Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoThat site is talking about averages, assembly across the board. The person you’re talking to is explicitly talking about CS jobs, like software developer or system engineer.
You can’t really compare the two.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No, but it is a starting point for passing some kind of sanity check. Someone who was making $81k in 1990 was making an exceedingly high salary in the general population, and computer-related professions weren’t exactly known for high salaries until maybe the 2000’s.
bls.gov/…/white-collar-pay-private-goods-producin… with government statistics showing that in March 1990, entry level programmers were making on average about $27k. Senior programmers were making about $34k. Systems analysts (which I understand to have primarily been mainframe programmers in 1990) were making low 30s at the entry level and high 60s at the most senior level. Going up the management track, only the fourth and highest level was making above $80k, and it seems to me that those are going to be high level executives.
So yeah, $81k is a very senior level in the 1990s tech industry, probably significantly less common than today’s $200k tech jobs.