Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional info on your peers. I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-something

Not a prof, sadly - last year of my PhD, though! Thanks for the additional info on your peers. I don't know what the undergraduate pay is like for 20-somethings. All of my friends (and wife) are > 30 and were experienced developers before entering the field. Most of them have bases above 200, but _all_ have total comps well over 200. I'd be surprised if you make more at Google Chicago than at, say, Getco or Citadel as a new college hire developer. I'll ask around. Certainly, though, if you accept with one of the butcher shops you should not be surprised to be treated like raw meat. The last time my wife was transitioning, she certainly experienced some offers that were just insulting. But these were also places just barely scraping by, so it shouldn't be a big surprise. Of course, many of the top shops won't even hire new college grads in CS. They don't have or want to build the infrastructure required to take someone from barely pulling together a few thousands of lines of code to writing realtime software.