Capitalism happens? Seriously, anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented CS people are near $100k. Anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented English majors are near... well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate. This is Mr. Market saying "Thanks, I've got enough literary criticism -- can I please, please, please have more code monkeys?"
"well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate"
I've noted your past fixation on English majors and their lack of financial success, and not sure why you single them out. Lit crit-saddled academia and coffeeshops aren't the only path for the English major. Writing is not only a noble pursuit but a lucrative[1] one (even if you skirt the legacy publishing industry), with as much a combination of hard work and dedication to craft (and luck) as, for example, selling bingo card generators for a living, or mobile phone games, or b2b CRUD apps, or facebook farming simulators.
Aside from fiction writing, there are ad copy and marketing writers, technical writers, screen and television writers, bloggers, journos, etc. Most of those are salaried positions, not necessarily part time/contract work.
It's really not that bad out there. For the record, I've never worked at a coffeeshop :D
If the grandparent is indeed right and OP's intention is as you say, it even more trite. If even the sample was not correctly chosen, I am not sure I would believe the generalization :P
True, but I'd wager the most lucrative forms of writing (outside the lottery win of a fiction bestseller or successfully navigating the Hollywood game) are only minimally related to the passions that drive people to major in English.
Majoring in English to write marketing copy is like majoring in CS to write soundboard Android apps. It'll help, but ...
Majoring and doing well in English develops good analytical and analysis skills. You learn to read between the lines -- it's not a trivial field of study.
Also, going to college is supposed to be about training your mind. Writing an Android app doesn't require a CS degree, but getting a CS degree instills certain habits that enable you to succeed in programming.
Humf. I took many semesters of welding and it taught me a great deal about how the human world is bodged together at the very lowest levels. Welding as a major is as hard a science as Mechanical or Electrical engineering. Its two parts mechanical engineering, one part chemistry and one part electrical engineering. Lives almost always depend on your work, there's rigorous certifications and civil engineers treat you with almost religious respect.
I'm really liking this thread. Everytime someone tries to dismiss a major or course as being somehow inferior, another person chimes in with a view point that blows said dismissal out of the water.
I'm sure there are CS majors now in the workforce that just crank out their requisite number of lines each day, the work that many like to deify as an analytical blend of art and science becoming a routine drag.
And there are welders who take pride in their work and are treated with religious respect by civil engineers.
CMU is big into big robots (as opposed to e.g. MIT's Randy Brooks' little robots), and in one book or article on their program one of their CS undergraduates who was "perfect" at welding stainless steel was mentioned. "I don't think we're going to let him graduate", one of his professors said in jest.
I'm not knocking welders, but if you want to go to school and come out with a specific job, you go to a school that turns you into a specialist, in this case a welder!
I worked on a farm in high school, mostly throwing hay, feeding animals and doing various odd jobs. That experience taught me alot, and left a much stronger mark on me than my CS education.
Arts is very easy to get in to in Australia. Law is far harder. At most of Australia's top Universities you have to be in the top 0.5% of high school students.
Admittedly a large number of Law Grads use Law as an engineering decree for government and other administrative work, but still.
I think we're on a tangent here. My point is that law is at least as good as teaching "soft" analytic skills as english literature, with the happy side-effect that it comes with a career path built in if you want it.
As for getting into law, there are universities outside the Group of 8 who'll accept lower scores.
I majored in English and I'm working as a paralegal... I don't know if there are cultural differences, but in the US there are plenty of English majors who go to law school, I actually think I know more of them than actual Political Science majors.
It's a different system. In Australia law is taken as an undergraduate degree. You leave high school and enrol directly in law. When you finish, if you want to be a lawyer, you either get a Graduate Certificate in Legal Practice or take an associateship.
Hm... perhaps you're just not as familiar with advertising/marketing as you think? There are tons of English majors who write ad copy. Case and point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bernbach
William Bernbach, founder of DDB, famous copywriter, and... drumroll please English major. Note, this is just a famous example I knew off the top of my head, but if you go look on LinkedIn there are tons of people in the ad industry with English majors.
When patio11 mentions literary criticism I take him to mean what goes by the name English major today. We can be pretty sure than what those two did in their majors in the '20s to very early '30s was very different than what many if not most do today.
Even if it's literary criticism, for today that's mostly done in a way that's much less broadly focused, right? E.g. who outside of academia and some narrow related circles cares about deconstruction? (Admittedly, some of that is due to cultural changes where literature has lost a tremendous amount of "market share" to modern media starting with movies and radio.)
I have nothing against writing, or other forms of communication. I've called myself a professional communicator since graduation. I think writing (and secondarily oral communication) is the most underemphasized professional skill for engineers. I agree that there are many lucrative and socially beneficial things that one can do with it. Writing is wonderful!
English degrees, on the other hand, do not ordinarily teach or imply possession of commercially valuable skills. They're hardly the only liberal arts degree with this problem: I have one in East Asian Studies from an excellent school. I learned to speak Japanese in the course of getting that degree -- that makes me employable even in the absence of any of my other talents. However, many people with my degree don't end up conversational in any other language. Virtually no business anywhere will pay for my ability to tell you, at length, about how the history of the Japanese family register screws over nth-generation Japanese Koreans. (To say nothing of the vastly more common research focus of EAS graduates: Naruto fandom.)
"English degrees, on the other hand, do not ordinarily teach or imply possession of commercially valuable skills."
Writing is an integral (I'd say a keystone) component of an English degree: The critique and analysis of others' writing as well as your own. Additionally, the development of said writing skills is supplemented with supportive activities such as peer review of others' papers and theses as well as incidentals such as submission to academic journals and creative writing periodicals, both on- and off-campus.
That's why newsdesks and tech writing bullpens as well as copywriting departments often require an English degree; it infers a seasoned level of both creative and expository writing and a supposition of deadline steadfastness (in the context of writing) that is simply not taught in any other concentration.
But, you're right. Degrees of any stripe shouldn't determine the fitness of one's abilities in the real world. After all, Larry Wall studied music and linguistics (with the intent on transcribing and creating a writing system for indigenous African tribal languages) in college, then turned around and created Perl while working at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Many degrees are not meant to train the holder in a specific set of trade skills: rather, they're meant to help train a mind that can take on many different complex real-world situations.
For example, I have a degree in economics. Literally speaking, I don't do economics on a day to day basis. But the skills it taught me in dealing with complex situations, making quantitative decisions, and dealing with uncertainty has been incredibly important in my business career, even though nobody's ever asked me to diagram an AD/AS curve.
I'm a paralegal/technical writer who majored in English and took some Engineering classes as well. Thanks for the comment, I really appreciate it because hey, I always thought you should play to your strengths, but more importantly do what interests you most. I was always great at math, but I was more interested in debate, writing, philosophy, etc. A ton of people out there have tried to make me feel like crap about it, but I'm happy with my situation and what I am involved with.
This kind of argument infuriates me. Mr. Market wants lots of things, some of them are good, some aren't. Besides, would a talented English major even want to be a full-time developer? Would you want to work with them?
Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
Kids in high school and even in early years of college have a lot to choose from. I was seriously considering medicine and econ but eventually chose a math/CS major.
In the abstract you're right to question what Mr. Market wants. But in this specific case, it's clear why the economy would be more productive if more people knew how to code. (And coding doesn't incur negative externalities.)
It's not just finance+energy salaries driving up programmer wages.
Exactly. Everyone should do what they enjoy. I'm not going to go chase some job I don't feel interested in to make 5-10% more a year but be miserable doing it.
$100K that's utter bs. Anecdotes mean squat. Most CS graduates start at around 45-50k. Suggesting that even a a sizeable minority makes 100k out of college is being ill-informed at best and dishonest at worst. If we are talking in terms of anecdotes, I know several history majors making good money working for the city whereas some new CS majors are still working at bestbuy.
Here's the nationwide average http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Bachelor_of_Scien... .The average pay for a senior software engineer is 77-101k. Hardly the 80k norm for fresh grads that the OP is suggesting. It might be the case at Stanford(although I'd need to see statistics before I concede that) but the op's explanation for the trend mentioned in the article was a broad indictment non-cs majors rather than it being specific to the culture at stanford. Google Pays $8000 a month interns? They hire co-op students out of my school $14,000 for the entire 4 month term which comes out to about 3500 a month.
Where are the 80k$-120k$ offers coming from, geographically? The reason I ask is that 80k in S.F. is roughly... 50k in Austin, TX. 120k in S.F. is roughly equivalent to 70k in Austin. (Based on Salary.com's cost of living calculator.) 50-70k is probably a nice starting salary in Austin, but not exactly mind-blowing, imho.
Google, for example, pays $8,000 a month - just for interns!
Do you have a source for this? That seems exceedingly high. And even higher on an annual basis that the entry level salary you're mentioning.
Though I could see how paying a few extra thousands could help convince a college grad to take an internship there. Google then has their foot in the door… (but still, it would be odd to then get an offer for less than what you were making as an intern)
Also, these salary threads from the past couple of days make me feel underpaid.
I'm graduating from Stanford with a BS in CS this year and I'm interning at Google this summer, and I'm being paid less than $8000/month. I've also been told that I'm being paid a "master's intern" rate, so presumably interns who haven't completed their bachelor's are being paid less. That said, Google's intern salaries are extremely generous (just not $8000/month generous).
Also, the Stanford CS department conducts a salary survey of graduates every year, and for 2009-2010 the average salary offer for CS/EE undergrads was $79,333 and the median was $80,0000.
I do have a source for this, I saw the offer myself. I was also told that this is given to all interns, no matter what department. That being said, maybe this applied only to grad interns - maybe undergraduates get less.
Reading this thread and the other salary thread I have noticed a disturbing trend among developers i.e the amount of greed. It seems that a lot of developers are motivated by finances rather than pure reasons of love of programming. msluyter's post exemplifies this perfectly. In what universe is 50-70k not mindblowing for a fresh grad? That is more money than enough money to live comfortably in most places in North-America. I'm not graduated yet but just last summer I worked for this company making 3k a month for the entire summer (36k for the year) and I had more money than I knew what to do with. Here's my expenditures:
After taxes and other deductions I took approx 2200/month. $475/ month for rent living with a roommate. $55 for internet. ~$50 for monthly bus pass. $150/month for food. $100-150 miscellaneous utilities. All in that's about $880 a month for essentials. That left me with $1320 a month spending money. I bought video games, went to movies etc and still had a lot of spare cash. This with co-op pay of 3k a month. I cannot see a reason how anyone can say that 50-70k is not enough, except greed run amok.
It's not greed, it's lifestyle inflation from being a grown up, combined with location. You are a student, you don't have a family or a car, and you can tolerate living with room mates outside of a major city. That's a totally different situation.
A 1br apartment in SF in a part of town where you don't have to step over human excrement on a daily basis is $1800-$2000. Add another $500 for a new building (the one I live in is 100 years old). A new-ish car payment is $500 + expensive insurance. Add your $400 or so for food + utilities and your starting burn rate here just as a single guy is much closer to 3k per month, let alone what it costs to have a family. Also, $5 a day for food? Really? Around here lunch is $10.
Amusingly enough, Professor Roberts was one of the two professors in charge of IHUM 58, my fall quarter "Introduction to the Humanities" class at Stanford. He was quite clear in stating that writing and being able to communicate your ideas was pivotally important, even to someone majoring in a technical field. While an English major may not lead to vast riches, everyone (including CS majors) can benefit from the analytical writing skills taught in "fuzzy" classes.
I think he's trying to argue that there's something more basic at work here where there's a fundamental value to computing science that is finally being realized by the world, and any drops will not be due to lack of interest in computing science, nor a dip in high-tech industries.
No kidding. Why is it scary to study CS for pecuniary reasons? I find it more appalling that the author glorifies "doing computer science" as a life goal. Self.profession != most important profession.
Most importantly, I think everyone who's willing to work hard enough to learn to program deserves the opportunity to earn dev wages.
If the theoretical CS courses are brimming with dollar-seekers, Stanford can add more practical programming courses. Everyone wins.
