I've seen it vary greatly here in the SF bay area. I've seen offers as low as 65k and as high as 95k. The two most important factors that decide where in the range you fall are the company making the offer, and the school you graduated from. You probably have a lot more leverage in asking for 5-10k extra if you are graduating from a place like stanford/berkeley as opposed to sjsu. But then again, 5-10k is nothing to a company if you are an impressive candidate.
That $5-10k delta could be made up within a year or two for a good developer coming from a non-namebrand CS school who puts his/her nose to the grindstone.
That is true. Good engineers will always rise above the bad ones, regardless of what background they have. But we are talking about starting salaries here.
I understand that. And it's true that it is best to negotiate the highest starting salary as possible because most people, on average, will get a standard "cost of living" (whatever that means anymore) raise increase on an annual basis. But, I wanted to point out that there is definitely hope for non-namebrand CS program graduates, too.
