A puzzle concerning CS major vs. engineering major salaries

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.

Anecdotal reasons. While being quite far from the programming world myself, I have multiple old friends living and working on the other side of the country in the belly of the beast in San Francisco.

One just recently quit a large well-known company and is looking for another place to work, and complained to me recently that every place she talks to doesn't actually talk about business models or product plans but instead spouts platitudes and overwrought claims of near-cosmic significance that seem to have specifically evolved to extract venture capital money rather than actually fulfil a need or produce a profitable business.

Another is stably working at a small company that actually does have a stable profitable business model, but often complains to me about how the majority of the people he works with or meets in that field have extremely inflated ideas about the amount of value they are actually generating and sometimes wonders when the investors as a general class will figure out how badly they are being played.

If it makes you feel better, I studied computer science but frequently feel a sense of inadequacy because it feels less hard core than "real engineering".

Your sense of inadequacy is probably unjustified. I studied electrical engineering and computer science. Within both fields there's a wide range of hardcore-ness. In both fields you can find people who do incredibly difficult things, and a much larger group of people who do the bare minimum, and people everywhere in-between. I have seen some startlingly incompetent people with engineering degrees, so the lower bound here is pretty low.

1. Computer science definitely seems better for making companies / entrepreneurship potential.

2. In my experience, engineering jobs are far more segmented. You can be awesome at making microprocessors, but then only a few companies may be able to hire you. In other fields in similar; there are lots of interesting areas within engineering, but within each, it seems like there are only a very few specific companies, especially within a given geographic area.

3. For whatever reason, a lot of engineering companies just don't seem that great (I think it's the lack of competition). Tesla and Space X (two of the top companies engineering friends would find jobs at) are much worse to work at than one may expect (see the Glassdoor ratings). Where you can find one, hope you keep the job (it often seems like you become specialized, and there just aren't many other great companies in the space. An example is Intel).

4. I think that computer science jobs are more flexible than engineering jobs. I'm a bit more afraid of engineering jobs getting automated than computer science jobs (if you're ok learning a lot of new languages).

5. More startups in computer science, if you're into that.

6. The fact that engineering is way harder in college (at least my college) is an important factor. I really disliked much of my college experience because of the difficulty. Now a lot of the information doesn't seem applicable to my life, at all (I'll forget it quickly).

7. It seems like with CS you get the bonus of understanding AI risk more, if you're into that.

I think that my (general engineering) degree definitely gives me a bit of a diverse background. I kind of have the option of going to a hardware/software startup, although I'm not sure I want to go in that direction with my career (it seems to narrow your career without improving your expected earnings). I like to think that it may be useful if I want to go into venture capital or some more diverse or meta-level positions, but now I'm really not sure about that.

One huge benefit to engineering is that I feel more comfortable making cool stuff, like arduino hobby circuits or burning man floats if I wanted to. It does feel really cool. Doesn't help my career as much though.

(For reference, I graduated with a 3.0 at Harvey Mudd College in General Engineering, focussed a bit on electrical. I spent 1 year doing web entrepreneurship with a cofounder, then another year with 80,000 hours doing web development.)

The word "startup" gets thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley, e.g. I was an intern at a company with over 50 employees that had millions of users and had been profitable for several years that still called itself a startup.

It is leveling of pay throughout the career for CS compared to growth in the first 8-10 years for engineering followed by general leveling, at least from what I see. Entry level engineers see salaries increase 10-15% annually at first! and then leveling off around $110k to a 2-3% annual increase. (There appears to be an age biased decrease after age 55 or so for the median changing jobs as well.)

This happens in cycles... Bubbles if you will. It isn't really sustainable, and it distorts the market. The numbers don't make much sense without a lot of detail.

For a given aptitude, earnings potential in engineering and CS are similar.

Is it plausible that starting salaries would increase faster than mid-career salaries? Why wouldn't salaries for senior software engineers rise by 30%, too?

Yeah, that was the hidden assumption behind my claim. On further reflection I don't have a clear idea whether it's correct or not.

It seems that there are on the order of 100 CS graduates at each top school per year (with the number increasing rapidly over time),

I would be extremely surprised if the graduates from the top 10 CS schools as a proportion of all CS graduates were rising. In fact, I believe that some of the top schools stopped increasing enrollment decades ago. To the extent that the list of top CS schools differs from top schools or top engineering schools, it is because it is the places that got into CS early.

Is it plausible that starting salaries would increase faster than mid-career salaries? Why wouldn't salaries for senior software engineers rise by 30%, too?

How durable is the human capital of software engineers? When the age discrimination in Silicon Valley comes up, a lot of people point out the huge turnover in technologies over decades, which would seem to negate a lot of the benefits of experience.