this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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I’m sorry no software engineer right out of college should be getting paid 100k plus. You have <1 yr of professional experience. Okay I’ll give your inter/“extern”-ship and land you a whopping 50k - 60k.. it is and was overly inflated wages..
"six figure career" might refer to a career in which you get there eventually.
That's absurd. Many other jobs should pay that much too.Take it from the billionaires.
Exactly. Fucking mcdonald's should be a 6 figure job.
$60k a year is not enough to live comfortably in most of the cities with tech hubs. Rent alone would be 60+% of your paycheck, plus utilities and a car to get to work, you might be going hungry.
If their work brings in > 100k in revenue then they should.
you're ignoring the $2,000,000 in training costs from sr devs and mistakes.
if you want to get serious about cost effectiveness, Jr devs should pay to work at a job.
keep in mind, you fuck up a steak at a cooking job you're out the cost of the meal + time.
you fuck up a DB after a schema change you're out thousands if not millions of dollars in outages, SLAs, and sales.
still want to use revenue as a compensation performance metric?
To be fair, if a jr dev has enough acesss to screw a prod db from a schena update, then the issue is with the seniors and managers who did not set up the appropriate guard rails to prevent that.
you understand how that proves my point, right?
What? Where?
Idk, I've worked with recent grads where their work likely did bring in > $100k in a year. Maybe only took a month to get up to speed. Commits from all devs should be reviewed, and all code should be tested before pushing to prod, so those catastrophic costs should rarely be a problem. We had a good relationship with professors at a local university, and they'd send us their top students. The students would work with us for a while before usually getting picked up by big tech.
Pretty sure my work right out of college brought the company around $300k the first year (wrote the firmware for an electronic control board mostly by myself, which allowed the company to secure a large contract).
you're almost there...
Cool story grandpa. Or maybe you're just underpaid? Try adjusting for inflation. $50k doesn't cut it for starting salaries anymore, and a chocolate bar now costs more than a quarter.
Agreed, but bump the internship up $10-20k for my area. In CS, you should be getting median household income more-or-less for a junior/intern role ($70-80k in my area), and double median income for a senior role ($140-160k in my area), or at least that's how it works out in my area. There are roles above senior, and those should get paid accordingly.
Okay I should’ve added regional based, like major cities should add above, and against inflation. Like obviously after the first year you can make more dependent on ones performance, bonus etc.. I’m just saying like you enter with a lesser salary, and get more. Or you just hop around till you get a better salary with more experience