Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.
Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to get their share of graduates. Students with a Masters degree in Computer Science are being offered as much as $130,000 for associate product manager jobs at Google.
Apparently the popular Facebook Applications class is getting a lot of attention from other startups, too. Slide and RockYou are both recruiting hard. One source says that RockYou is approaching students and telling them they aren’t hiring them, they’re “acquiring” their “companies” and will let them continue to work on their applications after graduation. That is, of course, some serious smoke blowing - any code they’ve been working on in the class is likely to be shelved by RockYou. Still, it’s a great way to recruit by making these students feel like they’re entering into some kind of an M&A transaction.
Something tells me the Pitzer students who’ve enrolled in the Learning From YouTube class aren’t getting the same types of offers.
If you are a CS student at Stanford or another top university, tell us what’s happening with recruiting.
Update: Good comments below from students confirming these (and even higher) salaries.
Oh, It a good exciting news for Stanford graduates. They can get high salary and decent job. but, for me , just hunting job. Wow
Why not go after the x-Yahoo’s. I’d imagine any Yahoo! employee at this point is ready to leave.
Great, in about 14 years they can pay off their student loans.
I am a CS Major at Stanford graduating this year, where are my 95k offers? Sigh.
This news is a hoax. There’s no way a big company such as google would hire a fresh graduate for $92K.
Which universities qualify as “another top university”?
michael in california - just about all of them, except Berkeley.
well i can speak for the grad students in the cs dept - and they too are being made offers between 80-100K - though getting offers beyond 100K requires candidates to have at least a few years of work exp. companies in the good pay bracket include a big db company near exit 412 on US-101N, another web based company which is rumored to lay off over 700 people, apart from a few start ups that are doing well - google and microsoft though are not really top of the notch salary payers unless the candidate in question has something exceptional to his/her credit…though i wish i had come to stanford as an undergrad seeing what these guys are making!
Where are your sources from? Newly graduated students do not get this kind of offers, not matter how big the tech bubble is. I wonder where you get such inflated numbers from.
Well, I got 2 offers of more than 95k, one of them 98k. And I have no experience.
I love it when Michael Arrington comments.
Mike, don’t dis Berkeley because you had to go to Stanford instead of Boalt.
Interesting concept, im sure some of these grads could create their own apps and make around the same per year
The barriers to entry are very low and facebook and google and news corp make it that much eaiser
If your a grad and have some ideas for http://www.yupnup.com let me know
feedback@yupnup.com
How do you rate? Check out http://www.yupnup.com
@9 you are wrong.
I’m a Ph.D. student in CS at UCLA. I do know that Google has been making their presence known pretty heavily on campus, though I don’t know how much they’re paying their new hires.
I know that the Google process for hiring Ph.D.’s is much harder then undergrads. A colleague who’s skills I admire and who’s getting his Ph.D. pretty soon just got turned down by Google after the onsite interviews. Doesn’t look so good for me.
Oh, and I haven’t seen Facebook at all around the UCLA campus. I guess they’re not interested in SoCal grads.
Definitely true. I’m a CS undergrad from stanford with offers up to $100k before stock/bonuses/etc. Two keys to success:
-Grades aren’t as important as you think, experience is. Focus on doing independent projects, great internships, and part-time work rather than squeezing out the 4.0. A 3.5 w/ tons of real-world experience and projects to point to is much more impressive because it shows that you can actually get things done in the real world (which is quite different from most classes).
-Get lots of offers. Job hunt aggressively! Don’t be afraid to go for positions beyond your experience level (particularly if you’ve followed point one). Because of my past internships and work during the school year I have been offered senior developer positions right out of college. Also be honest with other employers by telling them that they you are considering other options. If you’re qualified and they want you they can (and will!) increase their offer. This can make a substantial difference ( as much as $10-20k).
Good luck!
Wow, those salaries seem low to me for CS grads from schools like Stanford or Berkeley.
But what do I know - none of our engineers have degrees and they all make more than this.
Last year’s average was more than 70k. I think median was somewhere in the 80’s, according to numbers from computing forum.
@ 17
You could not be more right, experience does count! Why the focus on Stanford and other Cali University’s when Google can find twice as qualified candidates elsewhere?
Can someone explain me what these companies need all these people for? Is this another case of better hire him, so that noone else gets him? I mean I honestly don’t see how Facebook would need the hundreds of programmers that they have on payroll.
It disrupts the job market, doesn’t it?
This is hardly news for the top candidates from best schools. The names that compete for the top talent just change from time to time.
The ones flush with cash can bid for the top talent, whether it is investment banking, biotech, computer sciences, or any other field flush with cash from investors or in fields just adding un-proportionally more value to the economy than most other fields.
Top talent includes being in top of your class, top internships, and interesting extracurricular activities that make you an interesting blend into the company.
agree with #20. there are a lot of other qualified candidates outside of the mentioned schools that aren’t quite as expensive.
@18 , @all, @Zuckerberg especially
Does Zuckerberg hire Zuckerberg if he is a new grads. from Harvard, now!?
; )
i’m waiting your answer too, best commenter Michael Arrington : )
As I have always said, Google hire me.
nice thought Erhan
Given the current exchange rate, they all could earn more in most parts of Europe
(I know, that I do)
get a job with a top tech co., get options, etc - stay there for a couple of years - then leave / cash out
…to start your own company, you’ll have more than enough then to survive a couple years. and have gained clout and connections and what not
The *average* salary of a IST grad from Penn State was $56,000, an average signing bonus of over $5k, with placement over 90%. This is a state school with a competitive but average CS/tech program (PSU is not known for their tech). Merrill Lynch is paying their starting programmers $65k + 20k benefits, or about $85k total comp starting. Top grads out of IST can make over $90k total comp per year starting. I would *hope* that SV-based Stanford grads are making at least that, especially given the talent competition roaring these days.
Hey friends.
You maybe missed the point.The Google and Facebook are specially seeking for ones who have prior knowledge in similar area. In fact, if you have “ANY” open source software or anything that reveals your passion into programming, you will have a big chance to win the offers. I (and maybe you) know a lot of people who woks for Google who doesn’t have any CS degree. Their salary is unimaginable even base upon US standards.
I have friend CS MS from Stanford making close to $200k at a wireless startup.
$90K is basically the starting salary for developers in California.
Why don’t they look at other lesser known colleges they could save themself some money. I can’t believe CS grads at stanford are better than any others.
This is hilarious. I remember when Nortel was making standing offers to entire CS classes with no interview necessary. This was back in 2000 - if you were graduating you had a job paying $60k.
Given the progressive size of funding rounds as of late, hiring and salary trends, and imploding non-tech economy, it is not hard to see what is coming. This is beginning to look like the year 2000 again.
My suggestion is don’t go for the $hitty startup if you can get a job with a company that is rock solid, profitable, and has minimal exposure to outside interests (shareholders, VCs, etc.).
In Europe IT-students can apply for a 3 day event in Dubai by McKinsey. All expenses paid!! (50% solving Business Cases, 50% Leisure according to the agenda)
I’ve known people from Stanford and Berkeley, and interviewed them as well. I haven’t seen an increased ratio of quality developers coming from these schools. If anything, I’d say that they are less interested in learning new things. So in the end, they generally are average. No better, no worse.
Congradulations, but remember that these schools are a bubble in themselves.
As a recent graduate of a top university, I’d say that this is applicable to the top 10%, but most graduates are in the 50k-70k range.
Wow. such a “jealous underpaid journalists” type post.
seriously, it was rumored that bloggers are paid 12 dollars a post writing here. sad and unfair. but wam, not that michael arlington should be the jealous type…
So far, so good. Where does it end? If I narrow things down to my own perspectives, ‘across the pond’ (The Netherlands) a Phd-qualified computational linguist will need about 5 years of experience and a lot of talent to be paid those numbers (taken into account you’re about 10 years older than these students, don’t forget the weak dollar (vs. euro) and life’s a great deal more expensive over here as well). But, as experience and professional levels grow the curve steepens considerably as well.
Where will those guys end up? Go figure.
This is for Stanford Graduates(USA). But what for the Graduates from rest of world like Punjab University College of Information Technology, Lahore, Pakistan.
I graduated from the CS Masters program at Stanford not long back. Google’s offer was in the 85 - 90k ball park but the stock offering made it interesting (since the strike back then was in the 480’s). Even people with 2 years of work experience got the same offer. MSFT’s offers were in the late 70s/early 80s but required relocation to seattle. AMZN made insane sign on bonus offers (in the 35 to 40k ball park with a base salary of 90-95k for seattle). The best i’ve seen is from Yahoo! which offered way more than 100k for really strong candidates. Facebook is pretty competitive given the early stage stock perspective.
130k for APMs sounds ridiculous. I just called a couple of juniors and i havent heard of anything more than 95k. The 130k is probably for MBA graduates from the GSB(Graduate school of business).
For those of you not from Stanford, sorry, but most of us would agree that getting into Stanford CS was the best thing that God could’ve given us! Thank you professors, CS dept chair and everyone else!
@M
Ooops : )
jealous as u i think : )))
Are they only targeting computer science students? What about all the software engineers (with engineering degrees)?
Google has the best food and Burritos from Andale…:-)
Enjoy the salaries/competition while you can peeps. Unemployment in the Valley was very very high just a several years ago. What goes up usually comes down.
They’re just buying the college name. You could have two candidates with the same skill levels and degrees, and because one went to a “known” school they’ll get the job 9 out of 10 times.
What does 90k equal with the inflated rates of living in California? Can you even comfortably own a house with that?
heh, does this mean we’ll be approached by these companies too? our school is teaching developing applications on facebook as well. And the site’s kick ass. neways, don’t bother me. i’ll be counting my $$$$.
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs3216/
Whether or not a fresh-out-of-Stanford CS grad makes $85K or $95K is largely irrelevant. The bigger issue over time will be the impact on the Valley’s startup ecosystem.
Google and Facebook are sucking the oxygen out of the air, making it extremely difficult for many small startups to find the kind of engineers they need to develop their businesses. We live in a market economy, of course, so we can’t begrudge them their ability to call dibs on the best engineers. But it would be interesting to know how many great ideas are lying fallow because Google wants to throw another ten engineers at some little piece of functionality or Facebook wants to sell another million little bouquets of digital flowers.