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Stanford Computer Science '10-'11 Salary Survey Results

180 points by abi ↗ HN
I'm an undergraduate at Stanford and I recently got this mass email from the CS department. I figured it might be interesting to the Hacker News audience (with all the talk of bubble and stuff). No one said the survey results were not to be distributed so I assumed that it was okay to do this.

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CS/EE Undergrads

Data: I received 140 responses which described 360 job offers. 95% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 5% were from the Midwest and East Coast. 10% of the job offers were from start-ups.

Salary offers ranged from $64,400 to $100,000. The average salary offer was $79,914. The median salary offer was $ 82,200.

About 70% of students were offered stock options. About 80% of students were offered signing bonuses. And about 60% were offered relocation assistance and there were others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply to them. Relocation assistance ranged from $2,000 to $10,000 with an average of $3,000. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 with an average of $5,700. I did not calculate the range of stock options because stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values.

Students who replied averaged about 2 job offers. However, students may not have reported on all the offers they received. The average student who replied to the survey all had some job experience, nearly all of it through summer internships and averaged 3 summer of work.

Location, scope of work, salary/benefits, environment/culture, company were the important factors in accepting the offers for the undergrads.

CS/EE Masters

Data: I received 145 responses which described 330 job offers. 94% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 6% were in the Midwest and East Coast. 15% of the job offers were from start-ups.

Salary offers ranged from $66,000 to $120,000. The average salary offer was $94,634. The median salary offer was $93,000. The candidates who were offered $120,000 was reporting directly to the VP of his research group. Also, one of the candidates was offered $36,000 because the individual was doing an internship instead of a full-time position out of state which I did not include into the calculation.

About 78% of students were offered stock options. About 66% of students were offered signing bonuses. And about 43% were offered relocation assistance and there others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply to them. Relocation assistance ranged from $1,000 to $8,000 with an average of $1,740. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $35,000 with an average of $4,102. I did not calculate the range of stock options because stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values.

Students who replied averaged about 3 job offers. However, students may not have reported on all the offers they received. The Masters had a little more summer experience than the undergraduates, an average of 3 summer internships.

Like the undergrads, location, scope of work, company, and salary/benefits, and environment/culture seem to be the important factors for the MS grads.

CS/EE PhD's

Data: I received 26 responses which described 60 job offers. 79% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 21% were in the Midwest and East Coast. 30% of the job offers were from start-ups. 5% of the job offers were from a university.

Salary offers ranged from $132,888 to $145,000. The average salary offer was $123,972. The median salary offer was $138,944. One of the candidates was offered $43,000 because the individual was pursuing a Post-doc at a university which I did not include into the calculation.

About 45% of students were offered stock options. About 45% of students were offered signing bonuses. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $19,600 with an average of $6,150. Relocation assistance ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 with an average of $7,500. However, they may not have reported on all the benefits they r...

72 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread
felipepiresx
damn, i dropped out, so i guess this make me unemployable.
GuySensei
well..not really.. what are you good at?
pault
When I see these surveys from the top-tier universities, I often wonder what the ceiling is for those of us who are self-educated.
drido
Luckily for us, we can prove it. Not many people will ever get a chance to say, "hey, let me show you that I can do it". There aren't many hobbyist surgeons (I hope).
dodedo
I have no degree. Base salary 160k roughly 50-60k in equity/year. 10 years experience. I'm not at the top of my game yet.

I started at 70k with no experience no degree.

alexholehouse
I would perhaps argue that 70k starting with no experience or degree is very much not the norm. I'm not questioning you, but how/where?
Vishnevskiy
I have no actual work experience prior to my current job and no degree. I am 23 years old and I have a 6 figure salary and equity in the Bay Area. If you know people that know what you are capable of and can refer you to a company then an amazing resume is completely irrelevant. Last week I turned down a job offer from Blizzard Entertainment (was by referral) because they could not match my current salary.
Fliko
I'm jelly, you should post some your story for inspiration for all of us young people without a 6 figure salary :)
dodedo
You are questioning me, but it's fair. I should've said with minimal experience (nothing that'd be on my resume today).

It was a contracting gig. Hourly, operations and NOC type work.

plainOldText
you're not employable, but you can be selfemployable :)
biot
At least you're in good company: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many others were dropouts too. Your challenge is to prove that you can stack up against someone with that piece of paper if it's a job you're looking for.
Vishnevskiy
Depends if you are actually good at something. Great engineers easily find work anywhere.

I am drop out. It took me only 1 week of looking to get a 6 figure job in the Bay Area with equity. It is also my first real job. It is nice knowing that I am in my early 20s with no college debt. College is great for networking though.

apaprocki
I would be interested to know what % of students would state if asked whether they would prefer to stay in the Bay Area vs. relocate (assuming assistance) to another city. I know some companies on the East-coast don't focus too much energy on recruiting in West-coast schools because it is assumed there will already be a much lower % which would be willing to relocate in the first place. I'm just wondering what the actual survey #s would say and how tied the students are to the Bay Area tech culture.
hugh3
Salary offers ranged from $132,888 to $145,000. The average salary offer was $123,972. The median salary offer was $138,944. One of the candidates was offered $43,000 because the individual was pursuing a Post-doc at a university which I did not include into the calculation.

This makes me sad.

hemancuso
I'm more confused on how the average offer was lower than the bottom end of the range.
xtacy
It was probably a typo ($132,972)?
scottchin
Sad that Ph.D.s get such high offers from industry? Or sad that Post-Docs get such low offers from academia?
Legend
I hope its the latter :P
jballanc
$43,000 is actually a bit higher than what Post-docs in other science fields (esp. biology) can expect to make. Unfortunately, Post-doc salary is often fixed by the institutions making the grants (typically NSF or NIH) so there is no competition in the Post-doc market. This wouldn't be so bad if Post-docs still served their original purpose of bridging a Ph.D. from mentored researcher to independent investigator. Unfortunately, with fewer and fewer tenured positions (and the increasing life-span of currently tenured faculty, especially in the US where there is no mandatory retirement like some other countries), this is no longer the case. Originally, Post-docs were expected to spend 2 years until they could establish their own lab. Today, Post-doc periods of 6 or 8 years are not unheard of.
lutorm
In astrophysics, most postdocs seem to make between 45-60k. The grant agencies do not dictate what the salary is. There usually is a salary scale set by the institution, but I know that at least at UC Santa Cruz it ranged from $32k to $75k so did not in practice restrict the department from paying whatever they wanted.

I'm really surprised that a CS/EE postdoc would be paid only $43k, since they are more commercially viable than astro one.

emu
CS isn't a field where a postdoc is a mandatory step on the way to a professorship (unlike, say, physics). Postdocs in CS are not too common, so it's hard to generalize.
iqster
It wasn't common in areas like systems until recently. However, it has gotten common in the past 3 years. In "Theory", I thought most people did post-docs after their PhDs.
p4wnc6
The post-doc is now effectively mandatory in computer science academia like other fields. I don't know where this figure of 75k for an astrophysics post-doc comes from. The only 70k+ post-docs I've ever heard of are at government labs like Los Alamos. At Harvard, for example, post-docs make less than 50k per year (I'm a grad student there and have post-doc friends). If Harvard's Smithsonian center for astrophysics cannot pay market demanded prices for post-docs, then I just don't buy this claim that Santa Cruz could.

I second the sentiments mentioned above that the years and low-pay of a post-doc are depressing now that it is overwhelmingly likely that it won't lead to a tenured position.

_delirium
I wouldn't say it's mandatory; about half of my grad-school friends did post-docs, and half didn't. It depends strongly on your sub-area, and in part on how flexible you are on location and type of school. In some cases, people who take post-docs could've gotten professorships, but not at top-tier research universities, and preferred a year of post-doccing at Stanford to taking a professorship at a low-ranking school.
impendia
I left the software industry to go to grad school. I just finished a three-year postdoc. The pay was a little more generous, but in the same ballpark.

IMHO, it was the best gig in the world. I got to be at a fabulous university (Stanford) and was actively mentored by the world's leading experts in my subject area. I had a total of 120 teaching hours in the classroom over three years; no committee work; my only other duties were scholarship and research. It was like going to school, with the best teachers in the world, and with plenty of personal attention.

Oh, and they paid me.

metra
abi, sounds like all of these responses are for fresh grads (be it BS, MS, or Phd). It would be interesting to see the stats for offers after 1, 2, up to 10 years in industry. There was some element of 'hockey stick growth' for me from the year I graduated (unemployed for some months), to my first job (nothing to brag about, salary wise), to my second job (which is much better). I wonder if it will be the same for Stanford grads since they're already starting relatively high.
Periodic
It might also be interesting to control for prior experience. Some people enter the masters/PhD program with years of industry experience, as I did.

I'm a little sad to see that after five years in industry I made less than the median Stanford masters grad and was pretty much on par with the recipients of bachelors degrees. I should complete my masters by the end of the academic year and I'm starting to wonder how much I could conceivably be making so I know what to ask for during salary negotiations. I'm expecting my experience should help some, but but I bet the degree will be the eye catcher.

aelamb
I'm curious how well the study results reflect actual numbers of offers, salaries, and benefits. I would expect that since it's a voluntary survey, there would be some amount of the 'high school reunion effect' going on here and that the survey results would skew higher than the actual. In the same way that those who look good and have done well are more likely to attend a high school reunion, I would assume that those students who have had relatively successful job searches would be more likely to respond to the survey.
GuySensei
would be interesting to know how many graduates would be willing to join very early stage startups. humble salary, good equity, great idea, great work.
[dead] icn
What a freaking loser I am, I am a software engineer working in Vancouver ,Canada. I have cs master degree from a good university in Canada, I have 5 years experience, I am making around 65K.
stfu
The question is also how this data was "collected". I once was asked to fill out some survey of my school were I had to enter a salary number.

Knowing that this is going to be used most likely for some inter-school benchmark it is making very tempting to polish up the numbers.

emu
Since this is a copy of an email sent to CS students at Stanford, I'm not sure it's intended to be public information. One of the staff members in the CS department emails graduates every year to survey salary data and to ask about how useful the recruiting resources provided by the department are. I'd imagine the numbers accurately reflect the responses received, although as others have mentioned there may be biases in who chose to respond.
pagefruit
One thing I'm curious about is: at a larger software company like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, how much of a raise do you typically get every year?

Also, does Google's 10% across-the-board raise last year not apply to new hires?

webspiderus
To speak for the latter, Google's 10% across-the-board raise last year does apply to new hires, personally speaking. I'm surprised that my offer is above the MS median and average.
tensafefrogs
In google if you are really good you could maybe get promoted every 1.5 years, but realistically this is probably more like every 2-3 years.

Your pay then gets bumped to the next grade (or whatever grade you move in to in cases where you transfer laterally) and from what I can tell the increase can be 20-30% increase.

You also will get regular stock option/unit refreshes each year based on performance, so those will start to add up over the years and can be a substantial part of your income assuming the stock is doing ok (and historically it has).

ricw
Wow. Very high salaries indeed. What I find particularly interesting is that the PhD's clearly have absolutely no incentive of staying in academia. I wonder how bad an effect this has on academia..
iqster
CS PhDs might get paid this much in academia/research labs. This agrees with the lower proportion of folks who get stock options with their jobs (i.e. academic jobs don't come with options but research lab jobs sometimes do).
dkrich
That's a bit extreme. No financial incentive perhaps. I had a handful of professors in bschool who were widely known to be multimillionaires.
apu
It's bschool.
dkrich
So what? The inherent assumption is that graduating PhD have "absolutely no incentive" to remain in academia. I think multimillionaire profs are proof that it is just possible that people choose to teach for reasons entirely unrelated to pay.
emu
There's certainly no financial incentive for a Ph.D. graduate to remain in academia. That said, there is no financial incentive to do a Ph.D. in the first place. My understanding is that the opportunity cost (salary you didn't earn while doing your Ph.D.) is larger than the total expected extra earnings over your lifetime. My understanding is that by contrast a Masters degree is a good investment.

There are other reasons to stay in academia --- mostly to do with lifestyle. You have a lot more freedom to work on whatever interests you than in many other career paths.

kosei
There is certainly incentive to get a Ph.D. in many other studies (where the comparable industry salaries are much lower). Archaeology, East Asian Studies, etc.
anamax
> What I find particularly interesting is that the PhD's clearly have absolutely no incentive of staying in academia.

That's not clear.

The total net worth of Stanford's CS professors is a couple of billion dollars. Yes, Billion.

Then again, they have incredible "deal flow".

droithomme
This is very interesting, thank you so much for posting. I must say that I cringe when I see "Low numbers were discarded because of X" in surveys. There is always a reason for X, but if possibilities for X are not determined and justified prior to examining the data, then we are cherry picking.* I am glad though that the elimination of numbers was at least disclosed.

* People graduating with a degree from Stanford can be presumed to look for full time work at a salary sufficient to pay off student loans and live in a reasonable shelter and buy food and health care. Earning less than a restaurant manager as an intern is not what people choose, it's what they take when there are no better options. Discarding it as invalid salary information is not well justified ex post facto. If we decide in advance of gathering data to discard people doing internships because these are unfavorable situations and not average ones, why not also discard all the favorable situations that are not average ones as well, such as high salaries received in offers where the student has a relative or friend who helped him find an especially favorable position. Or any other arbitrary criteria chosen after the fact upon examination of the data.

alex1
> People graduating with a degree from Stanford can be presumed to look for full time work at a salary sufficient to pay off student loans.

I just wanted to point out that Stanford has a no-loan policy. Most Stanford graduates owe either nothing or very little in student loans (anecdotal evidence so correct me if I'm wrong).

robyates
For bachelor's and Ph. D. degree programs, this is true. In programs that have master's degrees (like CS for example), there are loans and aid comes from CAships or RAships.
balloot
I don't know where this claim comes from, but as a Stanford CS grad (MS) I never heard of such a thing. Stanford definitely offers loans.
mkjones
I believe this is only true for undergrads, and they started doing this in 06-07 or 07-08. I was undergrad '09 and definitely had loans for the first year or two, but not in subsequent years after they instated the "no required loans" policy.
alexsb92
Well as far as I remember from when applying (unsuccessfully) to Stanford, they have a need aware policy, which means that they do take into account the financials of the student. So a student in a well-off family would be more likely to get in than a student in a lower class family (all other things equal).

I'd assume that would be a reason for lower student debt.

mkjones
This is untrue. From the left column of http://www.stanford.edu/admission/:

"Students are admitted on a need-blind basis, and the university ensures that no admitted student is unable to attend."

ShabbyDoo
Let's say I was tasked with collecting and evaluating data about the selling price of homes in my community. Those interested in my findings likely are using the information to make financial decisions related to buying or selling a house. Now, let's say that one of the homes sold was not an arm's length sale -- a parent sold the house to a child for what appeared to be a very low price compared to other sales. Should this sale be included? Unlike the other sellers, maximizing the sale price was not a primary motivation. Including this data point would artificially lower average sale prices even though this individual seller's likely does not reflect his best financial option.

There are some graduates whose near-term primary motivation is not money. This is ok, but it is not correct to include those students in averages which will be used for the evaluation of the financial benefit of receiving an education from Stanford.

phamilton
"Salary offers ranged from $64,400 to $100,000. The average salary offer was $79,914. The median salary offer was $ 82,200."

Friends of mine got offers for 64k in Boise, ID. 64k seems low for the bay area. Or is 64k in a place like Boise, ID just a really good offer?

Sam_Odio
When we make new hires we give them the option of trading cash for equity. I've found $60k (with the rest in equity) to be a pretty popular choice.

Many seem to consider it to be the lowest salary where one can live comfortably in the valley (allowing one to take risk without going into debt).

vecter
I believe the cost of living in places like Boise is much less than places like SF/NYC, so that's relatively decent.
phamilton
With housing costs at almost half what they are in the valley, the cost of living is much lower in Boise.

I was there last summer on an internship and paying $550/month for a decent one bedroom.

orijing
> The candidates who were offered $120,000 was reporting directly to the VP of his research group

The candidates or the candidate? It seems like this candidate is easily identifiable... How many masters' grads from Stanford (145 responses) was offered 120,000 and reports to the VP of his research group?

This makes me wonder: How taboo is it to talk about your offers/comp details? When I get offers, I'm told to keep them confidential, but everyone knows that the numbers are openly discussed between friends.

snprbob86
This is a real problem. There were TWO of us at Drexel who interned one summer at Google. They published salary details BY EMPLOYER! I was livid when a professor made a snarky remark about how my internship paid better than his career. I gave the dean quite an earful over that.
orijing
> Salary offers ranged from $132,888 to $145,000. The average salary offer was $123,972. The median salary offer was $138,944.

How can the average be that much lower than the min?

jamesaguilar
I believe the colloquial term for this kind of event is "typo." Also "that much" is redundant because the average can never be lower than the min at all ;).
eel
Bay Area, Midwest, and East Coast are the three locations for each option, and they all add up to 100%. What about Southern Cali or the Pacific Northwest, both of which have at least some amounts of demand for CS graduates? I can't imagine they are 0%, so I'm guessing they are clumped with the Bay Area.
lakex24
For PhD's: "Salary offers ranged from $132,888 to $145,000. The average salary offer was $123,972."

how can the average be lower than $132,888?

headybrah
fuck this law school nonsense - wish I had computer science background
scatter
Thanks a lot, its very useful information. I wish I had this kind of information when I graduated.
teflonhook
You have an error with your PhD stats.
ashitvora
It would be interesting to see how many started their own startup.
agilebyte
If anyone is interested for UK data, then the UK government has a neat table here: http://data.gov.uk/appathon-2011

It is called "Salary of graduates by course topic (National Student Survey)"

strathmeyer
"I received 140 responses"

Uh... how many did you send out? How many people are unemployed? I had similar issues with my university, where I and everyone I knew made less than half the lowest quoted value, but had never received such a survey.