+1. I was never even aiming for a UMC life. I was looking at my parents living on one income in a house they bought for $40k and thinking "I don't need more than this, so I don't need to maximize income, just have a professional career and I'll be fine." It's different now. |
You're describing the CTMS which has been rolled out in very, very limited amounts. The normal pay scale for DHS/CISA is the regular GS scale with a 25% "cyberpay" retention bonus paid out after the first year of service on a bi-weekly basis. That tops out around $225k/year. So the PP is either one of the very few CTMS hires (who has outed themselves like an idiot by identifying their undergrad) or they're exaggerating. Or they're an SES (I don't think CISA has any SLs). Either way, they work at DHS, so we should all feel bad for them regardless if their income. |
Exactly. I can’t believe the posters who are saying everyone was discussing salaries and $$ requirements for a UMC life. It would have been considered so tacky back then. No one who actually was UMC or above ever talked about these things. |
Vault was started in 1997, so it clearly saw a need for salary info — but COL difference and the necessity of UMC would have been harder to find. Salary info still kind of hard to track down, that’s why Glassdoor still exists despite being fairly useless above entry level. |
First published in 1996. Those of us who graduated prior to that didn’t have Vault Guides or the internet resources that most people have access to now. Some of you younger people really can’t fathom how limited access to information was through the early 90’s. |
The irony of a cybersecurity expert DOXIng themselves on DCUM by bragging about their salary… |
As an undergrad, no idea how I would know if the brand new “salary guide” was legitimate or just some fake dot.com nonsense. |
LOL |
If a UMC GF dated a LMC BF, would she clue him in? Or vice versa? Though inter class dating is fairly rare to be serious. |
Yes! My family is UUMC and never discussed salary or job strategies or anything and just encouraged me to pursue whatever I wanted to do, so I feel like I could have made better choices $$ wise. And I wasn't pushed to work hard, just have fun. I think this is one of the reasons why WASPs are where they are now. |
Suburban Ivy loser here.
I think a lot of posters don't seem to realize that a lot of us are in our 50s. Gen-X. For me, I graduated HS in 1989, and college in 1993. The internet was not a thing yet -- at least for the general population. We found things out either by word-of-mouth, or through books. |
I think with exploding college costs and student debt, as well as salary inequality between genders and minorities, we suddenly turned to focus on the ROI of college (another thread on this) and that kind of opened the door for people more frankly talking about salaries. As well as internet, and Glassdoor, LinkedIn providing much more insight into work as an institution. |
I agree. People who have grown up with access to information because of the internet and even cable TV probably just aren’t able to imagine or appreciate what that’s like. Even access to books probably means that someone or something else that you read had to mention the book. I also think that people who grew up surrounded by professionals casually sharing information of all kinds have absolutely no idea all that people don’t get when they’re not exposed to that. |
This strategy really only worked for UMC white boomers. Those times are loonnngg gone. Time to put in the work and think about ROI like every minority family has encouraged for decades. |
OP, it sounds like your elite education opened doors for many jobs for you, though they may not have paid a ton. I likely would not even have been considered for these kinds of jobs bc the interviewers would not have heard of where I went to school (Midwest, non-elite school). At least your education opened up various opportunities for you. |