The CS graduates from top schools disproportionately end up in Silicon Valley, where salaries are much higher than in other places, as is the cost of living. Mechanical engineering doesn’t have a very large Mecca of its own.
(this post might have been better as an Open Thread comment)
Silicon Valley lore is that top programmers are 10x as productive as regular programmers (see Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham). I once attended a lecture series where entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley came to talk, and one point they kept hammering on was the importance of hiring the best people. So if coming from a top school makes SV employers think (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re a top programmer, this could go a way towards explaining the salary thing.
So if coming from a top school makes SV employers think (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re a top programmer, this could go a way towards explaining the salary thing.
This also works if coming from a top school correlates with some factor that makes SV employers think you’re a top programmer. The most obvious example of such a factor is programming skill: you’d expect people at top schools to program better, on average, than people from obscure schools.
Here are a few examples off the top of my head-
One of my first consulting jobs ever was to reverse engineer a bunch of models a former employee of a small engineering company had built. The company’s IT was atrocious, and to work around them, the employee in question had implemented a surprising amount of code in sql queries that were embedded in excel sheets (in general, the ways people work around bad IT make the situation even worse). These models and spreadsheets had become part of nearly every member of her team’s workflow. She left the company, productivity ground to a halt (with no one to keep the spreadsheets up to date, they were suddenly at the mercy of their terrible IT) and they spent a small fortune in consultants to get things back to where they were.
Insurance companies have a lot of data entry/data manipulation positions, because of the volume of claim data that comes in, much of which is still on paper. I recently worked with a small company that had four data analyst. One processed 9 data streams, comprising about 70% of their total claim volume, the other three managed to do one stream apiece. He had cornered himself by being literally too productive to promote to more interesting work.
Several months ago, I worked with a small marketing firm. They had a fairly large predictive analytics team, but all of their production models had come from a single modeler. The other modelers were building quite a lot, but none of them were winning out to production (their process, which is pretty common, was to run several models in parallel and move the best performing model to a production environment).
My first though was also along this line: Mechanical and other non-electronics-related engineering is mostly an established (read: CMM 4-5 level) fundamental part of our society where advancements or economically impactive progress are made only by the >99% percentile—at least that is my impression. Sure technology progresses here but it doesn’t make economical sense to excessively invest in brains.
CS on the other hand is not as established. Actually we haven’t reached the anything worth the name ‘software engineering’ even though this is demanded all the time. Our best working methodology is called ‘agile’ and far away from CMM 5. So in such a dynamic environment brains and talent make a difference. And I think this is what translates into a long tail of occupations, jobs, startups that have a sore demand and obviously are willing and able to pay much more than could pay back for normal engineering.
The CS graduates from top schools disproportionately end up in Silicon Valley, where salaries are much higher than in other places, as is the cost of living. Mechanical engineering doesn’t have a very large Mecca of its own.
The CS graduates from top schools disproportionately end up in Silicon Valley, where salaries are much higher than in other places, as is the cost of living. Mechanical engineering doesn’t have a very large Mecca of its own.
(this post might have been better as an Open Thread comment)
I think it’s quite alright on it’s own.
It’s about reasonable data and data driven thinking is something we generally want ot encourage. It’s also quite long for Open Thread standards.
Silicon Valley lore is that top programmers are 10x as productive as regular programmers (see Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham). I once attended a lecture series where entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley came to talk, and one point they kept hammering on was the importance of hiring the best people. So if coming from a top school makes SV employers think (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re a top programmer, this could go a way towards explaining the salary thing.
This also works if coming from a top school correlates with some factor that makes SV employers think you’re a top programmer. The most obvious example of such a factor is programming skill: you’d expect people at top schools to program better, on average, than people from obscure schools.
This is true of engineering as well though. I’ve seen whole teams productivity cut to near 0 when a key player leaves the company.
That actually sounds pretty fascinating. Want to share more details?
Here are a few examples off the top of my head- One of my first consulting jobs ever was to reverse engineer a bunch of models a former employee of a small engineering company had built. The company’s IT was atrocious, and to work around them, the employee in question had implemented a surprising amount of code in sql queries that were embedded in excel sheets (in general, the ways people work around bad IT make the situation even worse). These models and spreadsheets had become part of nearly every member of her team’s workflow. She left the company, productivity ground to a halt (with no one to keep the spreadsheets up to date, they were suddenly at the mercy of their terrible IT) and they spent a small fortune in consultants to get things back to where they were.
Insurance companies have a lot of data entry/data manipulation positions, because of the volume of claim data that comes in, much of which is still on paper. I recently worked with a small company that had four data analyst. One processed 9 data streams, comprising about 70% of their total claim volume, the other three managed to do one stream apiece. He had cornered himself by being literally too productive to promote to more interesting work.
Several months ago, I worked with a small marketing firm. They had a fairly large predictive analytics team, but all of their production models had come from a single modeler. The other modelers were building quite a lot, but none of them were winning out to production (their process, which is pretty common, was to run several models in parallel and move the best performing model to a production environment).
My first though was also along this line: Mechanical and other non-electronics-related engineering is mostly an established (read: CMM 4-5 level) fundamental part of our society where advancements or economically impactive progress are made only by the >99% percentile—at least that is my impression. Sure technology progresses here but it doesn’t make economical sense to excessively invest in brains.
CS on the other hand is not as established. Actually we haven’t reached the anything worth the name ‘software engineering’ even though this is demanded all the time. Our best working methodology is called ‘agile’ and far away from CMM 5. So in such a dynamic environment brains and talent make a difference. And I think this is what translates into a long tail of occupations, jobs, startups that have a sore demand and obviously are willing and able to pay much more than could pay back for normal engineering.
Also compare with blue/red ocean strategy.
The point about cost of living is a good one.