有位朋友 asked:

上次有位朋友贴了一个survey的link,里面的工资是大约9-10万左右，指在硅谷的公司。包括cisco等。

楼下的朋友却说IT engineers salary > 125K.

为什么有这么大的差距?

Here is my reply:

by IT engineers I mean people

have CS/EE BS and MS, and 7yr experience.

Or EE/CS PhD and +5 yr experience.

the following is a survey of Stanford EE, CS Starting Salaries (2002-03). For those who work in Silicon Valley, should be 3-5% high

(assume many Stanford graduates work in Silicon Valley).

Stanford graduate salary is about 5% higher than other good (but not top) school graduates. So the salary list here is basically what a new graduate can expected in Silicon Valley. You can see for a PhD, it is easy to reach 125K after work about 5 years. But it is very difficult to pass this number.

Computer Science

B.S. 62,273 11 50,000-72,000

M.S. 79,104 23 60,000-110,400

Ph.D. 98.250 6 78,000-120,000

Electrical Engineering

B.S. 55,667 3 53,000-59,000

M.S. 76,313 15 58,000-92,500

Ph.D. 91,175 5 60,000-100,000

When you see survey of 硅谷的公司, it includes too many

not so pure IT engineers. when you include company like cisco,

there are too many AE, QA engineers there. And also there are a lot of non-EE/CS turned IT engineers, their salary, generally speaking is much low than EE/CS graduates. So the salary will be affected. In summary, in Silicon Valley, if you directly work on

R&D, especially D, chances are your salary is between 100k-120.

and to get > 125K is not that difficult.

But if you do coding/design under someone guidance, your salary will be much low.