[purewater]

$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...)

[mkjones]

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?

[burgerbrain]

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.

[mkjones]

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.

[cpeterso]

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-...

[allenc]

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.