Question about the job status of the computer science field

[nickia]

Hi all,

I'm curious about the current job market for computer science/software engineer.


1. What is the supply and demand right now? I remember there were time where CS guys couldn't get a job but now it is much better is it due to the new tech boom?

2. How much does an undergrad get paid?

3. What about someone with experience in the field already who can lead project development?

[damnos]

Answered this so many times already, with the exception of Fall 2008 and the entire 2009, the market is always there, the demand is quite a lot - just check job listings at LinkedIn and other sites and you'll notice.
Of course it's not like the 2000s where jobs are like peanuts everywhere and you get paid so much, but it's also not like 2009 where nobody is hiring and recovering/surviving from recession.



2. How much does an undergrad get paid?


What's your qualification / experience (co-op)? What city? What kind of company?
In general, in Toronto a new grad could on average be $40k - 60k.



3. What about someone with experience in the field already who can lead project development?


That varies so much based on what your experiences are and what you can actually do.
Lead project means you've had like 5 - 10 years experience? you probably should be getting around the $100k mark.

Again salary range in this field can vary a lot.

[Mark77]

1. What is the supply and demand right now? I remember there were time where CS guys couldn't get a job but now it is much better is it due to the new tech boom?


"new tech boom"? Never heard of such a thing. CS grads still aren't able to find jobs in large numbers, and a new grad is basically competing with over a decade of underemployed/unemployed grads. You might see lot of job ads on various websites, but most of them demand 5-10 years of experience (even for positions that would be suited for new grads).


Headhunters/recruiters tend to duplicate ads posted by principals, trying to earn a commission. This has the effect of exxagerating the number of true opportunities available. A lot of ads are just downright fake as well (especially in the United States, for immigration purposes). For instance, many organizations post all jobs externally even when there is absolutely no possibility of an external candidate being hired. I even saw an instance of one job posted by a Calgary IT/engineering company being re-posted on websites like Workopolis and Monster no fewer than 20 times.



2. How much does an undergrad get paid?


$40k-$50k if you're lucky enough to find a job, in most cases. Its a field with very high unemployment, so employers often take a 'take it or leave it' approach.

$100k typically would be at 15 years of experience, ie: someone who graduated in the mid 1990s. Tech hiring past 2000/2001 has been relatively scarce as outsourcing and the collapse of many Canadian firms has been absolutely brutal towards the new grads. Even in the USA, where they didn't have a major national collapse of their industry, the hiring has been mostly of foreign guest workers.

http://i41.tinypic.com/1jorrn.jpg

The above chart was from a few years ago in the United States, but the 'visa' workers, especially for the younger workers, absolutely decimate the domestic workforce. From everything I've seen, the problem has only accelerated. If you integrate the area under those curves for 20-30-year-olds in the industry, ie: entry-level, its not too hard to see that "visa" workers (ie: foreigners) outnumber domestic workers by 3:1.

[resu]

Negate everything that comes out of Mark77's mouth and you'll get a pretty accurate picture of the current job market.

[Mark77]

Negate everything that comes out of Mark77's mouth and you'll get a pretty accurate picture of the current job market.

Hardly. $40-$60k as cited by the previous poster, isn't exactly a salary that shows there's a lot of demand. And everything I say is absolutely true. Its not all that atypical for a Canadian firm to receive 50+ resumes for each position they (barely) advertise in the CS/Software Engineering/EE fields. Advertised positions can attract hundreds, sometimes thousands of resumes from qualified individuals, meaning that selection is not likely to be based strictly on merit, but also contain a substantial random component or be on factors that aren't specific to the job.

Even the big brand-name tech firms in the USA, like Google, receive 1000X more resumes than they have jobs to fill. This is why the salaries on offer are relatively mediocre when viewed against the cost of living, and for the calibre of talent involved.

Look resu, I don't like talking about this. I think the state of the industry is absolutely disgusting, and the lives ruined by the industry immense. But I'm not going to sit here and mislead people when they ask about how the industry is doing.

[resu]

$40-60K is not good for a new grad? Most people I know will be graduating into $55-70K tech jobs in the GTA. That's not good enough? Name me another field where you can get that kind of pay (per hr, so forget IBD) with just a bachelor degree.

Everyone I know that is going to work for an American tech company are getting pay packages of 100K+. New grad. Hell, one guy got 120K + 100K staggered bonus over 3 years. Tech is the new IBD on the west coast.

edit: plus equity in some cases.

This is no slump. If anything, we're closing in on a replay of 2001.

[Mark77]

$40-60K is not good for a new grad? Most people I know will be graduating into $55-70K tech jobs in the GTA. That's not good enough? Name me another field where you can get that kind of pay (per hr, so forget IBD) with just a bachelor degree.


If you take a look at:

http://www.saskatoon.ca/DEPARTMENTS/City%20Clerks%20Office/Documents/Reports%20and%20Publications/2010PublicAccountsCombined.pdf

And search for "Programmer/Analyst" (ie: CS grad), you'll see salaries between $50k and $75k. Compare that to Constables, Firefighters. That's just one business (ie: the City of Saskatoon), but you don't even need a Bachelors degree to become a cop or a firefighter. The value of the Bachelors degree in CS is actually negative in those cases.



Everyone I know that is going to work for an American tech company are getting pay packages of 100K+. New grad. Hell, one guy got 120K + 100K staggered bonus over 3 years. Tech is the new IBD on the west coast.


Thats extremely uncommon. You must know some very rare, absolute geniuses. Go to the Cornell or UC Berkeley salary surveys, and you can see that the averages are closer to $85k working at top tier (ie: 1 in 1000 applicants hired) firms for the relatively few graduates that are actually hired (<40% of the graduating classes). And of course, top talent can submit hundreds of resumes and receive no response from the tech firms (nevermind even interviews), so there's not a particularly great amount of demand for talent out there.



This is no slump. If anything, we're closing in on a replay of 2001.

Hardly, its the same old story of the past decade, very few jobs, most of the hiring is done of foreigners, and domestic talent gets dumped off on the sidelines.

Even guys with upper quartile GPAs, dual degrees (ie: EE/CS, EP/CS, etc.) are finding themselves sidelined because the employers out there just aren't hiring domestically, and are ignoring the thousands of resumes submitted per job. Local teleco received 50+ resumes for a single engineering position. I don't know how you can call the field 'hot' when entry-level graduates don't even receive pay packages of the level paid to entry-level nurses, or pill counters. Nevermind the absolutely enormous levels of unemployment and non-responses to resumes from top talent in the field that is typical of the employers these days.

BTW, in 2001, the absolute floor for a CS and/or EE grad was $60k/year, as Nortel had a 'standing offer' for that salary (and plenty of firms paid more). You're outta your mind if you think we're anywhere near that peak, even in nominal dollars, set over a decade ago, and tech firms are notoriously picky as to who they hire as well when they actually interview people. $60k/year back then would be closer to $100k/year these days, and there is no evidence whatsoever that firms are paying that in Canada. Even in the Silicon Valley, $100k/year offers to entry-level grads are very uncommon.

As for the condition of the sector, it has been said that most of the actual earnings growth of the sector has ended up in the hands of one company -- Apple.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-25/markets/31235499_1_apple-chart-tech-sector-earnings

http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4f6efed769bedd5335000003/chart.jpg

If you strip out Apple, the tech sector has actually been in an earnings recession for the past 2 years. And it is well known that most of Apple's profit comes from cheaply manufacturing stuff overseas and selling it domestically using slick marketing campaigns -- not from paying its talent a lot of money. Most of the cost of making Apple's "stuff" happens in Asia, not the United States.

[resu]

No, the people I know are not geniuses. Above average in their program, but not 'gifted'. The gifted ones usually don't give a **** about money and go into academia.

Just because Nortel was once valued at whatever marketcap and paid whatever does not mean that it should be a benchmark. Are you saying that the bubble was justified? People were throwing millions at ridiculously stupid ideas. Kinda like what you see now with the recent startup craze. Instagram for a billion? :lol:

I didn't say that we are at the height of 2001, but we are clearly heading there. Are you actively looking for jobs Mark77? Have you interviewed for new grad jobs recently? Talked to HR/recruiters about the current job market?

"Even in the Silicon Valley, $100k/year offers to entry-level grads are very uncommon."

Go on glassdoor. See for yourself.

Where's the salary survey for Berkeley CS/EE grads? They are one of the top tech schools in terms of reputation and recruitment, so why does it matter if there are 1000 other applicants? They'll be at the top of the resume stack regardless...

[damnos]

Negate everything that comes out of Mark77's mouth and you'll get a pretty accurate picture of the current job market.

:arrowu: Best advice that you can get when you are asking for advice in this forum.

[rolledoats]

If you take a look at:

http://www.saskatoon.ca/DEPARTMENTS/City%20Clerks%20Office/Documents/Reports%20and%20Publications/2010PublicAccountsCombined.pdf

And search for "Programmer/Analyst" (ie: CS grad), you'll see salaries between $50k and $75k. Compare that to Constables, Firefighters. That's just one business (ie: the City of Saskatoon), but you don't even need a Bachelors degree to become a cop or a firefighter. The value of the Bachelors degree in CS is actually negative in those cases.
So...become a firefighter then. IMO, they earn it.


BTW, in 2001, the absolute floor for a CS and/or EE grad was $60k/year, as Nortel had a 'standing offer' for that salary (and plenty of firms paid more). You're outta your mind if you think we're anywhere near that peak, even in nominal dollars, set over a decade ago, and tech firms are notoriously picky as to who they hire as well when they actually interview people. $60k/year back then would be closer to $100k/year these days, and there is no evidence whatsoever that firms are paying that in Canada. Even in the Silicon Valley, $100k/year offers to entry-level grads are very uncommon.

That's called a bubble. You're outta your mind if you think those salaries had any connection to reality.

[siriuskao]

It's year 2012. Why are we still talking about 2001 & Nortel?

CompSci is a very flexible field - many of us don't even write code for a living. For the Saskatoon salary survey, if you include other keywords such as "technology", "systems analyst", you get a reasonable range of 50K-120K (management).

[Mark77]

It's year 2012. Why are we still talking about 2001 & Nortel?

Because there are still thousands of grads from 2001/2002, etc., that are unemployed in Canada because the Canadian industry collapsed, perhaps? Nortel hired over half of the CS and ECE grads that came out of Canadian universities in the 1990s, and there was nothing to replace that demand in the 2000s, leaving the hoardes of people who studied CS/IT/ECE/CompE/EE mostly unemployed. US firms stopped hiring Canadians in any significant numbers as well, turning their sights to guest workers in India.

The people who claim that things are hot are obviously not in the industry because when firms receive 50, 100, sometimes 1000 resumes for each position, that can only mean one thing -- that a ton of talent must be sidelined.

Even "Glassdoor" doesn't support $100k starting salaries for new grads by any stretch of the imagination, and once again, most of the firms on "glassdoor" are those receiving hundreds of resumes per position.

[Mark77]

I didn't say that we are at the height of 2001, but we are clearly heading there. Are you actively looking for jobs Mark77? Have you interviewed for new grad jobs recently? Talked to HR/recruiters about the current job market?

Yes, all of the above, and I've seen absolutely no evidence that we're anywhere near 2001 conditions. In fact, the situation probably hasn't ever been so dreadful for grads as the sector is now only barely returning to 2008 employment levels with hundreds of thousands of foreign guest workers imported in the meantime, displacing hundreds of thousands of domestic workers, new grads, etc.

Employment quality has dropped as well from what I've seen. Instead of high-end engineers being hired, there's a lot of lower-end technicians. Apple Store employees, for example, are classified as IT workers. Most of Apple's headcount growth is in these relatively low-end workers, not high-end software or engineering talent.



Where's the salary survey for Berkeley CS/EE grads? They are one of the top tech schools in terms of reputation and recruitment, so why does it matter if there are 1000 other applicants? They'll be at the top of the resume stack regardless...

https://career.berkeley.edu/major/major.stm

Specifically, for CS:

https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm


Average Salary = $80,484
Employment rate = 65%

Berkeley and Stanford are the two main CS schools with close proximity to the Silicon Valley and its employers.

Why does it matter that theres 1000 other applicants at firms like Google, Cisco, Facebook, etc? Because with that many applicants, firms really aren't able to assess them all on their merits. A large number of the resumes under such circumstances wouldn't even receive human review (ie: Facebook uses an automated script to reject applicants, probably based on schools attended, or number of FB friends in an applicant's profile, delivering rejections in mere seconds).

Stanford publishes salary statistics as well:

http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads


Computer Science (Bachelors) = $83,294

(yes, that $200k BSCS from Stanford only gets you an average starting salary similar to that of a San Jose police officer!)

[yads12]

I'd assume the market is location dependent. If you're willing to relocate, the demand for software developers and business analysts in Calgary is pretty high. That is for intermediate/senior positions. Not 100% on new grads.

[siriuskao]

Because there are still thousands of grads from 2001/2002, etc., that are unemployed in Canada because the Canadian industry collapsed, perhaps? Nortel hired over half of the CS and ECE grads that came out of Canadian universities in the 1990s, and there was nothing to replace that demand in the 2000s, leaving the hoardes of people who studied CS/IT/ECE/CompE/EE mostly unemployed. ...

They are irrelevant in today's IT job market if they've been out of the game for that long. IMHO they pose absolutely zero threat to new grads.

[Mark77]

They are irrelevant in today's IT job market if they've been out of the game for that long. IMHO they pose absolutely zero threat to new grads.

Hardly. Firms that receive hundreds of resumes aren't likely to give good pay or raises until they stop receiving hundreds of resumes for each position open from the tens of thousands of Canadians with high level IT skills who are underemployed/unemployed. IT skills don't just dissappear overnight. In many respects, those grads from the turn of the century are brighter/better quality than the new grads because of life experience, and graduation in a far more competitive environment (ie: enrolment quotas were common in the late 1990s, but now the CS schools reek of desperation that many have lowered their standards).

Unlike some other lines of work, IT skills are relatively easy to keep current on. Computers are cheap, everyone owns one, reading material is available online for free, etc.

[yads12]

Hardly. Firms that receive hundreds of resumes aren't likely to give good pay or raises until they stop receiving hundreds of resumes for each position open from the tens of thousands of Canadians with high level IT skills who are underemployed/unemployed. IT skills don't just dissappear overnight. In many respects, those grads from the turn of the century are brighter/better quality than the new grads because of life experience, and graduation in a far more competitive environment (ie: enrolment quotas were common in the late 1990s, but now the CS schools reek of desperation that many have lowered their standards).

Unlike some other lines of work, IT skills are relatively easy to keep current on. Computers are cheap, everyone owns one, reading material is available online for free, etc.

This can't be further from the truth. What industries are you comparing IT to? It's probably one of the hardest to keep current on as technologies change on a constant basis. Companies that are looking to hire are looking for people with professional experience with technology X. A guy who hasn't maintained his skills for 10+ years is going to be on basically the same footing as a new grad, since they basically have the same experience working with the technology of the day.

[Mark77]

This can't be further from the truth.


How so? Have computers changed fundmentally in the past decade? Are there any new programming languages in the past decade? Hardly. Anyone moving into a new job will have to change the programming environment they work in, whether it be to use different API's used by the business, or to different processes. If they could learn that a decade ago, they certainly can learn it now.



What industries are you comparing IT to? It's probably one of the hardest to keep current on as technologies change on a constant basis.


I disagree. The basics remain very similar, and the modern tools have only made things easier in many aspects. What exactly has changed in the networking realm? Practically nothing, other than we have 10gig-E instead of 1gig-E, and other non-IP, non-Ethernet technologies have mainly dissappeared. What has changed in programming? .NET and Java are the same programming languages today as they were 10 years ago. Python isn't hard to know if you learned perl. Etc. The big learning curves of the 1990s, ie: the transition to IP networking from previous architectures, socket programming, Unix, GUI OO programming instead of procedural text-based, etc., largely don't exist today and haven't for the past 13-15 years worth of grads. Even with mobile/tablet app development, most of the learning curve is in UI development, and of course, API familiarization. Very few, if any CS programs out there go into a lot of depth with platform-specific APIs, so a new CS grad would have to learn that stuff anyways or read a tutorial.

Heck, in my favourite area, embedded software development, things have become dramatically easier because one can buy cheap ARM micros and run Linux on them in a lot of cases, instead of slower micros that may have involved writing a lot of assembly language code. I would've killed to have had cheap Linux-capable SoC's for my thesis project, instead of what I used -- it would've cut my project down from 6 months, to maybe 6 weeks.



Companies that are looking to hire are looking for people with professional experience with technology X. A guy who hasn't maintained his skills for 10+ years is going to be on basically the same footing as a new grad, since they basically have the same experience working with the technology of the day.

The new grads aren't being hired, nor are the 10+ year guys, for the most part, in significant numbers. The real hiring is being done of foreigners on various work visas in the United States -- close to half a million of them in the past 5 years just on the H-1B program alone.

[resu]

Yes, all of the above, and I've seen absolutely no evidence that we're anywhere near 2001 conditions. In fact, the situation probably hasn't ever been so dreadful for grads as the sector is now only barely returning to 2008 employment levels with hundreds of thousands of foreign guest workers imported in the meantime, displacing hundreds of thousands of domestic workers, new grads, etc.

Employment quality has dropped as well from what I've seen. Instead of high-end engineers being hired, there's a lot of lower-end technicians. Apple Store employees, for example, are classified as IT workers. Most of Apple's headcount growth is in these relatively low-end workers, not high-end software or engineering talent.



https://career.berkeley.edu/major/major.stm

Specifically, for CS:

https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm



Berkeley and Stanford are the two main CS schools with close proximity to the Silicon Valley and its employers.

Why does it matter that theres 1000 other applicants at firms like Google, Cisco, Facebook, etc? Because with that many applicants, firms really aren't able to assess them all on their merits. A large number of the resumes under such circumstances wouldn't even receive human review (ie: Facebook uses an automated script to reject applicants, probably based on schools attended, or number of FB friends in an applicant's profile, delivering rejections in mere seconds).

Stanford publishes salary statistics as well:

http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads



(yes, that $200k BSCS from Stanford only gets you an average starting salary similar to that of a San Jose police officer!)

I'm sure you know how averages and medians work.

These are surveys of GRADUATING students. 65% of the class securing a job before graduation is pretty damn impressive. With a sample size of 17 and 37 the curve is going to be skewed. I'm pretty sure you know this but chose to ignore it because it doesn't fit with your view of the world :facepalm:

Look at those max values, those are the ones going to silicon valley.

Does it ever make you wonder why the rest of this forum paints a contradicting view of your job market assesment?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/lessons-from-canadas-silicon-valley-diaspora/article2346666/singlepage/

I guess all these Canadians are selling overprices Apple products or working at a In-n-Out right?

[Mark77]

These are surveys of GRADUATING students. 65% of the class securing a job before graduation is pretty damn impressive. With a sample size of 17 and 37 the curve is going to be skewed. I'm pretty sure you know this but chose to ignore it because it doesn't fit with your view of the world


Isn't it weird that Stanford, Cornell, and UC Berkeley's salary surveys can only conjure up around a 30-40% participation rate? The people who don't respond can mostly be presume to be unemployed. And if you look at the destinations for the graduates, most of them are remaining in the Silicon Valley (or going to NYC), which means that a substantial number of them, by definition (actually half of them) are below the median pay.

And those are Stanford, UCB, Cornell's numbers -- Stanford and UCB being undisputably the leaders in the region's IT industry. Imagine how bad things must be for students of lesser schools that are far less competitive to enter. UCB only admits 1 in 10 applicants, while UWaterloo, UToronto, Queen's, etc., basically turn away hardly anybody.





Look at those max values, those are the ones going to silicon valley.


Hardly, you can see the list of employers for UCB, and most of them are going to the Silicon Valley (or NYC, in the case of Goldman Sachs).



Does it ever make you wonder why the rest of this forum paints a contradicting view of your job market assesment?


This forum is dominated by students who haven't had the unpleasurable experience of graduating in the top quartile of their class, submitting their resume to hundreds of employers in this apparently 'hot' industry, and receiving no response, perhaps?



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/lessons-from-canadas-silicon-valley-diaspora/article2346666/singlepage/

I guess all these Canadians are selling overprices Apple products or working at a In-n-Out right?

The 80s and 90s brought a lot of Canadians down there, no denying that. But the trend largely slowed to a trickle in the 2000s as tech firms shifted their hiring to India. Most of the people in that article were at least 35 years old or older, which is consistent with emigration to the USA in the 1990s.

[resu]

This forum is dominated by students who haven't had the unpleasurable experience of graduating in the top quartile of their class, submitting their resume to hundreds of employers in this apparently 'hot' industry, and receiving no response, perhaps?


So this is why? You weren't successful, so everyone else can't be successful?

When was the last time you applied for a job in the tech industry?

You are simply ignoring all the facts that contradict your, um, unique view of the world. If that makes you feel good, no harm done, but you shouldn't mislead people.

btw, those numbers are averages. medians would be much more representative, and would likely be closer to the 100K mark.

[Mark77]

So this is why? You weren't successful, so everyone else can't be successful?

The statistical data shows that not very many people are 'successful' if you define 'success' in terms of those wildly unrealistic and uncommon numbers you are throwing around.

Most common, of the grads of UW, UToronto, and most Canadian schools in CS is that, if they can find a job, they're going to be starting in the $40-$60k range, and extremely few of them will be invited to those United States-based tech firms. It is dishonest to suggest it is happening on a widespread basis.

Also, as can be shown using immigration figures in the United States and overall IT employment figures, the number of Canadian and US workers in the IT industry has dropped by 500,000 since 2008. Some, but not all of this was achieved through minimal hiring of new grads.

If new grad hiring is so common and for such top salaries as you suggest, where are the job postings for 0-2 years of experience? There aren't many, and the ones that do exist, good luck getting a response from them.



When was the last time you applied for a job in the tech industry?


Today. Why I bother to add my resume to the 200 others on the pile, I don't know...



btw, those numbers are averages. medians would be much more representative, and would likely be closer to the 100K mark.

Not even close, as for the median to be higher than the average, there would have to be a ton of people working for practically peanuts, and then a very sharp discontinuity in the salary data. But nice try at exxageration.

[Piro21]

$100k typically would be at 15 years of experience, ie: someone who graduated in the mid 1990s. Tech hiring past 2000/2001 has been relatively scarce as outsourcing and the collapse of many Canadian firms has been absolutely brutal towards the new grads. Even in the USA, where they didn't have a major national collapse of their industry, the hiring has been mostly of foreign guest workers.

http://i41.tinypic.com/1jorrn.jpg

The above chart was from a few years ago in the United States, but the 'visa' workers, especially for the younger workers, absolutely decimate the domestic workforce. From everything I've seen, the problem has only accelerated. If you integrate the area under those curves for 20-30-year-olds in the industry, ie: entry-level, its not too hard to see that "visa" workers (ie: foreigners) outnumber domestic workers by 3:1.

OP, even if you're swayed by this poor attempt to mislead you, remind yourself that these are US statistics and Canadians make up a large percentage of the hated foreign visa workers on this chart.

[Mark77]

OP, even if you're swayed by this poor attempt to mislead you, remind yourself that these are US statistics and Canadians make up a large percentage of the hated foreign visa workers on this chart.

TN-1's aren't significant in the US tech industry's labour force, so those immigrants definitely aren't Canadians, that's for sure. Mostly Indian nationals. Read AFL-CIO's report which just came out recently:

http://dpeaflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/Gaming-the-System-2012-Revised.pdf

The few visa workers from Canada aren't even worthy of mention -- because there's so few. Yet page 19 of the report shows most of the visa workers are from India on L-1, and on H-1B (page 8) as well. L-1 and H-1B being the main work visas in use in the tech industry.

Nice try at the "attempt to mislead" though. The data, as well as anecdotal "on the ground" experience quite clearly shows that Canadians, as foreign participants in the US labour market, have been muscled out in favour of people from India, and to a far lesser extent, China.

[Mark77]

You're going to use a union website as impartial evidence?


The AFL-CIO (yeah, ick, shudder, yuck) paper is well-referenced, so you can certainly follow the references if you want if you don't like the author of the report.



All of us are just lying about the people we know that have easily found jobs in the US with a CS degree.

I know a couple guys too, because I'm in the field, but I'm not going to sit here and lie about how common it is. Of the ~100 guys with CS, EE, and other IT professional degrees, I know a grand total of around 5 that are in the US. One just left Apple because they wouldn't stop jerking him around, BTW, after 5 years there.

You and the other poster might get away with exxagerating to friends and industry outsiders about the true state of the CS and IT professions, but the facts speak for themselves in terms of the high unemployment and poor job opportunities out there for domestic talent.

I know you don't like me, and I know you think I am a dirty racist, but this issue affects Indian-Canadians, Chinese-Canadians, just as much as it affects European-Canadians and Japanese Canadians. US tech firms are addicted to cheap Indian, non-citizen labour, on guest worker visas that are held by the employer, not by the employee, such as H-1B and L-1. Most of the hiring in the past decade has been of these workers, not of Canadians, not of the best and brightest talent coming out of the US schools.

[Piro21]

TN-1's aren't significant in the US tech industry's labour force, so those immigrants definitely aren't Canadians, that's for sure. Mostly Indian nationals. Read AFL-CIO's report which just came out recently:

http://dpeaflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/Gaming-the-System-2012-Revised.pdf

The few visa workers from Canada aren't even worthy of mention -- because there's so few. Yet page 19 of the report shows most of the visa workers are from India on L-1, and on H-1B (page 8) as well. L-1 and H-1B being the main work visas in use in the tech industry.

Nice try at the "attempt to mislead" though.

You're going to use a union website as impartial evidence? Really? I guess the OP can just ignore everything else anyone has to say in this thread, you're spouting the truth, Mark. Everyone who has friends that have easily found jobs in the US with a CS degree are lying.

[Waiwai]

I am not sure what the undergrad (fresh out of college/university) situation is right now, so I won't comment on that.

I have roughly 5 years experience in software development and I find that finding new work is not difficult when I looked a year ago. I only have my resume up on Monster/Workopolis [which isn't even updated], I do not actively look for work, but I get a few recruiters contacting me every month for a job opening. I imagine that if I am on LinkedIn, I would get even more requests.

In terms of salary, I would say that $40,000 - $60,000 is about right. There are situations where you may get more, I would be bank more on the middle ground depending on what you are doing.

Good luck with your career.

[Mark77]

I am not sure what the undergrad (fresh out of college/university) situation is right now, so I won't comment on that.

I have roughly 5 years experience in software development and I find that finding new work is not difficult when I looked a year ago. I only have my resume up on Monster/Workopolis [which isn't even updated], I do not actively look for work, but I get a few recruiters contacting me every month for a job opening. I imagine that if I am on LinkedIn, I would get even more requests.


Yeah the experience of people in, say, software development, is certain to be somewhat different from that of hardware development, firmware, or certain other disciplines.

EE salaries used to be at a substantial premium over CS salaries, in terms of new grads. These days, because there is very little hardware, and mostly just applications software work going on, the premium has largely dissappeared, with CS majors, in many cases, actually seeing higher salaries overall.

In the Canadian context, much of this can be chalked up to the collapse of Nortel and various firms that performed work in that area.

[resu]

The statistical data shows that not very many people are 'successful' if you define 'success' in terms of those wildly unrealistic and uncommon numbers you are throwing around.

Most common, of the grads of UW, UToronto, and most Canadian schools in CS is that, if they can find a job, they're going to be starting in the $40-$60k range, and extremely few of them will be invited to those United States-based tech firms. It is dishonest to suggest it is happening on a widespread basis.

Also, as can be shown using immigration figures in the United States and overall IT employment figures, the number of Canadian and US workers in the IT industry has dropped by 500,000 since 2008. Some, but not all of this was achieved through minimal hiring of new grads.

If new grad hiring is so common and for such top salaries as you suggest, where are the job postings for 0-2 years of experience? There aren't many, and the ones that do exist, good luck getting a response from them.



Today. Why I bother to add my resume to the 200 others on the pile, I don't know...



Not even close, as for the median to be higher than the average, there would have to be a ton of people working for practically peanuts, and then a very sharp discontinuity in the salary data. But nice try at exxageration.

Maybe it's because your analytical skills aren't that great? You have 17 data points, from 20k-120k, average is ~80K. First of all, the sample size is ****, and you're trying to extrapolate this to ALL of north american universities? It's not exaggeration, it's STAT101.

Sounds to me you're just trying to justify your own failed attempts at finding a job in the tech industry.

You cannot find new grad postings? They are everywhere. Just check the recruitment calendar of any respectable university. I've had more than 15 interviews with American companies and I'm barely above average in my program...

[siriuskao]

Hardly. Firms that receive hundreds of resumes aren't likely to give good pay or raises until they stop receiving hundreds of resumes for each position open from the tens of thousands of Canadians with high level IT skills who are underemployed/unemployed. IT skills don't just dissappear overnight. In many respects, those grads from the turn of the century are brighter/better quality than the new grads because of life experience, and graduation in a far more competitive environment (ie: enrolment quotas were common in the late 1990s, but now the CS schools reek of desperation that many have lowered their standards).

Unlike some other lines of work, IT skills are relatively easy to keep current on. Computers are cheap, everyone owns one, reading material is available online for free, etc.

Employer care about real project experience, not what you can do at your home test lab. For example, running linux servers at home is valued differently than running servers hosting mission critical enterprise environment. Therefore, without relevant work experience, a grad with a 10 years old compsci degree is no longer competitive.

[yads12]

How so? Have computers changed fundmentally in the past decade? Are there any new programming languages in the past decade? Hardly. Anyone moving into a new job will have to change the programming environment they work in, whether it be to use different API's used by the business, or to different processes. If they could learn that a decade ago, they certainly can learn it now.


You're looking at it from a pretty narrow viewpoint. There are a bunch of fundamental changes to development practices in the past decade: emergence of mobile development, Agile development methodologies, NoSQL, just to name a few things off the top of my head.



I disagree. The basics remain very similar, and the modern tools have only made things easier in many aspects. What exactly has changed in the networking realm? Practically nothing, other than we have 10gig-E instead of 1gig-E, and other non-IP, non-Ethernet technologies have mainly dissappeared. What has changed in programming? .NET and Java are the same programming languages today as they were 10 years ago. Python isn't hard to know if you learned perl. Etc. The big learning curves of the 1990s, ie: the transition to IP networking from previous architectures, socket programming, Unix, GUI OO programming instead of procedural text-based, etc., largely don't exist today and haven't for the past 13-15 years worth of grads. Even with mobile/tablet app development, most of the learning curve is in UI development, and of course, API familiarization. Very few, if any CS programs out there go into a lot of depth with platform-specific APIs, so a new CS grad would have to learn that stuff anyways or read a tutorial.

Heck, in my favourite area, embedded software development, things have become dramatically easier because one can buy cheap ARM micros and run Linux on them in a lot of cases, instead of slower micros that may have involved writing a lot of assembly language code. I would've killed to have had cheap Linux-capable SoC's for my thesis project, instead of what I used -- it would've cut my project down from 6 months, to maybe 6 weeks.


Not really, don't know about Java, but here are some major things that have changed in .NET since it was launched: Nullable types, Generics, Linq, Dynamic types, Optional method signatures, ASP.NET MVC (which itself is on its 3d iteration going on 4), Web Api, WPF, WCF (again these things are just off the top of my head and are fairly broad). I can guarantee you that someone who hasn't kept up with changes in .NET for 5 years, let alone 10, wouldn't be able to get up to speed as quickly as you're making it seem.