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42k is a relatively low salary for Northern Virginia. I thought most entry level salaries were a bit higher, more around 50-55k. Any comments?
I started at $36k two years ago, when I was living in Alexandria. I only know one person who started at $55k in the private sector, but even that was considered very high. The rest of us hovered in the mid $30k's or maybe close to $40k.
No that's pretty typical. There are plenty of entry level jobs that start at less than that. It depends on what your field is there's more pay in certain fields some places start low but there's big raises to be had. I don't know to many that make that much straight out of college but at the same time I'm not one for talking about salaries. I think once your salary is defined by yearly versus hourly then it's officially impolite to ask how much one makes. I have a friend that still does.
I told him and immediately regretted it. I told another friend back home and then made the mistake of complaining about not being able to afford something and she was like but Terrence you make so much money. I don't know I didn't exactly hold my ground in the salary negotiation either. They told me my salary and I was like SOLD! Now I realize that I don't make a lot of money but at the same time I have a roof over my head and the lights are still on a pretty big improvement from making 30 cents above minimum wage at the mall.
I don't think it is proper to disclose one's current salary either. It is awfully personal information. I don't mind disclosing a starting salary i made 25+ years ago as a junior level engineer fresh out of college - but no way would I disclose my current salary. AND, even back then, I never told anyone what my starting salary was, until many years later.
I suppose though, some people think it is OK, or they think they are going to impress people with their starting salary or something. I just find it strange the few times I've seen people disclose their current starting salary to the world at large.
Then again, my wife was not born in this country, and she thinks nothing of telling people my salary. It caused a problem at work - she met a coworker's wife and she told her my salary for some stupid reason, and it was more than that person's husband made and until her husband left the company, that caused problems. He went and told a bunch of other folks my salary, so now a lot of people at work knew how much my salary was. That was not good. My wife said to her that is normal and OK, and everyone from her country always discuss each other's salaries! Anyway, needless to say I don't let her do that anymore!
That said, I have a good knowledge of software engineering starting salaries in NOVA. $50K - $55K is the norm, but depends on different things. Unlike some other profressions perhaps, they will just see normal raises and promotions so their salaries will go up, but not by huge percentage amounts each year. Maybe 4% or so, except a promotion might add another 4% in there, but promotions don't come every year obviously. As you get your master's degree that can help push up your salary and make you more marketable, as can (in this area) security clearances obviously. Those are a huge help, and can really boost your salary if you have a very high level clearance.
I don't think it is proper to disclose one's current salary either. It is awfully personal information. I don't mind disclosing a starting salary i made 25+ years ago as a junior level engineer fresh out of college - but no way would I disclose my current salary. AND, even back then, I never told anyone what my starting salary was, until many years later.
I suppose though, some people think it is OK, or they think they are going to impress people with their starting salary or something. I just find it strange the few times I've seen people disclose their current starting salary to the world at large.
That said, I have a good knowledge of software engineering starting salaries in NOVA. $50K - $55K is the norm, but depends on different things. Unlike some other profressions perhaps, they will just see normal raises and promotions so their salaries will go up, but not by huge percentage amounts each year. Maybe 4% or so, except a promotion might add another 4% in there, but promotions don't come every year obviously. As you get your master's degree that can help push up your salary and make you more marketable, as can (in this area) security clearances obviously. Those are a huge help, and can really boost your salary if you have a very high level clearance.
people make such a big deal about this! why is it not ok to disclose one salary? i wouldn't necessarily tell other co workers or 'some' friends....due to the possiblity of jealousy etc. but telling random people over the net for the sake of helping them out....what's wrong with that?
i hate the way people in this area of VA are SOOOO uptight!
I don't think it is proper to disclose one's current salary either. It is awfully personal information. I don't mind disclosing a starting salary i made 25+ years ago as a junior level engineer fresh out of college - but no way would I disclose my current salary. AND, even back then, I never told anyone what my starting salary was, until many years later.
I suppose though, some people think it is OK, or they think they are going to impress people with their starting salary or something. I just find it strange the few times I've seen people disclose their current starting salary to the world at large.
I basically agree with you on it being improper to ask someone's current salary and no really necessary to disclose your own. However, when starting out I got a lot of questions from friends about salary, mostly because we all are in the same field and are trying to figure out what the market salary is. It was still an awkward question, but it was helpful talking to people about what to expect (or what not to). After about a year I noticed that no one asked or cared anymore. I couldn't tell you what my roommate makes now, and chances are she couldn't tell you mine (unless she happened to remember my GS level, then it's an easy search on OPM), and it's only been 2 years since we started working and knew each other's budgets and salaries. If I ever disclose my salary, it's usually to give perspective, especially on the "Can I survive on $xx,xxx??" threads.
Just wondering, how is it that you were ''duped"? By whom? Or did you mean dope, not duped?
I don't know who duped ScranBarre about NoVA, but I know who duped me (re: both NoVA and the general D.C. area) - mass media and the entertainment industry. As someone from the Midwest, I grew up hearing from those two sources that my home region was total crap, that it was essentially one big farm, that people living places as far north as South Dakota had Southern accents, that the Northeast of the U.S. was culturally far superior to the Midwest in every way. (Some of these allegations were patently false, and I obviously trusted my own eyes and ears before, say, some entertainment columnist from Long Island, but I now realize I did acquire, on a thoroughly subconscious level, some of this attitude, myself.)
Well, being from an upper-middle-class background (which is actually pretty damn common in the Midwest) and having sort of "artsy" parents, I got to experience lots of yuppy goodies growing up, especially during my later childhood (indie coffee shops, high-end boutiques, awesomely quirky - if pricey - restaurants, natural foods emporia, gentrified "downtown" neighborhoods with rehabbed historic homes, etc.). Then, during my dirty-poor college years in Columbia, Missouri (the coolest small city on earth) and Evanston, Illinois (a Chicago 'burb that should make D.C. suburbanites cry), I settled into a very "granola" lifesyle - riding my bike everywhere (I don't even have a license!), buying all my food at funky and cheap natural foods places whose stock was almost 100% bulk items, etc. It was only natural for me to assume, based on the mantra that I'd heard from my natal day chanted by idiots on T.V. (on the rare occasions it was turned on ) and movie screens, in pages of magazines, etc. that such things would be both more plentiful and superior in quality in an Eastern city like D.C. (Well, I wasn't so naive that I believed D.C. wouldn't pale in comparison to Chicagoland, but the latter is a far bigger city, for one thing.)
I guess I did have some VERY GOOD data about the Mid-Atlantic, in retrospect, that I stupidly chose to ignore: when I was in high school, my parents and I took a trip to Baltimore (a city I actually do like in many ways - but that's for another thread ), Annapolis, Rehobeth Beach in Delaware, and Ocean City, MD. Except for a few isolated spots (parts of Baltimore, the Annapolis waterfront and areas nearby), we thought we'd descended into some 1960s throwback blue-collar hell. This was the vastly culturally superior East Coast? (I'd been to D.C. itself but was too little at the time to remember much about it by the time I moved here in '06.. besides the museums and monuments and the abundant litter/trash on the streets, that is. )
So - in short (I'd love to eventually gather some hard numbers which would back up my mostly subjective impressions) - it seems to me that good restaurants, walkable neighborhoods, indie coffee shops, indie shops in general, places to get old-school natural foods (e.g., sprouting supplies , bulk items, vegetarian jerky, etc.) are way, way, way, way, way sparser on a per-capita basis than in other (Midwestern) cities I've lived in. And also that these things are way less accessible in many ways to the middle class in D.C. than they would be in the Midwest. (The one cool thing about the area is that when you do stumble upon one of these places - i.e., the stationer in Vienna [can't recall the name], Artfully Chocolate, etc. - the proprieters/employees are actually nice, which is nice; my parents actually commented on this, too.)
Since ScranBarre is from the Rust Belt, another part of the country that people love to hate, it could be that his expectations about the D.C. area were unrealistically high (re: the kinds of things he values/enjoys), too. The genesis for my long-winded hypothesis, above, was actually an incident I had with a friend from Pittsburgh here in Faux Alexandria - she said she expected this area to have more "cool restaurants" and to be generally "hipper," especially since it wasn't a place "people made fun of" like Pittsburgh was.
One final caveat - since starting to read/post in the NoVA section of CD, I've discovered you guys are often very self-deprecating about a place - the vaunted "Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C." (ooooohhhh) - that many Midwesterners would (even if just subconsciously) equate to the splendor of the Elysian Fields. (I'd actually still agree that being here is like being dead - only kidding, of course. )
Ok, let the flames begin!
Last edited by Alicia Bradley; 07-13-2009 at 12:45 PM..
I don't know who duped ScranBarre about NoVA, but I know who duped me (re: both NoVA and the general D.C. area) - mass media and the entertainment industry. As someone from the Midwest, I grew up hearing from those two sources that my home region was total crap, that it was essentially one big farm, that people living places as far north as South Dakota had Southern accents, that the Northeast of the U.S. was culturally far superior to the Midwest in every way. (Some of these allegations were patently false, and I obviously trusted my own eyes and ears before, say, some entertainment columnist from Long Island, but I now realize I did acquire, on a thoroughly subconscious level, some of this attitude, myself.)
Well, being from an upper-middle-class background (which is actually pretty damn common in the Midwest) and having sort of "artsy" parents, I got to experience lots of yuppy goodies growing up, especially during my later childhood (indie coffee shops, high-end boutiques, awesomely quirky - if pricey - restaurants, natural foods emporia, gentrified "downtown" neighborhoods with rehabbed historic homes, etc.). Then, during my dirty-poor college years in Columbia, Missouri (the coolest small city on earth) and Evanston, Illinois (a Chicago 'burb that should make D.C. suburbanites cry), I settled into a very "granola" lifesyle - riding my bike everywhere (I don't even have a license!), buying all my food at funky and cheap natural foods places whose stock was almost 100% bulk items, etc. It was only natural for me to assume, based on the mantra that I'd heard from my natal day chanted by idiots on T.V. (on the rare occasions it was turned on ) and movie screens, in pages of magazines, etc. that such things would be both more plentiful and superior in quality in an Eastern city like D.C. (Well, I wasn't so naive that I believed D.C. wouldn't pale in comparison to Chicagoland, but the latter is a far bigger city, for one thing.)
I guess I did have some VERY GOOD data about the Mid-Atlantic, in retrospect, that I stupidly chose to ignore: when I was in high school, my parents and I took a trip to Baltimore (a city I actually do like in many ways - but that's for another thread ), Annapolis, Rehobeth Beach in Delaware, and Ocean City, MD. Except for a few isolated spots (parts of Baltimore, the Annapolis waterfront and areas nearby), we thought we'd descended into some 1960s throwback blue-collar hell. This was the vastly culturally superior East Coast? (I'd been to D.C. itself but was too little at the time to remember much about it by the time I moved here in '06.. besides the museums and monuments and the abundant litter/trash on the streets, that is. )
So - in short (I'd love to eventually gather some hard numbers which would back up my mostly subjective impressions) - it seems to me that good restaurants, walkable neighborhoods, indie coffee shops, indie shops in general, places to get old-school natural foods (e.g., sprouting supplies , bulk items, vegetarian jerky, etc.) are way, way, way, way, way sparser on a per-capita basis than in other (Midwestern) cities I've lived in. And also that these things are way less accessible in many ways to the middle class in D.C. than they would be in the Midwest. (The one cool thing about the area is that when you do stumble upon one of these places - i.e., Artfully Chocolate, the stationer in Vienna [can't recall the name], etc. - the proprieters/employees are actually nice, which is nice; my parents actually commented on this, too.)
Since ScranBarre is from the Rust Belt, another part of the country that people love to hate, it could be that his expectations about the D.C. area were unrealistically high (re: the kinds of things he values/enjoys), too. The genesis for my long-winded hypothesis, above, was actually an incident I had with a friend from Pittsburgh here in Faux Alexandria - she said she expected this area to have more "cool restaurants" and to be generally "hipper," especially since it wasn't a place "people made fun of" like Pittsburgh was.
One final caveat - since starting to read/post in the NoVA section of CD, I've discovered you guys are often very self-deprecating about a place - the vaunted "Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C." (ooooohhhh), many Midwesterners would (even if just subconsciously) equate to the splendor of the Elysian Fields. (I'd actually still agree that being here is like being dead - only kidding, of course. )
Ok, let the flames begin!
NoVa's not really a college town (George Mason is mostly a commuter school), and it's certainly not a hipster paradise like parts of Brooklyn or, for that matter, Pittsburgh. I'm not really sure how the mass media or the entertainment industry could have led you to think otherwise. Was it "McLean 22101" or "The Real World - Vienna"? Even the Los Angeles office buildings mischaracterized as "Falls Church" or "Langley" in the "X-Files" (or maybe they were Canadian) looked pretty bland - that should have tipped you off right there!
I think you just need to chalk it up to naivete and either move on, or grow up. I was an East Coast kid and I knew by the time I got out of school that midwestern college towns (such as Ann Arbor and Bloomington) were pretty cool, and that smaller cities like Richmond were more affordable for middle-income folks than places like DC or New York. It wasn't that there were more "cool restaurants" in Richmond than DC, but it seemed like there were more affordable places that would indulge the need of a 20-something with a limited budget to feel cool.
Since ScranBarre is from the Rust Belt, another part of the country that people love to hate, it could be that his expectations about the D.C. area were unrealistically high (re: the kinds of things he values/enjoys), too. The genesis for my long-winded hypothesis, above, was actually an incident I had with a friend from Pittsburgh here in Faux Alexandria - she said she expected this area to have more "cool restaurants" and to be generally "hipper," especially since it wasn't a place "people made fun of" like Pittsburgh was.
No flames here, I hope!
This area isn't hip at all, but nobody should expect it to be. The federal government, contractors, and a bunch of lawyers do not a hip city make. If you move here expecting avant-garde theater and funky boutiques, you will be sorely disappointed, and I think most DC/NoVA boosters would accept that. I just don't understand what cultural references you are talking about when you say that the media influenced you into thinking that this area would be crunchy. I mean...we get stereotyped as being a soulless city populated entirely by bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits (the men) and skirts and sneakers (the women).
I'm not sure that visiting Ocean City and defining the whole Mid-Atlantic as a 1960's blue-collar backwater as a result is terribly fair. In fact, it's about as unfair as visiting Toledo or Peoria and then slamming the Midwest.
I honestly think, from your posts, that you would be far happier in some of the Maryland suburbs. Takoma Park or Hyattsville would be pretty good fits. Virginia has Del Ray, but because we grew later than the Maryland suburbs, we are missing those streetcar suburbs that I *think* you are missing from the Midwest.
I don't know who duped ScranBarre about NoVA, but I know who duped me (re: both NoVA and the general D.C. area) - mass media and the entertainment industry. As someone from the Midwest, I grew up hearing from those two sources that my home region was total crap, that it was essentially one big farm, that people living places as far north as South Dakota had Southern accents, that the Northeast of the U.S. was culturally far superior to the Midwest in every way. (Some of these allegations were patently false, and I obviously trusted my own eyes and ears before, say, some entertainment columnist from Long Island, but I now realize I did acquire, on a thoroughly subconscious level, some of this attitude, myself.)
Ok, let the flames begin!
I agree that I'd like to know what these mass media sources were that were running down your home and painting our area in this apparently glorious light. I've never heard DC described as anything other than exactly what it is. But then, I didn't grow up in the Midwest, so my sources were understandably different...
At any rate, I think this is an excellent example of why it's important for each individual to form his or her own opinions about things. It's in nobody's best interest for one person to take another person's opinion as fact. It's one thing to agree with someone else's opinion; it's another thing entirely to accept that opinion as correct without having first gathered some data for yourself so that you can come to *your own* informed opinion. I think most of us have to learn that lesson the hard way, though. I'm sorry your "hard way" involves your living in a place in which you don't feel at home.
And, finally, I'm just naturally suspicious of anyone who feels the need to criticize things, places, or people in the way you've described. In most cases, one thing is not better than another thing. Things are just different. DC is in no way better than St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, LA; it's just different. DC is what it is, as are all other places.
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) and movie screens, in pages of magazines, etc. that such things would be both more plentiful and superior in quality in an Eastern city like D.C. (Well, I wasn't so naive that I believed D.C. wouldn't pale in comparison to Chicagoland, but the latter is a far bigger city, for one thing.) 
), Annapolis, Rehobeth Beach in Delaware, and Ocean City, MD. Except for a few isolated spots (parts of Baltimore, the Annapolis waterfront and areas nearby), we thought we'd descended into some 1960s throwback blue-collar hell. This was the vastly culturally superior East Coast? (I'd been to D.C. itself but was too little at the time to remember much about it by the time I moved here in '06.. besides the museums and monuments and the abundant litter/trash on the streets, that is. 
)
