What % of developers can get these kinds of offers? Do you need Ivy League? Insane algorithm / whiteboard testing prowess? A hot company in those 2 years of experience?
I think he graduated (says 2 years experience), picked the right company, and that put him on this kind of trajectory. It could be a different story if the last start up he was at was not a "unicorn".
OP mentioned working previously at a "unicorn" and having referrals. Keep in mind that those signals are much easier to detect (and thus justify decisions based upon).
Without these, one faces a number of challenges:
- You need to get your resume looked at somehow
- It's well-known that when it comes to programming and system design, "Real recognize real"
- You need a wide variety of skills beyond programming and system design: social skills (sometimes moreso than anything else), sometimes classic CS search/sorting/optimization techniques
- They might realize they need someone with different specializations
- You might remind the interviewer of someone they dislike
Is it really possible to get 180K RSUs per year with just 2 years of experience?
That's more than the standard new grad Rsu grant at Google/FB/Microsoft/Amazon, which vests over 4 years. I can't imagine that 2 years of experience plus some negotiating quadruples the stock signing bonus.
Everything else seems high, but within the realm of possibility...however, the RSU grants seem to be abnormally high to me. OP claims that he gets the listed amount per year in stock, not vesting over four years.
> Is it really possible to get 180K RSUs per year with just 2 years of experience?
Well, to be fair that's only from Lyft which isn't even liquid yet. All other offers are half that, but at least you could sell them for cash if you wanted.
Keep in mind that pre-IPO companies are often willing to throw egregious amounts of stock at you, since it is illiquid and forces you to stick around. (and in this specific instance, Lyft is known for above-average stock grants).
I got a similar offer (>180K RSU/year) from a company, and I have less experience than this guy.
I live in the UK, to me these numbers are insane. How are these salaries at that work experience possible? Is the pay increase from then on slow? Are these salaries sustainable for the industry long term? I know experienced professionals who would be considered successful in the UK who finish their careers nowhere near this level of salary (not programmers but certainly engineers). I’m astounded.
This is what I wonder also. It's like here in Australia, where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year. It doesn't seem sustainable... because it isn't.
The equivalent in the UK that I can think of are Pimlico plumbers in London, over £100K. But it’s a very small subset of an otherwise normal industry pay wise
I knew a 19 year old girl who was driving trucks in a mine in Western Australia. She was on $180K/year. She gave it up after a year though apparently, and I don't know where she is these days so cannot ask her why she left a job that was paying that much only a couple of years out of high school.
First of all, she would have experienced severe gender bias. I don't think it needs an explanation when you consider a demographic of mostly low-to-moderately-educated men in the workforce and everyone living in fairly close quarters.
Secondly, the conditions are harsh. You work around 14-hour days in 35-45 degree C heat. This wears out people very quickly. It can get so hot that rubbish bins catch on fire themselves, and you can cook an egg on your car's roof.
And third, people get homesick due to the rosters - usually 2 weeks on, one week off (or similar). It disrupts relationships and takes a big personal toll on people.
There are a lot of people that do it for years - but the majority pull a year or two and then leave.
I figured it would have been something like this. She was a fairly attractive young lady. Very capable, but I am thinking she would have copped a fair amount of harrassment just due to her gender.
I am several male friends in the mining and offshore oil rig game too, and those jobs appear to suit young people without a family and little social life. Once relationships and kids come into the equation, that shift regime just doesn't seem to be compatible.
I know someone in Brisbane who did the mining thing who went to General Assembly and accepted the first job he could get his hands on - he knew mining wasn't sustainable.
I've seen rosters between 7/9days and 3/4 weeks - It does vary depending on the site. The main difference though, is that oil and gas is literal luxury to working in an iron ore mine... My ex partner used to be a chef on one of the Atwell platforms, and just the difference in food is unbelievable haha.
I work in this industry and the women I've talked to don't seem to feel gender bias is that much of an issue. Your second and third points are much bigger factors - in some parts of the industry (admin, environmental management, safety, camp support - ie. desk jobs in airconditioned offices) I'd guess 40%+ of the workforce would be women, but other roles with more physical discomfort (mechanical fitters, civil works, machine operators) are almost exclusively male.
Depression and suicide are a huge risk factor for FIFO workers. It's shit work.
> where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year.
Remember that this is for a specialist driving a haul truck on a remote mine site, working 12 hour days on a 3-in-1 swing or worse (ie. three weeks on, one week off, only one day off out of 14). You literally have no life.
Consider that it might be the reverse. Why are we paid so low? How come companies extract so much profit from UK developers? Can businesses get away with being much less efficient with dev resources around the world vs. USA?
Successful US technology businesses tend to detach from the rest of the world, they stop becoming very good comparison points (eg vs a local or semi-local technology business in a given smaller market). They first have the US to massively scale into, which can be enough by itself to generate a vast business, then they tend to rapidly push global.
If you look at that list: Facebook (global), Google (global), Dropbox (global), Airbnb (global), Palantir (US military money). And then Lyft, which is going to push global.
And among some of the other giants: Microsoft (global), Amazon (global), Apple (global), Netflix (global), Oracle (global).
Many of the prominent start-ups in the US are then backed by the proceeds from all of that (further enabling lucrative start-up pay), and it keeps cycling upwards.
The point being, they scale and extract at a hyper global scale. That enables extremely unusual compensation.
Honestly, I think most development work in the UK is crap,and most of the small and medium-sized companies out there are producing bad software, slowly.
They can't afford to pay more. They offer bad salaries, they get people with low productivity and low reward expectations. The people running the company have low expectations of their engineers and the whole sorry mess just stumbles along barely holding its head above water.
(I have been contracting in the south-east these last 5 years, I've seen quite a few of these places)
I know many developers who have come to London for better jobs, but not many who are leaving the UK altogether. Are you including London on your assessment?
A lot less so than the rest of the country. And there are pockets of competence elsewhere I'm sure.
I don't know many people who have left the country for dev opportunities elsewhere either, and most I know eventually leave London for quality of life reasons. It's just my comment on the UK industry as I have experienced it in the south east and south of the country.
I think it's the same everywhere in Europe. Unless you are in a big metropolis with lots of financial power behind it, IT will be treated as a cost centre, salaries and quality will be sub par.
The same in Germany, if you are not in Berlin/Munich, most jobs in IT will be really bad. Not sure about US but I'd assume best jobs are in SF/NY/Seattle and other places will have "shitty" jobs compared to that.
I think there are two core parts of the issue here:
- he claims to be from a "unicorn startup" -- this matters a lot in SV for some reason
- my impression, in SV, years of experience against salary seems to be a skewed bell curve where >= 2 years is near optimal and >= 5 years is too much (for whatever reason)
Couple thoughts:
1) This engineer is getting offers from FB, Goog, etc. They are definitely in the top 1% of engineers in terms of interviewing ability if not in terms of engineering ability.
2) No salary increases do not slow down. A friend of mine has 4 years of experience, is a top 1-5% engineer/interviewer and had multiple offers at 350-500k.
3) Sustainable? No. This is a supply/demand issue and supply is increasing rapidly (more CS grads, etc)
Well in this case, for Google and Facebook, it is pretty close to that.
Facebook has 86% gross profit margins.
Google's are a little lower but still incredible, at 60%.
For the most part, they print as much profit as they want to. Google could get rid of half of their staff and just print $40-$50 billion per year in profit off of search (while keeping various critical moat pieces like Android). They have nearly 80,000 employees now, the majority of that is a combination of bloat and efforts at expansion into other non-search things.
To put into perspective how hilariously profitable Google (the search business) is, they're now capable of doing $35 to $40 billion per year in operating income. Last quarter they generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that segment. Google's (search biz) capital expenditures were a mere $3.5 billion out of $27 billion in sales. If they cared to do it, they could push margins to the ceiling.
I think they actually do slow down in most cases. While some engineers may continue to get promoted and get large bumps I think most are probably in the 150k-200k (base+bonus) range after a couple years.
FWIW, my BigCo has base comp in that range for the second lowest level. I think comp gets even higher after a few years, but there is pressure at these companies to reach a certain tier in a couple of years. For competant engineers able to learn & adapt, they will reach it just fine, but I imagine there is a percentage who struggle as well.
Making more CS majors doesn't decrease the salary someone needs to live in the Bay Area/Seattle/New York. As long as FAANG insists on engineers living in cities with housing crises and minimal supply growth, I just don't see the floor coming down much.
Entry-level engineers already live far away with roommates. What are they going to do if salaries fall? SROs? Bunks? Doesn't seem like people who are generally capable of knowledge work would take that deal.
The numbers are meaningless without knowing the cost of living. Here in the Netherlands I also make a lot less (Ph.D. working in bioinformatics) and probably pay a lot more taxes. But my mortgage is my only dept and if I get cancer I can stop working for the treatment and have no other worries than the actual cancer. When I lose my job I can still pay for my house and food and school for both kids. University is about 2000 euros a year here. There are more things than net salary.
Agreed. Nobody takes into account the total loss of social security in the US. Healthcare, retirement, child aid, education, .... If anything, I'd be upset if I were living in the US about other jobs not earning at least that much, to make ends meet, particularly given the huge risks everyone has to shoulder on their own.
In the UK my wife and I loose 25-30% of our pay checks to tax and national insurance and I would imagine the cost of living in the UK is comparable to the US. Our household income is considered pretty high in the UK as well so it’s not that we are badly paid in UK terms
At least here in the Netherlands the minimal, obligatory package is about 100 euros a month. this is with 375 of own risk (doesn't include doctors visits). This package will basically make sure you'll never get a real surprise, except when you have something with your teeth, oddly. Some cheap drugs are not covered. And for example there are sometimes discussions of whether new immuno-oncology related drugs that go well over 100.000 a year per patient will be in this package.
For people with low income there is "zorgtoeslag", they get sponsoring from the government.
In the UK you get everything for free regardless of work history or other factors. Every prescription has a £12 charge, topping out at a maximum of about £150 a year. Dental treatments are also normally charged at a low rate.
This is a misconception about the US. Compared to Europe, engineers tend to proportionally pay as much taxes, and sometimes even a bit more (!) in the US.
You get tremendously LESS for your taxes though, both at the city/state level and national level.
That's not a misconception. The US has a far more progressive tax system than Western Europe. People earning $40k to $80k in the US pay extremely little in taxes versus most comparable nations. If you're making $47,000 in the US, you're paying near a 10% effective federal income tax rate (before any deductions). That income level, which is the median US full-time income, is far higher than nearly every other median income on earth (except for a handful, such as Switzerland, Norway etc). At $80,000 in the US, you're paying a 16% effective federal income tax rate. If you're making $80k at a job in the US, you're also almost guaranteed to be getting a solid benefits package on top of that including healthcare.
In systems with fully socialized healthcare, the middle class pays far higher taxes to cover their health insurance. That's why Scandinavia's tax systems are so regressive for example. In the US, the middle class is taxed far less, and they simultaneously get health coverage from their job. The top 20% are paying 95% of all income taxes in the US. Serious income taxation doesn't kick in until you get well above $100,000.
All of these US engineers are getting nearly entirely / entirely subsidized health coverage, which is extremely lucrative and is not accounted for in the pay numbers. US healthcare costs twice as much as it does in eg Britain or Germany, so if your employer in the US covers the cost of that, as is typically the case with an engineer, that's worth another $10,000 to $30,000 per year depending.
My post came from the fact that as an engineer in Silicon Valley about 45% of my salary goes in taxes, which is more than if I were an engineer in my native European country (where obviously the pay would be much less).
As a percentage comparison to your salary, what are you getting in benefits (including healthcare coverage)?
If you're making $200,000 and getting $60,000 per year in total non-base-salary benefits, that makes a meaningful difference in the taxation percentage picture. In my experience, Europeans properly always talk about what they get for their taxes (eg healthcare), while Americans rarely discuss that they get an entire other compensation set to go with their salary and it's excluded from income comparisons (which is extremely relevant, because of how very expensive US healthcare is, ie that it's not cost comparable to other developed nations).
Your not including the flat ~%15 social security / medicare taxes that you get, the ~%3-%9.5 state taxes. New york has city taxes if you live there making your high income.
Also not including the ~%1 or more property tax rate, which doesn't really exist at the same level vs. places like the UK. That can add $2000-$10000 per year to your tax bill.
At $47k, Federal income tax + FICA + average state + local + deducations, you're looking at about 18%-20% all-in.
The VAT tax also doesn't exist in the US, you're not accounting for that, and it's dramatically higher in most of Europe than the US sales tax. In the US we think a 6% or 7% sales tax is high; in Europe 15% to 20% VAT rates are common.
We don't need to go over all of that however, we have the disposable income figures to reference. The US median disposable income figure is among the highest:
The US is better of in terms of median income than all of Europe except for a few nations (that gets even more exaggerated if you select for full-time employment):
Well programmed high end robots are a scarce commodity.
The reason Facebook needs 5000 robots to run/take care of the data of 1.5 billion people while the Indian or Chinese govt need about 2 million robots says all there needs to be said about the quality of the robot.
Yes it’s sustainable — I remember reading somewhere that Apple could pay every employee almost a million dollars per year and still make a profit. You can do the math yourself, and you will be further blown away by just how wealthy our country and tech industry is.
As to how our companies make so much money? I’m sure it’s very complicated, but just look at the US economy and contrast it to more socialist economies as seen in Europe. The US economy is far from perfect, but for better or for worse, it’s very prosperous.
In addition to the US having lower taxes and fewer services I think there’s some sort of status thing going on in Europe/the UK with engineer salaries being lower than they’d be otherwise.
Engineers there seem to be viewed as the lower rung on the status ladder compared to management/sales/finance and are paid less on that metric alone. I think the US (particularly Silicon Valley) is better about respecting engineer talent.
One of my biggest surprises when moving to Europe was that engineers earn less (and are IMO less respected) than all types of managers, including but not limited to PMs.
That shouldn't be surprising. You will find this much with little research. Engineers are treated as blue collar workers in majority of world. There are couple of exceptions such as notably Silicon Valley and most big metro areas in US (New York for example), perhaps London in Europe. But these are just anomalies, prevailing consensus around the world is that engineering is blue collar work, just instead of shovel you use keyboard.
Well, I guess I’m glad we proved that “consensus” wrong.
I suppose this goes to show that just because the majority of the world has consensus on something non-scientific, does not make it the best decision or mindset.
Thankfully science is mostly immune to political and social biases when done correctly.
Yeah and I would never want to work in Switzerland.
Switzerland is such a hypocritical country it is not even funny.
Everyone and their dog is such a rude creature that you cannot even shower at 2.00 am when you arrive from a business trip because it annoys your neighbors.
Sure there are quadrillions of other positive things in Switzerland but not all of us would change money for "european social equality lalaland"
Wow. Seems like you feel personally attacked. I noticed that you defend working in the US a lot in this thread... not sure what is up with that. But I hope you can somehow relax about this discussion...
And btw. I never said everyone should live there. I said I do not want to live in the US.
I am european and I work in Europe. No need to explain I totally understand why one would want to work in Switzerland and not in the US.I just felt like giving a different perspective on how working and living is in Europe.
Well, but you cannot just compare with UK. That's just like comparing Silicon Valley with rest of US.
Compare Silicon Valley with London. It's still much worse in London but engineer salaries in London have been going up lately and it's definitely best place in Europe to be a software engineer.
£80-£100k is something you can get in London if you are good at your profession. It's not Silicon Valley obviously (mostly because concept of bonuses and RSUs does not really exist in London compared to SV). But as base salary, it's not bad.
Oh I agree it's a fine salary, but it is at the higher end (if we disregard contractors (like me)).
But the post is about someone two years past graduation! That's the mind-boggling thing to me. Those high-end London salaries are probably people with 10+ years behind them. I could be wrong about that but... I don't think so.
You are right. I am a long time London contractor too but am close to accepting a perm offer :)
I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you.
Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience.
Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even very young. But then again, you get no RSUs, no bonus, no paid vacation or other benefits, have to deal with taxes and admin of your company, can be fired at will, high levels of stress...
I think that's a much worse deal than working for one of the FAANGs in Silicon Valley.
So what finally turned your head? A bit of security? More of a management/architect type role? Or just an obscene amount of money?
Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)
I actually got a really good job offer in South East Asia for one of the big unicorns over there so I’m going perm but to a different continent :)
If I stayed in London I’d probably keep contracting. But yes I guess it would be good for my career to settle down for 3-4 years in a perm job to get that sort of experience.
It's worth remembering that these numbers are essentially for contractors in UK terms.
No job security, no long-term promise of employment, if you don't fit what the company wants, you'll be gone with little or no come back.
This all leads to very long working hours, little or no holiday, and a different lifestyle than we have in the UK.
I know plenty of UK (and European) software developers who wouldn't dream of answering their phone about work after 5 or 6 in the evening. If you want $250k a year, you'll answer it at 3am.
None of these things are true at Google, Facebook or half the other places on OP's list. These companies will not fire you at will. You will go through at least 2 cycles of poor reviews and a performance improvement plan, it should be obvious at least a year out that you're not cutting it.
All of those companies have great benefits and generous holiday time. Some people have an oncall rotation, but they know what it is ahead of time. Others don't.
If you have the flexibility, most of the companies on this list recruit regularly in Australia for roles in the US. You may need to fly state-side of an on-site but the initial round can be done in Melbourne or Sydney.
I'll be in Melbourne renewing my E3 visa in late Dec/early Jan. And maybe doing some recruiting for my almost-unicorn company too. Message me if you'd like to get coffee or something. My email's in my profile.
My chance to try and swipe a referral bonus, then. I'll be in Perth for Christmas and my lot were sponsoring E3s before it was cool. My work email is jchester@pivotal.io
It's good, but a huge chunk of this will be lost to taxes because he's in SV (I know because I live and work here as well, have been in a similar situation, and his numbers are plausible). So it's something to marvel at, but the actual amount going in the bank is much smaller.
Your rent for a 1 bedroom is $2800-3500/month to start tho. Total tax rate around %33, and your marginal tax rate is ~%40.
If your interested, you could apply to these companies directly on their website. You would probably get a reply. Same with many startups. Go practice a whole bunch of leetcode questions and cracking the coding interview beforehand although.
I guess I need to move to Silicon Valley. These numbers are insane for two years and an undergrad degree. I have 32 years experience and I don't get these kinds of offers. This is either complete BS or the guy is a savant. Something smells fishy here.
They seem a bit higher than what I would normally expect for 2 year experience; sometimes a successful startup and some salary negotiations can give you a boost.
And there are some other downsides, you work very long hours in a company of 70%+ men. I think quality of life in South Bay for most isn't as nice as much less affluent places. It depends on your cup of tea, I guess.
Whoa...such bias. Like working in a company of 70%+ males is a bad thing.
Stop this madness please.
The americans are known for working hard that's not a mystery.
True, but the total compensation here is at or above 250K annually. Most places in the US won't break 100K with 2 years of experience, and the cost of living is less than 2.5x as much. In other words, you still come out well ahead.
Again though, I don't know anyone 2 years in making 134K (the Austin-equivalent of 250K in SF) in Austin. I know more than one person 2 years in making that much in SF.
And you're also ignoring that CoL calculators bias against high CoL areas in a few important ways.
> And there are some other downsides, you work very long hours in a company of 70%+ men
Why is it a downside for someone who has no bias against men? Would you call a downside working for example as a registered nurse just because there are too many women?
At my BigCo, I am working maybe slightly more than 40 hours/week on average, and mainly due to unfortunate circumstances. Otherwise it’s pretty relaxed - I did mostly 5-6 hour days last week for example, and that includes meetings where I had to take company shuttles to get around to a different building.
Also for comp, keep in mind that he is getting that sort of comp with two years of experience - I have met people with even less experience getting similar numbers (I know one with less experience with non-technical degree making even more). If you have the right experience/background, you can get such compensation. Just imagine what the comp is like when these people get experience under their belt at the big companies.
According to that site, I'd need to make over $200k to meet my same standard of living, but I still think someone with two years experience can't come close to my knowledge of software development. There are inherent limitations. Of course if the job is to write code without any comment about the big picture and without complaint about hours, then maybe it is competitive. And that signing bonus? That just doesn't translate to the Midwest at all.
All else being equal 32 years experience will count against, you though --- and this is quite rational...
These companies want to hire for trajectory. If someone's gotten to a great level of skills 2 years out of university, that says good things about where they'll be in 5 or 10 years.
We just bought a 5 bedroom, 3-1/2 bathroom house with a nice size separate office in the northern suburbs of Atlanta with about 2800 square feet. Brand new build for $335,000 with all of the niceties. I've looked on Zillow, the same square footage, much older home, would be around 2-4 million at least in San Francisco.
Yup, this is the major difference. The COL numbers can be explained away, but if you want space now and a retirement later then you can get by with much less work outside SF.
In Chicago, it's fairly common to take a regional 50 to 75 minute train ride into the city from a distant suburb. Is there anything like that for Silicon Valley? Can you get an hour away by train and lower housing costs?
I can only speak for Atlanta, but the state of public transportation is abysmal from the burbs. True the train system is great to get to certain parts of Atlanta - and I use the park and ride any time I'm going to the airport or going downtown, but people in the burbs fight tooth and nail against an easy transfer system that will allow "them" to come up here.
And don't let me get started ranting about why the majority of white collar workers even need to come in to work as often as we do just for appearances.
That's actually cheap, depending on the BART station (not all are created equal), the size of the place, whether it's gated, and whether you mean 10 minutes walking or driving.
I still find it a little hard to believe... When I was a new grad, I got offers from several of the companies you listed, and the comp didn't come close to OP's post. I can't imagine 2 years of experience and some negotiating changes the compensation that drastically.
Google, for example, offered a base salary just over 100k. Is the difference between level 3 and 4 (what I assume 2 years of experience gets you) really ~60%? The annual RSU difference is also drastic, as OPs offer was 100k in stock annually.
Note: I'm calculating the 60% by looking at annual salary + stock + target bonus each year.
Google base is 110K for a new grad L3. This isn't a 70% difference, its a ~30% difference.
Total comp for a new-grad Googler who doesn't negotiate at all will be 110K base +18K bonus + 25K stock annually = ~153. That's without negotiating at all. Negotiation can push that across 200K annually in extreme cases. From that perspective, its not as gargantuan a leap. And similarly, I expect that this person was able to negotiate their google offer, so it would be higher than the "default" for an L4.
Right, I was calculating the difference across total comp. OPs total comp is ~261k per year (140 + 21 + 100), so compared against the number you listed, it's almost exactly +70% (261 / 153 = ~1.71).
I edited it to 60% to account for negotiations (assumed +10-15k annually), but I didn't think there was that much room at the new grad level. I remember Google being very inflexible on base, and didn't think you could get 200k annually with just negotiating (which would involve tripling the initial stock grant you listed, assuming that base is inflexible).
Even still, are the bands truly that wide across L3 and L4? I suppose I'm most astonished that the median L3 and top of L4 are that wide apart. Thank you for all the information.
Indeed, Google is inflexible on base, but they're well known (or at least I have it on fairly good authority) that they will match total comp of new grad offers from various finance firms, which have first year comp at ~200K.
And as to your second question: a rule of thumb that I think exists is that total comp approximately doubles every 2 levels, so you get a ~40% increase per level on the median. Keep in mind that a new grad offer is not the median of L3, but the bottom.
Nope definitely not fishy. I'm 2 years out of college and $180k salary + 250k RSU. SF is expensive these days. And also remember California grabs 9% of your income so it goes down by a lot
Don't do it. Silicon Valley is more favorable for the inexperienced, in part because they are a blank slate that can be more easily coached. His interviewing skills could be too notch regardless of number of years of professional experience. On top of that, there is a huge bias with interviewers to expect much more interview performance from those with more years of experience. The local industry favors the young in so many ways.
Also, don't forget about the cost of living. With 140k per year salary, about 10 percent of that (for me) was money that didn't go to taxes or bills. I have 15 years of experience (and I look young).
It's definitely a different kind of experience, so if you're feeling adventurous, do it! Just don't expect it to be fun, and be sure to do your own homework on whether there is a realistic market for a company's product if it's a startup (especially if it is Pre-Series-B). And, for the love of all that is good, don't work for any CEO under age 25. They are probably not the next Mark Zuckerberg.
If you want those offers, most of those companies are more than happy to fly you out for an onsite interview. Get 3 San Francisco weekends out of your onsites, and see if you can get this kind of pay.
Practice basic algorithms. The guys at these firms aren't nearly as smart as they think they are so you can comfortably stop after part III of the "Introduction to Algorithms" (the R. Rivest one) book (which is about 1/3 of the actual book, but like half the text is exercises, so in total this is like maybe 150 normal pages of theory, which you can condense down to 3 really dense ones, which is a good exercise by itself. Make sure to have actually written those data structures in C++ or Java (Python if you must), with tests, and if you want to ace, with benchmarks. Of course you could super-plus ace and get to part 6 or so)
And yes, the "real" way to learn software engineering is not a good way to ace these interviews. The author and maintainer of 10 years of a VM system you guys all know about, who codes and designs circles around the best engineer you've ever heard of failed the big G interview (also good enough that using some connections managed to get that reversed and an offer extended anyway). Like most jobs, it's not about actual ability, it's about knowing the "magical" bit of theory that doesn't matter in practice, but is effectively a lock on the door.
Every last bit of it you can find extensive explanations on youtube for. Don't get distracted :). There's also a free coursera course. If you don't want to follow the time schema on coursera, download the course videos on piratebay.
Oh and for academic CS candidates. Please do remember: Stanford is a LISP school, not a Haskell school. If in any book you're training for these interviews with you see the words "dependant typing", you immediately slam the book shut and make SURE you don't open it again until after the interview. Sad, but you use that stuff, your interviewer won't understand and you'll get dinged. Yes, really. Don't go into theory that you can tell your interviewer doesn't know about beyond "oh yes, I know about some stuff relating to x". DO NOT talk for 40 minutes about advanced theory your interviewer doesn't understand.
Oh and one last thing. Give a small amount of thought to how you appear to others. You might be the best engineer on the planet, but if your interviewers all write that on the feedback form, they'll pass on you. You may have 10 years of experience and get interviewed by a 2 months hire (usually 2 years, but 2 months can happen). If you proceed to shout at the guy about how his person being there disrespects you ... things won't go well. Be friendly, be approachable. Talk about your cat, but for 5 minutes at most (not for 50).
Also, you can get a small plus next to your name by asking to get referred.
These numbers are real, at least for Silicon Valley. There's nothing fishy when you take into account the cost of living here and the constant demand for engineering talent that's up to date.
Taxes: https://imgur.com/a/s3SVY (Not sure if imgur links are allowed here, but I couldn't find a website that would let me calculate an estimated paycheck and share the link)
This is one of the things that really sucks about the industry. It is a new "boy's club", and if you know people in the club then the barrier to entry is easier (if you can code at a reasonable capacity).
The entry fee for a referral is striking up a single conversation at a conference. If someone from a big tech company is speaking at a conference, the fact that they are speaking isn't the primary reason for being present. They are there to recruit.
Just having a chat with someone at a conference is often not enough to get a referral tbh. I'd assume for a referral you need to know a person at least reasonably well, i.e. you know each other on first name basis and have been out for a beer or worked together on some open source project or something like that. I don't believe you can just walk to a person at a conference, talk to them to 15 minutes and then ask for their referral.
I was a bit brief on tactics. Yes. Don't just ask for a referral.
Tactics:
Understand that they are there to recruit. This should give you confidence. This isn't some weird game, you're not manipulating or tricking them. They are here for these conversations. Some soft-skill tactics don't work for everyone. If some/none of the below materializes or isn't your thing, it's alway okay to ask. "Are you doing any recruiting while in town? I'm interested in talking to someone at NeatCo."
If you can speak at the conference, that is preferable. If not, walking up and saying hi will work but it should involve you asking a well-informed question about the thing they are speaking about. Spend an hour before the conference researching their topic and come with something in mind: What lead company X to create Y? If someone were motivated, could they create ${interesting but not crazy new feature/thing} using Y?
If you don't have a question, just talk about the content of the talk. Tell them what you thought.
The person speaking on behalf of NeatCo will often bring another person with them. The speaker is the domain expert, the other person will often be someone capable of hiring. If they bring a +1, talk to that person as well.
The goal of your chat is to get any of: dinner invite, next-day coffee, straight up ad-hoc interview.
Typically the referrals are paid pretty well, from my experience most people in a BigCo will refer anyone with a pulse as long as it's not to their direct team.
I wouldn't even bother going to a conference for this, just find someone on LinkedIn who is a 2nd connection, InMail them (no need for an intro), mention your shared connection and that you're looking for a referral for [job spec link] at their company.
Yeah, but that just reflects the sad fact that working together with someone is a much better indicator of their quality than any interviewing process.
So a referral saying "I worked with X and he/she is really good" should outweigh most other things.
If you are applying local you can go to meetups and meet people and easily get in to interviews. The hard part is if you want to go to another city and have no contacts or networks. You can't really go to meetups there before you move. I've had to move twice for my wife's job, it's brutal losing two networks. Luckily I was able to work for my previous companies remotely. Then when I wanted to move on I attended meetups and got connected with the right people. Finding work remotely is also an option but it's really difficult getting responses. They get flooded with so many applicants you probably won't even get a reply.
Exactly, I think he should have started from this (and that unicorn experience). In other words, he's not just any young developer with 2 years experience.
Because Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Harvard produce radically superior computer science students vs the average community college.
That doesn't mean no talent comes out of community colleges. It means the average ability level is far lower and the elite students are far more rare.
The school doesn't matter much if you have the ability and can demonstrate it. The kind of grads coming out of elite schools that Google & Co are recruiting, tend to have both the ability and the school. The schools, and the professors there, help more often than not with filtering.
CS schools don’t matter because they’re so bad at teaching that any student from the #3 school or below is probably useless unless they’re self taught. But if it’s Stanford they’ll be okay.
10 years ago I was working for VMware in Palo Alto as an intern and my salary was $5.5k per month. They offered me a permanent position for $75k per year, but I decided to move back to Finland. I would say that those numbers in the article sound believable. Housing costs in the bay area are crazy.
Housing costs shouldn't really factor into what the company is willing to pay staff though. It costs the company the same amount regardless of how much it costs the employee to live.
Housing costs come in to play when trying to recruit and maintain talent. All cities do not have enough tech talent. Migrant tech workers consider housing costs when deciding which city to move too.
In addition, if salary does not increase with cost of living workers will leave.
There was a question on gender and race in the article comments. I am wondering how much does this play in the numbers game? Do tech companies ask this in their application process (in SF, USA anyway)? Are they even allowed to? Can they find out? Do they have recruitment teams sniffing out applicant's social media to find out?
Sidenote: One of my favourite replies on the article comments:
I'm somewhat confused by your question, but generally it's not a secret what gender someone is based on their resume/application. You may also be able to glean race from this. This information is rarely anonymized.
That said, the "numbers game" doesn't really start until after you pass the on-site, and any inherent bias likely occurs more frequently there since there are more opportunities (likely a single phone screener/resume screener, then 4-6 on-site participants).
From what I've seen in management in SV, bias tends to rear it's head more in the phase of considering on-site feedback in the topic "does this candidate fit in here?" before anything gets to the offer stage.
At the offer stage, the actual financial details are usually left to a different set of individuals, depending on the size of the company (hiring manager, HR, CTO, CEO, etc.). There's a different opportunity for bias here, but I think generally, it's smaller.
Well, with Western names, I guess a recruiter can guess at the gender, but with some Sub-continental or Asian names - that can be hard to do.
Which leads me to another question - Do people use pseudonyms to increase their chances of getting through initial screening of their applications?
(Anecdote: I had a (female) business mentor many years ago who said that she had trouble getting businesses to meet with her. Until she stopped using her full name on letters to company executives. She changed her signature from 'Anna Smith' to just 'A. Smith'. She said she then started getting lots of replies addressed to 'Dear Mr. Smith'.)
I suppose depending on where you're located, a name may be difficult to pinpoint gender. Though I think it's more common than not to be able to tell (or guess).
I think it's important to understand the context of SV, and especially the larger companies. Most companies are flooded with applications (less so on the referral side, which I think this post points to being useful a bit).
Because of this, most people applying seem to shotgun apply to many companies in hopes of having a good one respond in a reasonable timeframe.
It seems rare to have a tweaked resume per position, let alone per company. I would not be surprised if there were some people that choose to leave out some details from their resumes to avoid early bias, but I personally don't think it does much to help them, as they would likely face that bias eventually anyways. I don't, however, think it's particularly common to see this.
You do see the occasional "American-ized" name from time to time, where an individual from an Asian/South Asian, or other area where pronunciation differs greatly from the common US English, will adopt a pseudonym to be more easily accepted, pronounced, or not hear their name butchered by every person they work with. I also don't think this is overly motivated by avoiding hiring bias.
(Anonymized anecdote: a previous fellow I know is Chinese and his name is 'Xiang', but he goes by 'Jacob')
Depends. With Chinese people applying for jobs, for example, Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name. And they would use their English first name when applying for a job at US or other large international company. So you could definitely guess gender there.
Sub continental names I would agree, if you are European or American it might be difficult to guess the gender from name. But from the resume you might be able to guess it based on other information (lots of people put their photo on their CV which makes this a moot point obviously).
> Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name
I've always been intrigued by this. I assume they do this when they decide to travel to the West for work or study (in order to make it easier to communicate with locals), as opposed to being given dual names at birth?
I think it might depend on country. Mainland China I'm not sure about but in Taiwan/HK/SG I think parents choose a second "unofficial" English first name for their children. This is useful exactly for reasons of traveling, studying or working abroad or for multinational corps.
It seems standard way to get a great compensation is to sit down and exercise all the run-of-the-mill algorithmic questions because that will matter the most in the end. Further optimisation could be made by being less fearful about negotiating the offer. Asking for 10% more would never hurt [1].
I am not a fierce critic of BigCo. interviewing practises but it seems a little disappointing that coding side-projects, contributing to open source, and writing mean so little in getting hired.
I think having a tier 1 college degree matters the most even in getting an interview, atleast here in India. This is from my experience of seeing increasing job posts having tier 1 college degree as requirement and colleagues I know having good college degree having no difficulty in getting interviews(github code, portfolio etc really doesn't matter)
Not true for a 5+ years experience. The scene is changing fast. Github is a plus and hacker rank interviews are getting adopted in almost all new startups.
A good chunk of these people will be good engineers that cannot talk about or show the stuff they worked on at their previous job. And those places specifically ban them from making apps or working on open source and they will be hard workers that work 40-50+ hours a week. Maybe they have kids too.
How do you interview these people?
I agree, algo interviews are annoying and I wish it wasn't there. If it wasn't it would make switching jobs a lot faster. But thats what it is. The suggested alternative of portfolio work has it's own problems, the same with homework problems.
Unfortunately, even places that have you write code with the internet still have an algo inteview or two.
I had an interviewer ask my for some code samples. Conveniently it was the day after I accepted another offer, but that was a definite no bueno for me, I don't contribute to open source, and I was hardly going to send them some code samples from my previous job.
This is true. I have around 6 years of experience and when interviewing recently I tried two approaches:
1) Not preparing myself by reading on data structures and algorithms. Just relying on my solid experience to carry me.
2) Spending couple of hours evening before interview to quickly go through data structures (array, linked list, hashmap, stack, queue, binary trees), algorithms (searching binary search trees, merge sort etc) and writing quick implementations of couple of most common algorithms you get asked about during interviews (just to have fresh "muscle" memory to be able to quickly write an implementation on the whiteboard with confidence).
Approach 1) did not really work well for me. After I switched to 2) the interviews got much better for me and offers started coming.
So I'd suggest even if you are very experienced and have a decade of experience, don't rely on that being enough. Spend a day before interview refreshing your memory on computer science fundamentals, try to memorize Big O cheat sheet. And you will be much more likely to get offer.
Even though I've not been in interviews for a couple of years now I still read from time to time something on the basics of algorithms and data structures to keep it "fresh" in my mind.
I go from re-reading Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual (I prefer his writing style over more formal textbooks like CLRS or Sedgewick's) to a more easy to digest piece when I'm really not in the mood for formality (last one was this week with "A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms").
It helps me to refresh it with different styles of writing as I can go from a very broad overview to the details if/when I want but I always have the basics in my head.
I hope I won't go for another interview soon though, it's really tiring, I have 12 years of experience now and I still dread just thinking about going through the process again.
> Male. Two years of professional experience. Bachelors. Non-ivy league school. Previously from a unicorn startup. I'm mentioning these because people ask, not that I think they matter.
Being an alumni from unicorn startup is my guess on why he got these offers.
People are obsessed with salaries and positions which I think is unhealthy. But what I find ironic is that I have always heard the rich talk about how money can't buy happiness or how you should take risks from people who have some kind of backing - monetary/family or like here how background doesn't matter, even with evidence like unicorn or referrals.
From a practical point of view, SF is expensive to live in so being 'obsessed' with salary might just be practical. Being able to know the range your in is also good, regardless of location, for not being taken advantage of, especially if you're young and new to the business world.
I think beyond salary, maybe you meant money in general or the social status that having a lot of it confers. That can be a particular obsession that is not healthy for a person or society in general.
Also, there are people obsessed with titles as status, which can be funny. A former co-worker made a stink about not getting a 'promoted' to a certain title level. At her next year's review, she finally did and she was ecstatic. She was doing the same job with the same duties and getting paid the same. But she had the title.
I just get a 403 page instead of an article, probably because I browse via a DigitalOcean IP address.
If this is enough to get me blocked, that's hilarious given that this company's product is supposed to be "anonymous work talk" - if they like anonymity so much why am I not allowed to browse from whatever IP address I like?
EDIT: And furthermore, all it takes to find out if a company uses Blind is to type in the company name and see what it says. That's a pretty blatant privacy leak right on the company's home page.
Why are people so surprised ? US and especially US's tech sector is known for trowing money at people. They are doing it in a hope to get those sweet Rob Pikes of our time by sheer brute force.
From what I have read about the potential Palantir IPO in 2019, they might be valued less than current 20 billion valuation if they IPO, potentially much less. It will depend on how well they do in 2018, that will be key year if they are going for 2019 IPO.
You also need to think about what you'd lose if you were to work for a big company. I do not know your current company, so maybe there is nothing to lose.
I just recently quit a Big 8 co and moved to a smaller co (was working remote for a few yrs, wanted to do something local); its just different styles of working; the quality of work isnt much different between each other.
These numbers seem high in absolute value but one must compare Cost of Living (insane in the Bay Area I guess) and insurance costs and other living expenses as well
Regionally: The wealthiest companies pay the highest salaries. In the tech world, those live on the west coast or the east coast. Texas probably isn’t going to give you much room to grow in the tech world.
Some of it is regional, and some of it will depend on what you do. The best salaries will go to the most valuable roles, so you may need to find out how to develop a specialty to make your work more valuable.
$14/hour is really low. I don’t know what exactly you do, but for most programming that’s below the market rate. If you can give me more info I’d be happy to help with advise where I can.
> Texas probably isn’t going to give you much room to grow in the tech world.
Outside of Austin, Texas definitely isn't a tech hub, but there's tons of work in energy and health care, and the pay isn't bad. Your average tech worker in Dallas or Houston is probably on par with the average SV tech worker, when you adjust for cost of living.
I understand that Texas isn't going to pay well, I'm anchored to a wife who has a PhD with extremely limited opportunities that pay decent. So here I am.
The $14 was way below market, some web work, some IT, and some updating a program that I had built for them a year earlier. I needed the cash and it beat flipping burgers or working retail. The place was interesting, people did Bio-Research. I was trying to get my foot in the door and get a better job with them. About that time my wife took a job that brought us back to Texas, outside of San Antonio.
Where are you in Texas? I'm in Houston, and those numbers don't jive with my experience (since 2000, making $30 an hour in the lowest paying jobs, and making well more than that on a regular basis)
The 45k was in Houston. Worked 10 months before the company decided to offshore everybody but sales.
Took that job because I had been looking for a year and this was the first reasonable offer. Didn't negotiate cause I really needed the job, found out after a promotion that I was lowest paid employee in the shop by 20k.
What languages do you work in? I'm not trying to belittle you, but at the same time, I'm trying to understand how you've received such small offers. Your experience is EXTREMELY atypical for Houston/Texas.
$14 is really low for programming in TX. Interns in (Houston/Dallas/Austin) get paid more than that. I think you just to look what's actually there, especially in the heath and energy business.
I know $14 is low, but I was trying to get my foot in the door. I will not live in Houston again. I'd be willing to live in Austin or Dallas, but I need an offer to be able to move.
How do these numbers carry over to non bay area places like Austin? I've got an offer for 86k base, 4000 RSU, no sign on here in Austin for an L2 at one of those companies in the top 5 and it seems like a joke.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 86.3 ms ] thread> Previously from a unicorn startup
I think he graduated (says 2 years experience), picked the right company, and that put him on this kind of trajectory. It could be a different story if the last start up he was at was not a "unicorn".
Without these, one faces a number of challenges:
- You need to get your resume looked at somehow
- It's well-known that when it comes to programming and system design, "Real recognize real"
- You need a wide variety of skills beyond programming and system design: social skills (sometimes moreso than anything else), sometimes classic CS search/sorting/optimization techniques
- They might realize they need someone with different specializations
- You might remind the interviewer of someone they dislike
I know new grads who have gotten 200k TC offers with negotiation. That’s all it takes (and sadly I don’t have that..)
That's more than the standard new grad Rsu grant at Google/FB/Microsoft/Amazon, which vests over 4 years. I can't imagine that 2 years of experience plus some negotiating quadruples the stock signing bonus.
Everything else seems high, but within the realm of possibility...however, the RSU grants seem to be abnormally high to me. OP claims that he gets the listed amount per year in stock, not vesting over four years.
Well, to be fair that's only from Lyft which isn't even liquid yet. All other offers are half that, but at least you could sell them for cash if you wanted.
I got a similar offer (>180K RSU/year) from a company, and I have less experience than this guy.
Edit: This has resulted in what people are calling a "two-speed" economy - http://archive.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell....
First of all, she would have experienced severe gender bias. I don't think it needs an explanation when you consider a demographic of mostly low-to-moderately-educated men in the workforce and everyone living in fairly close quarters.
Secondly, the conditions are harsh. You work around 14-hour days in 35-45 degree C heat. This wears out people very quickly. It can get so hot that rubbish bins catch on fire themselves, and you can cook an egg on your car's roof.
And third, people get homesick due to the rosters - usually 2 weeks on, one week off (or similar). It disrupts relationships and takes a big personal toll on people.
There are a lot of people that do it for years - but the majority pull a year or two and then leave.
I am several male friends in the mining and offshore oil rig game too, and those jobs appear to suit young people without a family and little social life. Once relationships and kids come into the equation, that shift regime just doesn't seem to be compatible.
Depression and suicide are a huge risk factor for FIFO workers. It's shit work.
Remember that this is for a specialist driving a haul truck on a remote mine site, working 12 hour days on a 3-in-1 swing or worse (ie. three weeks on, one week off, only one day off out of 14). You literally have no life.
If you look at that list: Facebook (global), Google (global), Dropbox (global), Airbnb (global), Palantir (US military money). And then Lyft, which is going to push global.
And among some of the other giants: Microsoft (global), Amazon (global), Apple (global), Netflix (global), Oracle (global).
Many of the prominent start-ups in the US are then backed by the proceeds from all of that (further enabling lucrative start-up pay), and it keeps cycling upwards.
The point being, they scale and extract at a hyper global scale. That enables extremely unusual compensation.
They can't afford to pay more. They offer bad salaries, they get people with low productivity and low reward expectations. The people running the company have low expectations of their engineers and the whole sorry mess just stumbles along barely holding its head above water.
(I have been contracting in the south-east these last 5 years, I've seen quite a few of these places)
I don't know many people who have left the country for dev opportunities elsewhere either, and most I know eventually leave London for quality of life reasons. It's just my comment on the UK industry as I have experienced it in the south east and south of the country.
The same in Germany, if you are not in Berlin/Munich, most jobs in IT will be really bad. Not sure about US but I'd assume best jobs are in SF/NY/Seattle and other places will have "shitty" jobs compared to that.
- he claims to be from a "unicorn startup" -- this matters a lot in SV for some reason
- my impression, in SV, years of experience against salary seems to be a skewed bell curve where >= 2 years is near optimal and >= 5 years is too much (for whatever reason)
Facebook has 86% gross profit margins.
Google's are a little lower but still incredible, at 60%.
For the most part, they print as much profit as they want to. Google could get rid of half of their staff and just print $40-$50 billion per year in profit off of search (while keeping various critical moat pieces like Android). They have nearly 80,000 employees now, the majority of that is a combination of bloat and efforts at expansion into other non-search things.
To put into perspective how hilariously profitable Google (the search business) is, they're now capable of doing $35 to $40 billion per year in operating income. Last quarter they generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that segment. Google's (search biz) capital expenditures were a mere $3.5 billion out of $27 billion in sales. If they cared to do it, they could push margins to the ceiling.
Entry-level engineers already live far away with roommates. What are they going to do if salaries fall? SROs? Bunks? Doesn't seem like people who are generally capable of knowledge work would take that deal.
For people with low income there is "zorgtoeslag", they get sponsoring from the government.
This is a misconception about the US. Compared to Europe, engineers tend to proportionally pay as much taxes, and sometimes even a bit more (!) in the US.
You get tremendously LESS for your taxes though, both at the city/state level and national level.
In systems with fully socialized healthcare, the middle class pays far higher taxes to cover their health insurance. That's why Scandinavia's tax systems are so regressive for example. In the US, the middle class is taxed far less, and they simultaneously get health coverage from their job. The top 20% are paying 95% of all income taxes in the US. Serious income taxation doesn't kick in until you get well above $100,000.
All of these US engineers are getting nearly entirely / entirely subsidized health coverage, which is extremely lucrative and is not accounted for in the pay numbers. US healthcare costs twice as much as it does in eg Britain or Germany, so if your employer in the US covers the cost of that, as is typically the case with an engineer, that's worth another $10,000 to $30,000 per year depending.
My post came from the fact that as an engineer in Silicon Valley about 45% of my salary goes in taxes, which is more than if I were an engineer in my native European country (where obviously the pay would be much less).
If you're making $200,000 and getting $60,000 per year in total non-base-salary benefits, that makes a meaningful difference in the taxation percentage picture. In my experience, Europeans properly always talk about what they get for their taxes (eg healthcare), while Americans rarely discuss that they get an entire other compensation set to go with their salary and it's excluded from income comparisons (which is extremely relevant, because of how very expensive US healthcare is, ie that it's not cost comparable to other developed nations).
Also not including the ~%1 or more property tax rate, which doesn't really exist at the same level vs. places like the UK. That can add $2000-$10000 per year to your tax bill.
The VAT tax also doesn't exist in the US, you're not accounting for that, and it's dramatically higher in most of Europe than the US sales tax. In the US we think a 6% or 7% sales tax is high; in Europe 15% to 20% VAT rates are common.
We don't need to go over all of that however, we have the disposable income figures to reference. The US median disposable income figure is among the highest:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-a...
The US is better of in terms of median income than all of Europe except for a few nations (that gets even more exaggerated if you select for full-time employment):
https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...
And per the OECD, when it comes to taxation progressiveness, the US is the leader among developed nations:
https://taxfoundation.org/news-obama-oecd-says-united-states...
The reason Facebook needs 5000 robots to run/take care of the data of 1.5 billion people while the Indian or Chinese govt need about 2 million robots says all there needs to be said about the quality of the robot.
As to how our companies make so much money? I’m sure it’s very complicated, but just look at the US economy and contrast it to more socialist economies as seen in Europe. The US economy is far from perfect, but for better or for worse, it’s very prosperous.
Engineers there seem to be viewed as the lower rung on the status ladder compared to management/sales/finance and are paid less on that metric alone. I think the US (particularly Silicon Valley) is better about respecting engineer talent.
I suppose this goes to show that just because the majority of the world has consensus on something non-scientific, does not make it the best decision or mindset.
Thankfully science is mostly immune to political and social biases when done correctly.
Elementary. Quite, Quite elementary. I yawn in unison with you old chap.
You could pay me 300k a year and I'd never want to go back to the Bay Area ever again.
Sure there are quadrillions of other positive things in Switzerland but not all of us would change money for "european social equality lalaland"
And btw. I never said everyone should live there. I said I do not want to live in the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But then the UK pays its programmers peanuts, more or less considers them blue collar, and wonders why it can't retain 'talent', AFAICT.
Compare Silicon Valley with London. It's still much worse in London but engineer salaries in London have been going up lately and it's definitely best place in Europe to be a software engineer.
£80-£100k is something you can get in London if you are good at your profession. It's not Silicon Valley obviously (mostly because concept of bonuses and RSUs does not really exist in London compared to SV). But as base salary, it's not bad.
But the post is about someone two years past graduation! That's the mind-boggling thing to me. Those high-end London salaries are probably people with 10+ years behind them. I could be wrong about that but... I don't think so.
I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you.
Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience.
Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even very young. But then again, you get no RSUs, no bonus, no paid vacation or other benefits, have to deal with taxes and admin of your company, can be fired at will, high levels of stress...
I think that's a much worse deal than working for one of the FAANGs in Silicon Valley.
Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)
If I stayed in London I’d probably keep contracting. But yes I guess it would be good for my career to settle down for 3-4 years in a perm job to get that sort of experience.
No job security, no long-term promise of employment, if you don't fit what the company wants, you'll be gone with little or no come back.
This all leads to very long working hours, little or no holiday, and a different lifestyle than we have in the UK.
I know plenty of UK (and European) software developers who wouldn't dream of answering their phone about work after 5 or 6 in the evening. If you want $250k a year, you'll answer it at 3am.
All of those companies have great benefits and generous holiday time. Some people have an oncall rotation, but they know what it is ahead of time. Others don't.
I haven't seen anything like that in Aus for that sort of experience.
Tech companies love E3 visas.
Hell even I get $66k over 2 years if I take Amazon and my friends don’t even think that’s good.
If your interested, you could apply to these companies directly on their website. You would probably get a reply. Same with many startups. Go practice a whole bunch of leetcode questions and cracking the coding interview beforehand although.
Silicon Valley salaries are pretty decent and I’ve heard of new grads getting 100k signing bonuses at Facebook.
But recall: $1 USD (SFO) != $1 USD (Almost anywhere else).
And there are some other downsides, you work very long hours in a company of 70%+ men. I think quality of life in South Bay for most isn't as nice as much less affluent places. It depends on your cup of tea, I guess.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
That's essentially a parallel move if you consider nerdwallet doesn't consider local tax rates (very high in SFO vs 0% in Texas).
And you're also ignoring that CoL calculators bias against high CoL areas in a few important ways.
Why is it a downside for someone who has no bias against men? Would you call a downside working for example as a registered nurse just because there are too many women?
Also for comp, keep in mind that he is getting that sort of comp with two years of experience - I have met people with even less experience getting similar numbers (I know one with less experience with non-technical degree making even more). If you have the right experience/background, you can get such compensation. Just imagine what the comp is like when these people get experience under their belt at the big companies.
These companies want to hire for trajectory. If someone's gotten to a great level of skills 2 years out of university, that says good things about where they'll be in 5 or 10 years.
And don't let me get started ranting about why the majority of white collar workers even need to come in to work as often as we do just for appearances.
Google, for example, offered a base salary just over 100k. Is the difference between level 3 and 4 (what I assume 2 years of experience gets you) really ~60%? The annual RSU difference is also drastic, as OPs offer was 100k in stock annually.
Note: I'm calculating the 60% by looking at annual salary + stock + target bonus each year.
Total comp for a new-grad Googler who doesn't negotiate at all will be 110K base +18K bonus + 25K stock annually = ~153. That's without negotiating at all. Negotiation can push that across 200K annually in extreme cases. From that perspective, its not as gargantuan a leap. And similarly, I expect that this person was able to negotiate their google offer, so it would be higher than the "default" for an L4.
I edited it to 60% to account for negotiations (assumed +10-15k annually), but I didn't think there was that much room at the new grad level. I remember Google being very inflexible on base, and didn't think you could get 200k annually with just negotiating (which would involve tripling the initial stock grant you listed, assuming that base is inflexible).
Even still, are the bands truly that wide across L3 and L4? I suppose I'm most astonished that the median L3 and top of L4 are that wide apart. Thank you for all the information.
And as to your second question: a rule of thumb that I think exists is that total comp approximately doubles every 2 levels, so you get a ~40% increase per level on the median. Keep in mind that a new grad offer is not the median of L3, but the bottom.
Also, don't forget about the cost of living. With 140k per year salary, about 10 percent of that (for me) was money that didn't go to taxes or bills. I have 15 years of experience (and I look young).
It's definitely a different kind of experience, so if you're feeling adventurous, do it! Just don't expect it to be fun, and be sure to do your own homework on whether there is a realistic market for a company's product if it's a startup (especially if it is Pre-Series-B). And, for the love of all that is good, don't work for any CEO under age 25. They are probably not the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Practice basic algorithms. The guys at these firms aren't nearly as smart as they think they are so you can comfortably stop after part III of the "Introduction to Algorithms" (the R. Rivest one) book (which is about 1/3 of the actual book, but like half the text is exercises, so in total this is like maybe 150 normal pages of theory, which you can condense down to 3 really dense ones, which is a good exercise by itself. Make sure to have actually written those data structures in C++ or Java (Python if you must), with tests, and if you want to ace, with benchmarks. Of course you could super-plus ace and get to part 6 or so)
And yes, the "real" way to learn software engineering is not a good way to ace these interviews. The author and maintainer of 10 years of a VM system you guys all know about, who codes and designs circles around the best engineer you've ever heard of failed the big G interview (also good enough that using some connections managed to get that reversed and an offer extended anyway). Like most jobs, it's not about actual ability, it's about knowing the "magical" bit of theory that doesn't matter in practice, but is effectively a lock on the door.
Every last bit of it you can find extensive explanations on youtube for. Don't get distracted :). There's also a free coursera course. If you don't want to follow the time schema on coursera, download the course videos on piratebay.
Oh and for academic CS candidates. Please do remember: Stanford is a LISP school, not a Haskell school. If in any book you're training for these interviews with you see the words "dependant typing", you immediately slam the book shut and make SURE you don't open it again until after the interview. Sad, but you use that stuff, your interviewer won't understand and you'll get dinged. Yes, really. Don't go into theory that you can tell your interviewer doesn't know about beyond "oh yes, I know about some stuff relating to x". DO NOT talk for 40 minutes about advanced theory your interviewer doesn't understand.
Oh and one last thing. Give a small amount of thought to how you appear to others. You might be the best engineer on the planet, but if your interviewers all write that on the feedback form, they'll pass on you. You may have 10 years of experience and get interviewed by a 2 months hire (usually 2 years, but 2 months can happen). If you proceed to shout at the guy about how his person being there disrespects you ... things won't go well. Be friendly, be approachable. Talk about your cat, but for 5 minutes at most (not for 50).
Also, you can get a small plus next to your name by asking to get referred.
I have never worked like an “engineer”. My brain takes information from many channels, I let it congeal, then I create solutions.
This means that I’m terrible at algorithms and patterns, but highly creative with real-world solutions.
I believe companies need both kinds of technical people (drone and creative), but I’ve only been in a few places that actually understand that.
Taxes: https://imgur.com/a/s3SVY (Not sure if imgur links are allowed here, but I couldn't find a website that would let me calculate an estimated paycheck and share the link)
Rent: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/d/apts-housing-for-rent/search/...
Car Insurance: https://imgur.com/a/3UgPw
Public Transit Options (https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/49dfm6/poor_public...)
>Previously from a unicorn startup
Still, must have been some referral for those kind of offers.
Tactics:
Understand that they are there to recruit. This should give you confidence. This isn't some weird game, you're not manipulating or tricking them. They are here for these conversations. Some soft-skill tactics don't work for everyone. If some/none of the below materializes or isn't your thing, it's alway okay to ask. "Are you doing any recruiting while in town? I'm interested in talking to someone at NeatCo."
If you can speak at the conference, that is preferable. If not, walking up and saying hi will work but it should involve you asking a well-informed question about the thing they are speaking about. Spend an hour before the conference researching their topic and come with something in mind: What lead company X to create Y? If someone were motivated, could they create ${interesting but not crazy new feature/thing} using Y?
If you don't have a question, just talk about the content of the talk. Tell them what you thought.
The person speaking on behalf of NeatCo will often bring another person with them. The speaker is the domain expert, the other person will often be someone capable of hiring. If they bring a +1, talk to that person as well.
The goal of your chat is to get any of: dinner invite, next-day coffee, straight up ad-hoc interview.
I wouldn't even bother going to a conference for this, just find someone on LinkedIn who is a 2nd connection, InMail them (no need for an intro), mention your shared connection and that you're looking for a referral for [job spec link] at their company.
So a referral saying "I worked with X and he/she is really good" should outweigh most other things.
Is this for real? This is Ministry of Truth levels of double-speak.
This will blow up one day.
I thought this industry keeps crowing about how “school doesn’t matter”?
That doesn't mean no talent comes out of community colleges. It means the average ability level is far lower and the elite students are far more rare.
The school doesn't matter much if you have the ability and can demonstrate it. The kind of grads coming out of elite schools that Google & Co are recruiting, tend to have both the ability and the school. The schools, and the professors there, help more often than not with filtering.
In addition, if salary does not increase with cost of living workers will leave.
Sidenote: One of my favourite replies on the article comments:
> Can you share your gender and race?
>> OP is a female dwarf paladin
That said, the "numbers game" doesn't really start until after you pass the on-site, and any inherent bias likely occurs more frequently there since there are more opportunities (likely a single phone screener/resume screener, then 4-6 on-site participants).
From what I've seen in management in SV, bias tends to rear it's head more in the phase of considering on-site feedback in the topic "does this candidate fit in here?" before anything gets to the offer stage.
At the offer stage, the actual financial details are usually left to a different set of individuals, depending on the size of the company (hiring manager, HR, CTO, CEO, etc.). There's a different opportunity for bias here, but I think generally, it's smaller.
Which leads me to another question - Do people use pseudonyms to increase their chances of getting through initial screening of their applications?
(Anecdote: I had a (female) business mentor many years ago who said that she had trouble getting businesses to meet with her. Until she stopped using her full name on letters to company executives. She changed her signature from 'Anna Smith' to just 'A. Smith'. She said she then started getting lots of replies addressed to 'Dear Mr. Smith'.)
I think it's important to understand the context of SV, and especially the larger companies. Most companies are flooded with applications (less so on the referral side, which I think this post points to being useful a bit).
Because of this, most people applying seem to shotgun apply to many companies in hopes of having a good one respond in a reasonable timeframe.
It seems rare to have a tweaked resume per position, let alone per company. I would not be surprised if there were some people that choose to leave out some details from their resumes to avoid early bias, but I personally don't think it does much to help them, as they would likely face that bias eventually anyways. I don't, however, think it's particularly common to see this.
You do see the occasional "American-ized" name from time to time, where an individual from an Asian/South Asian, or other area where pronunciation differs greatly from the common US English, will adopt a pseudonym to be more easily accepted, pronounced, or not hear their name butchered by every person they work with. I also don't think this is overly motivated by avoiding hiring bias.
(Anonymized anecdote: a previous fellow I know is Chinese and his name is 'Xiang', but he goes by 'Jacob')
Sub continental names I would agree, if you are European or American it might be difficult to guess the gender from name. But from the resume you might be able to guess it based on other information (lots of people put their photo on their CV which makes this a moot point obviously).
I've always been intrigued by this. I assume they do this when they decide to travel to the West for work or study (in order to make it easier to communicate with locals), as opposed to being given dual names at birth?
I am not a fierce critic of BigCo. interviewing practises but it seems a little disappointing that coding side-projects, contributing to open source, and writing mean so little in getting hired.
[1]: https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/how-i-negotiated-for-an-add...
How do you interview these people?
I agree, algo interviews are annoying and I wish it wasn't there. If it wasn't it would make switching jobs a lot faster. But thats what it is. The suggested alternative of portfolio work has it's own problems, the same with homework problems.
Unfortunately, even places that have you write code with the internet still have an algo inteview or two.
1) Not preparing myself by reading on data structures and algorithms. Just relying on my solid experience to carry me.
2) Spending couple of hours evening before interview to quickly go through data structures (array, linked list, hashmap, stack, queue, binary trees), algorithms (searching binary search trees, merge sort etc) and writing quick implementations of couple of most common algorithms you get asked about during interviews (just to have fresh "muscle" memory to be able to quickly write an implementation on the whiteboard with confidence).
Approach 1) did not really work well for me. After I switched to 2) the interviews got much better for me and offers started coming.
So I'd suggest even if you are very experienced and have a decade of experience, don't rely on that being enough. Spend a day before interview refreshing your memory on computer science fundamentals, try to memorize Big O cheat sheet. And you will be much more likely to get offer.
I go from re-reading Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual (I prefer his writing style over more formal textbooks like CLRS or Sedgewick's) to a more easy to digest piece when I'm really not in the mood for formality (last one was this week with "A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms").
It helps me to refresh it with different styles of writing as I can go from a very broad overview to the details if/when I want but I always have the basics in my head.
I hope I won't go for another interview soon though, it's really tiring, I have 12 years of experience now and I still dread just thinking about going through the process again.
> Male. Two years of professional experience. Bachelors. Non-ivy league school. Previously from a unicorn startup. I'm mentioning these because people ask, not that I think they matter.
Being an alumni from unicorn startup is my guess on why he got these offers.
People are obsessed with salaries and positions which I think is unhealthy. But what I find ironic is that I have always heard the rich talk about how money can't buy happiness or how you should take risks from people who have some kind of backing - monetary/family or like here how background doesn't matter, even with evidence like unicorn or referrals.
Edited for some clarity.
Also not having money will often cause unhappiness.
To add to your points, money used to invest in experiences with loved ones will certainly add to happiness.
So by definition, having money will not solve your unhappiness caused by not having money :)
I think beyond salary, maybe you meant money in general or the social status that having a lot of it confers. That can be a particular obsession that is not healthy for a person or society in general.
Also, there are people obsessed with titles as status, which can be funny. A former co-worker made a stink about not getting a 'promoted' to a certain title level. At her next year's review, she finally did and she was ecstatic. She was doing the same job with the same duties and getting paid the same. But she had the title.
If this is enough to get me blocked, that's hilarious given that this company's product is supposed to be "anonymous work talk" - if they like anonymity so much why am I not allowed to browse from whatever IP address I like?
EDIT: And furthermore, all it takes to find out if a company uses Blind is to type in the company name and see what it says. That's a pretty blatant privacy leak right on the company's home page.
Here's archive.is: https://archive.fo/FF094
Archive:
> 5. Did you get rejected anywhere?
> Yes, I got rejected by Asana and Instacart at the onsite stage.
Web Link:
> 5. Did you get rejected anywhere?
> Yes, I got rejected by some smaller startups at the onsite stage.
1) Google - 140k base, 100k RSUs, 50k sign on, 15% bonus
2) Facebook - 160k base, 75k RSUs, 75k sign on, 10% bonus
3) Lyft - 165k base, 180k RSUs, 20k sign on
4) Dropbox - 160k base, 115k RSUs, 10k sign on
5) Airbnb - 150k base, 75k RSUs, 15k sign on
6) Palantir - 150k base, 50k stock options, 25k sign on, 25k bonus
TLDR the author had 2 years experience
1) Google - 140k base, 107.5k RSUs, 50k sign on, 15% bonus
2) Facebook - 160k base, 75k RSUs, 70k sign on, 10% bonus
3) Lyft - 170k base, 180k RSUs, 20k sign on
4) Dropbox - 162k base, 114k RSUs, 10k sign on
5) Airbnb - 152k base, 75k RSUs, 13.5k sign on
6) Palantir - 150k base, 51k stock options, 25k sign on, 25k bonus
My first job after graduating 10 years ago was for 45k per year.
I have had an awful lot of bad luck since graduating and have yet to be paid more than that since.
Every job I've had paid progressively less, always took them cause I needed the job.
My last programming job paid $14 an hour.
Can anyone offer advice on breaking out of the cycle of terribleness?
I'm a US citizen, bachelors in CS, live in Tx.
Some of it is regional, and some of it will depend on what you do. The best salaries will go to the most valuable roles, so you may need to find out how to develop a specialty to make your work more valuable.
$14/hour is really low. I don’t know what exactly you do, but for most programming that’s below the market rate. If you can give me more info I’d be happy to help with advise where I can.
Outside of Austin, Texas definitely isn't a tech hub, but there's tons of work in energy and health care, and the pay isn't bad. Your average tech worker in Dallas or Houston is probably on par with the average SV tech worker, when you adjust for cost of living.
The $14 was way below market, some web work, some IT, and some updating a program that I had built for them a year earlier. I needed the cash and it beat flipping burgers or working retail. The place was interesting, people did Bio-Research. I was trying to get my foot in the door and get a better job with them. About that time my wife took a job that brought us back to Texas, outside of San Antonio.
Took that job because I had been looking for a year and this was the first reasonable offer. Didn't negotiate cause I really needed the job, found out after a promotion that I was lowest paid employee in the shop by 20k.