Actually, it’s a little worse than that — some people don’t. Which means you can’t jst assume the opposite of everything you read.

As a programmer, this is hard to get used to. We have a pretty effective mthod for sepearting wheat from chaff — does the code/idea/algorithm/bugfix work? — so the internet is a great place for finding out anything code related.

It’s a bloody awful place for finding out the answer to “What is a reasonable starting salary for a software developer?” Which, despite the fact it involves numbers and programmers, is impossible to solve.

I’ve discovered the following facts thus far:
-There are, like, a billion awesome programmers out there that can’t find jobs
-There is a shortage of programmers
-A reasonable expectation for a starting salary is between 0 and 200 000 a year
-Whoever is posting the message is a super-awesome programmer
-The author works at a startup and makes *a lot* of money
-big companies pay way more than startups
-Google is overvalued
-Google is undervalued
-I should start my own company
-nine out of ten of companies fail
-etc…

Basically 90% of the content is opinions, and even worse, most of it is what the author wants to believe or is just grabage to attract clicks.

Outliers are too noisy, the average joe doesn’t get excitied enough to post so most of the noise comes from people seeking pity (and lying) or people bragging (and lying).

Self reporting is unreliable, to be generous to the point of decpetion.

Priority one is selling ads, in this case I was lucky that there are sites that actually sell this information so they have a vested interest in it being correct. In most cases they just sell ads, and real information is expensive to produce and so bland — you don’t get to the front page of digg saying water is wet.

/ranting

The best 100% free resource I found was this post from Joel on Software. Even then it’s clear many of the posts are grandstanding (“Sr Unix Admin, No college, 92K yr plus 10K bonus” really needs some mention of experience) or optimistic (“$500,000+ from part time Internet Business” but no URL to plug?).

Here is my conclusion:
Software jobs with CS start at 50-80k out of school and then rise to 70-120k over the next 15 years.

Honestly I would’ve settled for confirmation of things I already believed:
-Big company == more money
-Longer hours == more money
-Higher cost of living == more money
-If people get excited about a job as children you get less money for it (see video games and saving the world)