Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#31

Post by tschwimmer »

alephnerd wrote: post #19

My 2 cents as a Zellenial: 1. I've spent an hour trying to find this survey but cannot. My hunch is it's an online survey with questionable reproducibility (especially after looking at similar research produced by Clever) 2. I'm not too surprised by my college aged peers overestimataing average starting salaries. With the increase in CS/ECE students and a relatively small but vocal minority talking about 200K TC out…

For public companies with monthly vesting without a cliff (FB, Goog), TC is actually a good model for what the company deposits in your bank account at the end of the month.

For private startups, it's obviously a less good measure both because you don't get the incremental liquidity over the course of the year and also because even when you get that big chunk of shares at the end of the year, it isn't liquid.

An interesting middle case is public companies that have a 1 year cliff. I've heard Amazon has this. Anyone care to chime in about how TC is calculated there?

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#32

Post by IceMetalPunk »

danjoredd wrote: post #29
IceMetalPunk wrote: post #17

I applied for my first career job (read: first job that wasn't "you don't get a living wage" retail, and which actually used my degree) 4 years ago. It's the job I'm currently still at. When I applied, it was for an entry level position at $35k. After the interview, I was offered a senior position instead for double that salary. Apparently, my current salary after 4 years of $81k is still on the low end for a senior…

I agree. I am in an entry level position right now and not making much, but I am hoping to push past that before long and make more. However, parent, teachers, relatives, everyone all said the same thing. "go to college, you you will make lots of money!" Turns out, that was a gross oversimplification and a CS degree doesn't automatically make money. You have to have a mix of experience and solid projects under your b…

I think college/uni should be about personal growth and education first, career opportunities second. Can it help you get a job? Great. But that shouldn't be why you do it; you should do it because you want to learn about the world.

That said, since university is privatized, it's expensive, which sucks for society. So it's definitely going to be a consideration of whether it's affordable to learn or not.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#33

Post by etempleton »

To be fair, salaries are crazy out there right now. Companies are desperate and job hopping can net you 30-50% more.

I think the other factor is all of these weird TikTok videos that just lie about things for views and clicks. And all of these influencers acting like they are billionaires. I think a lot of teens and college age people have pretty unrealistic expectations for life right now. This generation has been through some things with the pandemic, but there hasn’t been a recession in awhile beyond the Covid blip.

When I graduated unemployment was high so the advice was you are probably not going to get a decent salary out of college just be happy if you get anything and work your way up.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#34

Post by shellfisher »

zamadatix wrote: post #15
retrac wrote: post #5

> Current graduates are simply asking for their compensation to reflect the cost of living in the United States. If the entire GDP of the USA, after taxes, were simply taken (about $15 trillion) and equally distributed among the ~210 million working age adults of the United States, each would receive about $70,000 a year. If the 70 million university graduates were each paid a handsome and deserved $150,000 (hey, tha…

Real GDP per capita per year increases over time though, it's not some static number that must take from others for yours to grow, it's perfectly possible to increase the GDP to get your larger salary. That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't?

> That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't?

Obviously this depends on what you might have done instead… If on the one hand you went to college and learned to program, and on the other hand you didn’t go to college and didn’t learn to program, then you are going to be 100x more productive (as a programmer) having gone to college.

It’s hard to disentangle having gone to college with having learned something there.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#35

Post by danjoredd »

IceMetalPunk wrote: post #32
danjoredd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I am in an entry level position right now and not making much, but I am hoping to push past that before long and make more. However, parent, teachers, relatives, everyone all said the same thing. "go to college, you you will make lots of money!" Turns out, that was a gross oversimplification and a CS degree doesn't automatically make money. You have to have a mix of experience and solid projects under your b…

I think college/uni should be about personal growth and education first, career opportunities second. Can it help you get a job? Great. But that shouldn't be why you do it; you should do it because you want to learn about the world. That said, since university is privatized, it's expensive, which sucks for society. So it's definitely going to be a consideration of whether it's affordable to learn or not.

In a way I can agree with that, but we need to change the narrative. Instead of telling kids to go to college to get a job, we would need to change it to "go to college to learn interesting things." When we tell kids that, that's the expectation they will end up having when they go.

The demand for college also has to go way down to make it more affordable, save for maybe an act on the government's part. Learning for learnings sake is great, but not $50k great.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#36

Post by giantg2 »

AlphaOne1 wrote: post #12
retrac wrote: post #5

> Current graduates are simply asking for their compensation to reflect the cost of living in the United States. If the entire GDP of the USA, after taxes, were simply taken (about $15 trillion) and equally distributed among the ~210 million working age adults of the United States, each would receive about $70,000 a year. If the 70 million university graduates were each paid a handsome and deserved $150,000 (hey, tha…

yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation a…

Those 529 funds can be used for other forms of education, such as a trade school.

I think the biggest problem is credentialing. Employers want 4 year degrees for just about everything. Many careers/industries could probably switch to 2 year degrees and be fine. I'm sure there are a few that could just do a bootcamp.

All that sort of leads into the secondary problem of debt, with people not considering the cost differences of various schools due to bias, prestige, easy loans (like you mention), whatever. It's still possible to go to the state school I attended and end up with around $85k in debt. Not great, but much better than other schools where tuition alone would surpass that. I feel like this cost difference isn't covered enough in high school, and that students are making emotional decisions about where to go.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#37

Post by giantg2 »

shellfisher wrote: post #34
zamadatix wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real GDP per capita per year increases over time though, it's not some static number that must take from others for yours to grow, it's perfectly possible to increase the GDP to get your larger salary. That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't?

> That said one needs to be realistic about it, is going to college really going to make you 3x more productive at 22 than if you didn't? Obviously this depends on what you might have done instead… If on the one hand you went to college and learned to program, and on the other hand you didn’t go to college and didn’t learn to program, then you are going to be 100x more productive (as a programmer) having gone to coll…

I learned plenty of things in college. The real question is how much of it is stuff I actually use today, especially for my job.

Calculus - no, literature - no, Spanish - no, English - no (HS level is sufficient), cryptography - no, networking - no, COBOL - no, assembly - no, business minor classes - barely, all those liberal arts - nope.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#38

Post by kurupt213 »

acchow wrote: post #26
alephnerd wrote: post #19

My 2 cents as a Zellenial: 1. I've spent an hour trying to find this survey but cannot. My hunch is it's an online survey with questionable reproducibility (especially after looking at similar research produced by Clever) 2. I'm not too surprised by my college aged peers overestimataing average starting salaries. With the increase in CS/ECE students and a relatively small but vocal minority talking about 200K TC out…

> I HATE the TC designation. that 200k TC is more like 140k/year when you factor in vesting Can you explain this calculation?

He’s saying 60k of the compensation is equity and other fringe benefits

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#39

Post by brundolf »

IceMetalPunk wrote: post #30
brundolf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is beside the point, but I'd shop around a bit if I were you. It sounds like you're still very underpaid

So I've heard. But I don't really care. I'm single. My current salary is enough to pay my mortgage, all my bills, all my student loans, my food bill, etc. and still have enough to not only save, but donate. I give a minimum of $1,200 to St. Jude's every year, plus assorted charities and even random Twitch streamers who make music if I like what they do and they seem like decent people. In other words, despite everyon…

I'd never fault someone for being content, and if there's a specific tradeoff you're making for that paycut, then more power to you

But otherwise- there's a difference between "trying to make as much money as possible" and "keeping a casual eye out to see if you could be making more money doing roughly the same thing you're already doing". Imagine if you could give twice as much to St. Jude's, or pay off your student loans completely, or both. There's a huge gap between being greedy and letting money rule your life, vs not giving it the slightest attention. It's worth putting in the baseline effort, especially if you're not having to sacrifice any of your other life priorities in the process.

Re: Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

#40

Post by kurupt213 »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #7
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #4

Graduated in 2020, and I was shocked by how few of my peers had done any research into the type of work and compensation that would be available to them upon graduation. No, I'm not referring to the issue of 17-20 years olds choosing a degree path with little awareness of post-graduation opportunities, but for upperclassmen 0-2 years out from graduation. On the other hand, I can report a disproportionate awareness /…

I know a lot of people who go a Masters because they didn't want to get a job, then never worked in their field.

That just makes the interviewer wonder why they didn’t get the terminal degree… unless the masters is the terminal degree (like an MFA)
Post reply on HN