gwern comments on A puzzle concerning CS major vs. engineering major salaries - Less Wrong

5 Post author: JonahSinick 05 April 2014 07:13AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (33)

Comments (33)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JonahSinick 05 April 2014 05:55:17PM *  1 point [-]

I think your suggestion about graduates from top schools being above the 90th percentile is quite plausible.

Let's see. This article from 2013 reports that 56,742 students graduated with CS majors in 2012. It seems that there are on the order of 100 CS graduates at each top school per year (with the number increasing rapidly over time), so maybe 1,000 total, so 2% of CS graduates. So yes, it's plausible that they're above the 90th percentile.

Also, part of it could be that programmer salaries have gone up recently, so that the mid-career data you cite won't be in line with the current starting salaries. This would match up with the anecdata I have that starting salaries for college hires at Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are about 30% higher now than 7 years ago. Have salaries for other engineering jobs increased at the same rate?

The 2008 source that I cited in particular is dated.

Is it plausible that starting salaries would increase faster than mid-career salaries? Why wouldn't salaries for senior software engineers rise by 30%, too?

Comment author: gwern 05 April 2014 06:29:19PM 0 points [-]

Is it plausible that starting salaries would increase faster than mid-career salaries? Why wouldn't salaries for senior software engineers rise by 30%, too?

How durable is the human capital of software engineers? When the age discrimination in Silicon Valley comes up, a lot of people point out the huge turnover in technologies over decades, which would seem to negate a lot of the benefits of experience.

Comment author: JonahSinick 05 April 2014 07:31:16PM *  0 points [-]

Good point, thanks. Are you a programmer? If so, is this your subjective sense for what's going on?

Comment author: gwern 05 April 2014 10:08:26PM 0 points [-]

I'm not a professional programmer, but I do program for my own needs, my older sister is a professional, and obviously I hang out with a lot of programmers between Reddit/HN/Lesswrong/#lesswrong. My subjective sense is that there's a lot of truth to the turnover claim, although I don't know how much or how one would rigorously test such a claim.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit