What was your starting salary (approx.)? - Page 15

There was quite some volatility and disparity between expected and actual bonus payouts in finance over the past few years with people getting more than they expected and substantially less than they expected. Of course this varied from company to company.

I'd say 99.9% of the time fresh undergrads who go into finance are starting at around 60-70k base salary.

you do realize only like 5% of law grads get those jobs, right? The vast majority of recent grads make 1/3 of that $$$ or possibly less (if they're employed). I went to a good-ish school (top 100) and I don't think anyone I know from my class got even half that sort of money, with the exception of one girl I had a class with who I think I heard got an offer from a large firm, but I think even that offer was put on hold for a while and may have eventually been pulled.

+1 this. I don't think people realize how much work they do. When you break it down by per-hour wage, even the lawyers at those big-law firms with the hefty starting salaries don't really make that much (well ok, "that much" is relative) as they bill a ton of hours, and as AR6 can tell you (unless things are different in Canada) a good chunk of the hours you work you can't bill. You may work 65-70 hours in a given week but may only be able to bill 50 of them. It's not like some office jobs where you're there 8-9 hours a day but can spend 1/3 of the time avoiding work and wasting time.

Considerably less. NYC is not an indicator of anything. Toronto is Canada's version of NYC in terms of law jobs (center of everything + highest salaries) and the biggest firms pay about 100k to start (though again, it increases around 15% per year). Lots of places pay 60k. Government, less still, I believe it's about 55 and it doesn't move much from there.

My understanding is that the primary activity is receiving verbal abuse from poor fat people who are mad that their Medicaid requires a $20 copay. That combined with lots of standing doesn't sound like a fun work environment. As far as being overpaid, it makes sense to have a trained professional double checking drug prescriptions. Doctors are rarely better than "decent" when it comes to pharmaceutical knowledge, and they are humans that make mistakes. However, It does seem to me that someone with a 4 year science degree combined with a computer program could do the work just as effectively for about 1/3rd the salary. What field did you end up pursuing instead?

For all you lawyers, is your bonus calculated based on number of hours billed? I read an article a while ago criticizing the "billable hours" legal model, claiming that it leads to padding so people can ramp up the amount of time worked. Is that an issue that ever comes up?

How many hours would you be billing on an average month? And how many actual hours would you work as compared to billed hours?

Depends on the person. I know people who are extremely efficient such that they bill 80+% of their hours worked. For me, maybe 2/3? The summer is less busy so you spend more hours drinking on patios at lunch - or on vacation- and fewer hours billing (though it is a prime time for client development). The general model in Canada is that you work to a target (1750 billables is standard, so about 150 / month), which if you meet it, yields a 10% bonus. Then for every 100 hours above target, tack on another 10%, up to a cap of 30% or so. However, different practice groups have different targets. Also sometimes you can get credit for hours for involvement with internal groups like recruitment, or for doing legal aid work, etc.

And no, I know of no one who tries to pad their hours. Juniors often try to get on longer bigger deals for due diligence work and things like that because it takes forever and the client has a huge budget for it, so it's a good source of hours. But that's not "padding", it's actually more cost efficient for the client to get a junior to do it at a lower rate.

I'll be happy to clear 35k in 2 years when I'm done.

Anyone going to law school knows its T15 or bust.

Big firms that pay 160K to first years often end up losing money on those first years, after counting costs of recruitment and benefits. The firm breaks even or has a small profit in the lawyer's second year, and the lawyer is fully productive in their third year.

Fresh out of school guys actually do contribute a lot, all my friends are in engineering (as I was in engineering, though never did an engineering job, straight to finance). Maybe it takes them 3 month to gets the hands on (or longer depends on what exactly), but the pay off is there.

Bank's internal IT department (the guys who write applications, not the call center fix some outlook/excel issue) works more like software firm these days (though a poorly organized in a lot cases). You can easily see a fresh out of school guy worth a lot more than the guy who has been doing it for 10 years in about 2 month or less. At least that was my experience.

Silicon valley are built by fresh out school as well as some seasonal guys. If I was ever to start a software firm, I would not hesitate to pay decent salary for fresh out school bright kids.

The key is that in your examples (engineering and computer science) the students learned job skills in college that have real industrial value. There is an enormous amount of information that a fresh engineering graduate does not know and must learn with experience, but nonetheless you do graduate with a large number of skills that are immediately valuable, and in many cases the lab projects you complete in school are near the level of real life products in complexity. It's not surprising that these fields generally offer among the highest starting salaries.

Most of the people saying entry-level people don't know anything are talking more about business functions that presumptively are not (maybe cannot be) effectively taught in school. Being that I am not in such an industry and didn't go to business school I don't know whether or not this is true.

I pursued A LOT of different fields, from hospital software consulting (got the offer but declined because of the travel schedule) to just about every sales job there is (sofware, telecom, copiers etc) I'm in my last round of interviews with a Med Distribution company for a Rep position and I have an offer on the table to be an insurance adjuster. Still not sure what to do so I made a SF thread on it. hahaha

this. like i said above, unless you're from a specialized field (ie. engineering) what you learned in college isn't really applicable...

sure, your liberal arts degree helped you open your mind and give you some critical thinking skills, but not everyone gains those skills and those skills also don't manifest themselves until later with training

Irrelevant considering they are the recipients of a salary, not a wage, hence breaking down productivity - how you even quantify that is beyond me - per hour is a pointless exercise. I have a good friend who works in auditing who works more hours than that and gets a fraction of what bankers earn, but the point is that he's on a salary, not a wage.

I think it's pretty hard to justify these huge salaries that fresh faced graduates get, especially in banking. But I have to be honest: I'm deeply unimpressed with the banking industry, and the capabilities of many bankers.