Software systems engineer salary

Salaries are tricky since there is a vast range of starting salaries in the industries and their composition. In the tech field, wages are compromised of stock, bonus, and base salary. At the larger companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), the combination of those three might be up to 200k for a new grad, but it might be significantly less for smaller companies. These figures can grow into the half a million to the millions range as graduates advance in their careers as a larger portion of your salary becomes stocks. This is the situation now, and it's hard to predict where the industry will be 5 to 10 years in the future, especially as the field becomes saturated. As the supply of computer science/engineer grads increases (every school seems to have bigger and bigger classes each year), and efficiencies increase due to economies of scale (more companies moving to cloud-based solutions), with machine learning/AI improvements, etc., salaries might start trending down. Still, they might also trend up with a smaller cohort, etc.