See your potential future salaries
This makes life interesting - knowing what you could be earning in a few years time once you've got your degree. The idea behind this website is (other than extreme nosiness) available information on who is earning what, at which company. It's not as specific to the point you can type in "Jonathan Schwartz" and "Sun Microsystems" and get his exact salary, but it's not far off.
Start off by creating an account with Glassdoor.com which adds to the database of salaries - you are asked to provide your salary information for your company (past or present) anonymously which then gets added, but you are then given access to the site for a set period of time. By checking the salaries page, you can find out how much those in specific positions earn, whether they are at Microsoft, Apple, Intel, even those like the Bank of America or Verizon.
To put this to the test, I asked a few university students I know who are all doing computer-related courses at my university, and my friend from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and got the general consensus that they wanted to work in the computer software industry. I threw that into Glassdoor.com, and you're looking at salaries ranging from:
- $76k-$145k as a software development engineer at Microsoft
- $120k-$150k as a product manager at Adobe
- $100k as an applications engineer at Oracle
- $90-$92k as technical staff at VMWare
If you consider those as "earned jobs" rather than jobs you'll get straight away as a graduate, fair enough. Lets look at something which a graduate my be expected to get using the same companies used before:
- $79k as an operations engineer, or $86k as a user experience designer at Microsoft
- $97k-$107k as a computer scientist at Adobe
- $100k as a sales consultant, or $98k as a usability engineer at Oracle
- $70k as a service desk analyst, or $90k-$92k as technical staff at VMWare
Even though the statistics won't be 100% accurate, it still shows how important computing students and IT-graduates are to the world, because after all, the students now will be running the world in the next few years as the next generation of working staff.
Update: sorry, my mind has turned to fudge today - forgot to link back to the original source. Via TechCrunch originally.