, and network effects, hence paying top dollar for talent to get products out fast and prevent competitors from hiring said talent or getting products out sooner. Given how profitable at least some of these companies are, paying top dollar is not a problem.

In 1998, fresh out of school, I was making 50K a year. A few years later, late 2001, at a dot-bomb, middle of nowhere east coast, I was making 75K a year.

Looking back, those early career gains were huge. And yeah, inflation is painful.

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