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Comment by avenoir | Hacker News Reader

Amazon recently opened new office in Boulder (i believe) and started hitting up a lot of folks in the surrounding states. I live in CO, but my company is in KS and I started hearing a lot of chatter among our interns that they're grabbing kids left and right from schools in the area with mediocre to below average computer science programs. In fact, one of the kids who interviewed at our place ended up taking an offer from Amazon, which i kid you not was around $100K more than what my company was offering for a new grad with no prior experience and a degree from a school that doesn't even make it to the top 100 in the nation.

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I'd be careful about being so infatuated by school name - for example, I went to a state school in undergrad that most not from NY probably heard of. My peers in my majors went on to finish PhDs in math, physics, economics, and attend prestigious programs at schools like MIT. In addition, one of the smartest people in my PhD program in math at UIUC graduated from Cal State Long Beach - he was smarter than just about everyone else in the PhD program. I also have another smart friend who is a college dropout - he currently is a standout at Google.

Don't use any metric other than performance to judge people. You will find many surprises in the world, and smart people who have many unique stories to tell.

I'm not infatuated with any particular school. I myself graduated from a low-ranked CS school. I was just making a point that a degree from a fancy school like Stanford where the OP graduated from no longer limits you from getting into companies like Google and Amazon. If anything i'm actually happy that these companies aren't stigmatizing or stereotyping graduates based on which school they went to.

It's a good strategy. The best engineer I've ever worked with went to a school I'd never heard of. I've worked with plenty of people from Cal/Stanford who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

100k more for a new grad? That can't be right. Five years back, the new grad offer was 90k, plus 45k of stock over four years. If they're up that much, things must be getting desperate.

2k increase per year isn't desperate. That's inflation.

100k more, not 100k total.

I'm sure $90K is a thing somewhere on the coasts. A typical starting salary around here (MO/KS) is $60-65K considering you have some internship experience. Otherwise it's usually in the mid 50s. Amazon offered $160K (bonus included).

I would guess the fact that most starting developer salaries are 60-65k in your city is the reason Amazon opened an office there.

I moved to the Toronto office not long after I joined, and that office existed for similar reasons. Lots of talent, but generally low wages in the city. Made recruiting easy- they went from 25 people five years ago to 500+ today.

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