My son wants a to be a $200,000/year Silicon Valley Software Engineer. Aside from the obvious, which schools do you

This is the answer.MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech. Big time software corps and promising start ups put a lot of resources into exclusively recruiting from those schools. That's just the way it is.

artemis pyle wrote:

Body parts are nice wrote:

$200,000/year? Probably closer to low 4:xx, no? How many $200k software engineer jobs are there?

Google's starting base for a programmer is $150k, Facebook just a tick lower, linkedin just about the same as facebook.

But for those jobs college matters. Specifically these colleges: MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Harvard. Any UC other than Berkeley or UCLA is a huge strike.

Call me elitist, but those are elite companies looking for elite brains. Elite brains don't go to UC Riverside.

Funny how people still stereotype UCR as the UC for wetbacks, UCSB as the UC for beach babes and water polo players, and UCSC as totally just weird. But we recruit primarily from the entire UC System per DOE & DOD mandate.

SD, OC, LA, SC, SM, CC counties are where the startup action and mind boggling salaries are.

People forget that So Cal has a larger technology base than Silicon Valley with internet, wireless, aerospace, deep space, defense, television, multimedia, and motion pictures. As the invertors of the Internet, UCLA and USC still remain primary caretakers by federal contract.

USC, Cal St East L.A., UCSD, UCI, UCR, UCSB, LMU, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd/Claremont, CP Pomona, Pepperdine, UCLA, LGB St, Full St, Cal State Compton, SD St are the feed Wireless Valley, Westwood/WLA and SNA startups.

Stanford started Silicon Valley in the 1940s with the advent of the Klystron. SCU, USF, San Jose St, Fresno St, UOP, Chico St, Stanford, Cal, CS East Bay, Cal Poly SLO, CS Bakersfield feed Silicon Valley startups.

So there you have it. Good luck with your son.

What a joke! I work with many of guys from MIT and Harvard and none make over 150K. There are more guys in the NBA than there are software engineers making 200K. Simple fact. Of course there are guys who started as SEs and moved into management roles that make 200+.

Good for your son for aspiring to enter a field that offers a lot of opportunities. The other posters are correct in that a lot of these job are being moved overseas, but there is an awful lot of work available in this field. Since the mid 90s people have been saying that all of the software work would be done in India within the next 10 years. Almost 20 years later and that hasn't happened.

I won't speak much to your specific question on which school is best. In my mind, it doesn't matter that much. What does matter though is that your son has the ability to do this kind of work. Not only the aptitude, but the mindset and work ethic.

I've been a software engineer since 1995. I went to a good school but was not a good student. I loved programming but just couldn't force myself to stare at a book and memorize stuff for my non-CS classes. As a result, I ended up with a low GPA and low starting salary.

But, I got a job at a small company and quickly proved myself by working long hours and doing whatever was necessary to get the job done. Within 3 months I got 30% raise, and now, 16 years later, I make over 6 times my initial salary out of college.

My point with all of this is that a good college and good degree will only get you so far. You have to be willing to WORK, WORK, and WORK to get to where he wants to be. It may come easy to him, it may not. I know people that were far better students than me (and probably a lot smarter), but they ultimately just didn't like spewing out lines and lines of code day after day.

Does your son do any programming now? If so, does he LOVE it? Or does he only see it as a means for earning a big income? There is nothing wrong with wanting a big salary, but you better love, or at least enjoy, this sort of work if you want to make that kind of money.

Great informative post without an sarcasm, a rarity here on Letsrun. Well done and even though I am not the OP, thanks for the post.

These days it's not so much about the school. If anything, that just puts people into contact with great networking opportunities. Many of the "elite" developers-to-be are starting these days with mobile development. There was a recent article in the Bloomberg Report highlighting this trend in high school students. Many of the forward thinking parents (and students) who want to be the top of the heap in the next generation are not only full fledged developers in high school (that means he's already behind at 15 if he's not selling apps on iPhone) they are very much on the "cutting edge". Now, cutting edge is a relative term, but, in software, that means, whatever is hot now. That, sadly, doesn't necessarily mean these kids are inventing software to run nuclear power plants or rockets. However, in 10 years when these kids are done building toys and do start serious work, it'll be old hat. I honestly would have him think less about the school to go to (still several years away) and start thinking about taking advantage of what he can now. If you want to be aggressive and push the academic track, use MIT's online courses to give yourself a basic curriculum to work through.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-computer-science

And, remember, academic success does not necessarily mean real world success, especially in something like programming. There are tons of dead or academic languages that have nothing to do with Silicon valley that were all the rage in schools. I guess I just see the byproduct of being a cutting edge developer (making $200k a year as a Silicon Valley developer) as the end. The goal is to be a great developer. The rest of that stuff comes after the fact. But, often, the guys who get that really aren't that concerned with it because they are always looking at the next hot thing trying to tear it apart and figure it out instead of sitting back and reveling in the glory of all their accomplishments.

fatchance wrote:

What a joke! I work with many of guys from MIT and Harvard and none make over 150K. There are more guys in the NBA than there are software engineers making 200K. Simple fact. Of course there are guys who started as SEs and moved into management roles that make 200+.

You work with the wrong guys or at the wrong company. In Silicon Valley starting salaries for the big companies are pretty much common knowledge.

Where do people think Google finds employees? Trolling coffee shops for tortured programming geniuses?

They recruit from top schools. Even at MIT a Google or Facebook job is incredibly hard to get, harder than getting into the school because of the competition base.

These are sophisticated operations with unbelievable investments in HR. Sure there are the occasional serendipitous hires, but if your kid wants to make a bundle he's going to have to out-compete a lot of brilliant people. The admissions committee at Stanford is a pretty helpful pre-screen for top companies.

But as others noted, it's not just academics. He needs to program, program, program and be f'ing good at it. The don't hand out $150k/year for raw talent, it needs to be demonstrated talent.

ITT tech

Disappointment.edu

On a visit to Purdue with our son we saw Google recruiting from the IT department. The guy came in a talked to all the HSers. He said that Google goes to the top engineering schools in the country to find talent. I believe he himself was a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.

I recently graduated from UCSB and every year companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etc. come to campus to recruit.

Base salary of 200k is still pretty rare (in 10 years I am sure it will be common). However something 150k salary, 30k bonus and 50k in stock options/ESPP isn't unheard of. Of course you have to live in the silicon valley where a 3/2 1200sq ft house goes for 750k.

Going to Africa wrote:

Not that many. I'm pretty sure even at salary generous places like Google senior engineers are topping out in the mid to maybe high 100s range, recent grads in the 100k ballpark. I'd say he has about zero chance of earning 200k very soon out of school. If he's that good, he'll probably just be leap frogging that middle high pay ground straight to starting his own company and making millions.

He's not going to be making $200,000 doing software development when he's 22. That's a lot of money and people fresh out of school don't get that.

Cornell

artemis pyle wrote:

Google's starting base for a programmer is $150k, Facebook just a tick lower, linkedin just about the same as facebook.

How much experience do you need?

On a slighthly different note: remember that everything in California is about 2-3 times higher than the rest of the country. $200k a year is not that wild in a place where a modest home that would cost $200k anywhere else can run into the $1 million range. $200k out there is not $200k in Missouri.

#1 Carnegie Mellon University

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#1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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#5 Cornell University

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#5 University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign

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Make sure your son goes to college already proficient in at least three different programming languages. And he needs to have some proven results too like a program that he made. Also doesn't hurt if said program could be used in business

Basically as a upper div student you work/study with profs/TAs/RAs who started/advises 95% of the Silly Valley, Wireless Valley, & Hollywierd Techy cos

USC

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Stanford

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