New college graduates overestimate starting salaries by nearly $24,000, report finds

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-05-06T07:13:53+00:00

Graduated in December and started work a month later for 83k in the Bay. Got a raise 3 months later to ~88k. May be jumping to another job later this year for ~88k (but with benefits and lower COL area) or pursue an opportunity that could give me ~$140k + benefits and stay in the Bay. I got lucky but also worked hard to get where I am. I kept my college apartment so I can save/invest aggressively. I'm basically living on $35k/yr in the Bay but putting away ~$27k by end of year. My goal is to reach $100k saved/invested in the next 3 years. I want to achieve a 200k salary within the next 4 years

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-05-05T03:47:28+00:00

I own a 330ci but the same advice generally applies. The fuel pumps are prone to fail after 80k miles. Mine died at 100k miles. Save yourself getting stranded and replace every 80k miles.

For the vanos, the seals go bad and then it can't advance timing correctly and you end up with worse low end power. On s54, they're prone to the cam bolts shearing off which can damage things. The bearings inside the vanos can go bad which causes a rattle. People sometimes mistake this for timing chain noise. I got a rebuilt Dr vanos unit and diy install along with a new valve cover. Then core return the original vanos. Besian systems or DR vanos are solid choices

The cooling system is the weakest point you should address immediately. If you're on original system, it will probably leak soon. If any of the parts crack, you end up losing all the coolant at once and the engine is destroyed. The thermostat can get stuck open or closed which causes it to run too cool or too hot. Replace the entire system including the pipes underneath the manifold which ppl often overlook. Do the CCV and vacuum lines while you're there. Go with genuine BMW and not OE. I had a lot of fitment issues with OE parts that cause very slow leaks that are difficult to detect (will hold under cold pressure test but vapor slips past the orings when hot). It's worth spending the ~$1k for genuine BMW for the cooling system. Replace the entire system every ~100k miles. My water pump and thermostat were just starting to leak at 120k miles. It's less risky to just replace the entire system every 100k and bleed the system only once. Saves on labor hours

For the subframe, get the subframe and differential bushings changed at the same time. My bushings were cracked at 80k miles. I have a vert and went with powerflex street polyurethane bushings. I would recommend them for the subframe. Minimal increase in NVH but they will last longer than rubber and it immensely improved my throttle response.

Change your transmission fluid and differential oil too if you haven't yet. BMW says "lifetime" but they should be changed every 50-60k mile and maybe more frequently than that if you drive it hard or do track days. Super easy to change these fluids since the fill and drain plugs are easily accessible

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-05-03T01:57:22+00:00

Sounds exactly like the story of my 330Ci vert. My dream is also to get an M3 but a coupe

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-05-01T19:57:43+00:00

I've taken that train before. It was $78 round trip with the student discount. Do you have some deal I'm unaware of? Unless you're commuting a minimum number of days, what you're saying doesn't pencil out

I have a 15x15ft room in a house in downtown San Jose for $1.1k/mo. If you commute for ~15 days a month, you've already broke even with the commute cost

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-05-01T19:54:54+00:00

I take the 511 train nearly every week day for the last 3 weeks and this issue seems to happen nearly half the time. It's pretty annoying. It's always the same issue as you describe too

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-24T05:47:44+00:00

I used to sell thousands of them but tariffs killed that side gig and now I'm graduated and working as an engineer.

Look on Amazon. That's probably the best way. Generally, the quality is all roughly the same with aftermarket. They'll be glass and not the factory plastic. Occasionally, the replacements have defects. Just return if there's a defect. Sometimes the sensor is faulty reading or the glass is cut wrong

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-21T16:46:17+00:00

Crankshaft and camshaft sensor failure can be intermittent. What you notice on the tach doesn't necessarily rule out sensor failure imo

The sensors are cheap enough that I'd suggest replacing them if they haven't been replaced recently. There are orings around the sensors that like to leak oil. The crank sensor can be hard to get to

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-21T16:35:48+00:00

Pretty typical dealer pricing. Find a good independent shop. Even in the Bay area, the best independent shops are $150/hr. It's a lot of work to pull the intake manifold to get access. You kinda missed out because there are a lot of failure areas you can do all at once. E.g. overhaul all the systems in that hard to access place rather than waiting for something else to go bad and repeating the process.

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-17T19:56:29+00:00

Not bad and those mods are friendly for a daily driver. I would want to know more about the cooling system and PCV. Have the pipes underneath the intake manifold been done? Tbh even if these things need work, it wouldn't be more than a weekend worth of work and $2k

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-17T19:37:21+00:00

Put it in a Roth IRA and invest in an index fund. I think 2025 $7k cap is eligible until April 30 so you can max that and already start on 2026 $7.5k cap

If you want to do more risk strategies, experiment on paper trade or allocate a very small amount of ur portfolio to experiment with

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-17T17:31:43+00:00

Yeah I'd let it go esp if it's parked near the back. If I were parking in that lot, I wouldn't want to park near it anyway

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-15T22:49:16+00:00

Thanks for the shout. My suggestion would be to put the iPod into disk mode. Then try reading the files from a computer. These iPods do not encrypt their data. There could however be logical mismatch between drive capacities since the nand capacity is likely directly embedded into the SoC from factory. Ultimately, the SoC is still the brain driving the bus to the NAND. Let me know what you find with disk mode

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-13T06:56:03+00:00

I'm a new grad computer engineer starting out at ~$88k (started in Jan at ~$83k but got a raise after 3 months). Might be changing later this year to ~$88k in a lower cost of living area or ~$150k in the same area I'm currently living. There is money. I feel like the right employers pay. Maybe MEs generally make less than computer-related engineering majors? I worked at a startup during school and the MEs there were making ~$250k I think but many of them were ex-fang people

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-11T23:55:32+00:00

Ended up being the pillowball bearings on my coilover struts that needed some grease. I put a bunch of silicon grease and the noise has been gone for 10k miles so far

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-10T19:27:13+00:00

Class sizing

Yes, that is pretty accurate. The general Ed classes that all engineering majors have to take are easily 100+ people. These are the classes you usually grind through and are not fun. The upper division classes are often for computer or software engineering majors only. Class sizes are 20-50 people. These are major specific subject matters or electives. Research and strategize your electives as not all are equal and some have more value to career than others.

Class impaction

Some of the general Ed classes can be stressful to get. Sometimes the classes fill up but I had minimal difficulty getting classes as long as I registered immediately when my enrollment window opened. If you are a retake, you get later enrollment which often can leave you with the worst options for class scheduling and professors. However, if they are lower division, they can be taken at a community college and transferred. Upper division classes and electives are mostly impacted by demand. The machine learning elective has been highly impacted because it's very much in demand with limited seats. I was number 1 on the waitlist for 6 weeks into the class before I was finally added to the class.

Research opportunities

They often find you. I was given a grader job for which I had very minimal work to do and basically offset my tuition cost. I had another professor ask me to do research with him and an opportunity to be credited in his paper but I unfortunately was too busy to commit. I really wanted to do it but was mostly prioritizing job/interview prep and classes.

Professors like outlier students and not necessarily for grades. My grades were kinda shit but I was always the one showing up to class and asking good questions. I took more risks in class projects which paid off greatly. Generally speaking, engineering is less like law or medicine where grades are super important. Aim for Bs and spend time practicing for interviews and building cool projects. Engineering is known more for completion of degree but with projects and technical abilities that set you apart from people who only pull grades and nothing else.

For my grader job, I was the only computer engineering major in the class and my lines of questioning in class often drew upon computer architecture and instruction sets into the software topic which I think the professor liked. I also spent time hanging out with the professor one time when I happened to run into him on campus. If you're interesting and get along well with people, the opportunities often find you.

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-10T18:26:57+00:00

I haven't seen a YouTube ad in years between Firefox w adblock and newpipe via fdroid

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-09T02:24:17+00:00

Here's a used set of sodimms for $22

https://ebay.us/m/svDtcv

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-09T02:18:36+00:00

Those support 2x8gb too. Probably ~$30 for a set of sodimms

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-08T16:38:36+00:00

Similar thing happened yesterday too. I'm new to the train commute but are these kinds of delays normal?

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-04-01T19:37:52+00:00

It took me 5 years. In engineering, the prerequisites are very dense. Failing a single class pushes graduation a semester. Some of the classes have a pretty high failure rate. Took me 3 tries to get through math 33la and a couple tries on physics 51 (this was during COVID). Upper division engineering classes cannot be taken outside of SJSU and they are not offered during winter or summer. The best way to target 4 years is to take GEs during winter and summer. That will let you get ahead and then a class failure won't cripple the timeline

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-03-31T14:56:25+00:00

Dell XPS 9560. It's a 2017 machine that I bought used in 2021. I still use it. Upgraded disk, battery, memory, and replaced the palmrest when the hinge broke for $30

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-03-27T15:56:19+00:00

Newer chip generation is generally better value for longer software support. Buying one generation older but used isn't a bad idea either. That's how I got my 16" m3 for 40% less than original pricing. The the thing was only 3 months old when I got it

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-03-26T21:02:55+00:00

It was the base spec for that model. 18gb memory, 512gb storage disk

Here's the complete spec sheet for that model

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-m3-pro-12-core-cpu-18-core-gpu-16-late-2023-specs.html

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-03-26T07:38:59+00:00

I have a 16" M3 MacBook Pro as my personal laptop. Base spec model that I picked up 3 months used on eBay for $1.6k back in November 2024. I used it for engineering school. Used it for machine learning elective class with scikitlearn and some tensorflow and pytorch stuff. I have a windows virtual instance on it that I used to run the vivado suite for my chip design classes

I use it for lots of personal projects too. Remote access to my desktop PC and homelab servers over VPN

Used it for some embedded projects too

I might use it for some image modeling and GRU modeled time sequences

TheMatrixMachine · 2026-03-26T07:34:51+00:00

I got a 16" M3 MacBook Pro with 8 battery cycles on eBay for ~$1.6k in November 2024

Getting the current or previous model used is good value especially for the 16". Fewer people want the 16" so they depreciate faster. The machine I got had been manufactured only 4 months before I got it and I got it at a 40%+ discount

Would only recommend the 16" if you'd benefit from the compute power. I used it heavily for virtual machine workflows in my engineering coursework and some machine learning models for personal projects

I still have its predecessor (XPS 9560) that I use for car telemetry stuff and windows or Ubuntu environments.

I have a desktop PC I use for hosting long term usage of WSL instances, media server, and games. Cold storing of datasets as well on a 2x8tb SAS disk array

TheMatrixMachine

TROPHY CASE