Engineer salary negotiation: from $120K to $250K offer | Hacker News Reader

Engineer salary negotiation: from $120K to $250K offer

haseebq.com

37 pointszavulon27 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780

Note that the offer was "highly illiquid", and the yearly salary offer was only $130k.

Personally, I don't consider any of the "might vest and become valuable" parts of an offer to be actual compensation. But, your mileage may vary.

Full clarity:

"250K. 130K salary, 25K signing, 95K a year in RSUs."

> I got a call from Google. They were raising the offer to 211K. That’s 211K. Liquid. I’d receive all of that before a year’s end.

That offer might be more to your taste. The fact that he chose an offer with less liquidity doesn't mean he didn't have the option.

My fascination at this inside look at a strong candidate's experience interviewing in the Bay Area with well known companies is counterbalanced by my repulsion that people can actually write and promote such self-aggrandizing blog posts with pride. I would be ashamed to hand anyone something I had written explaining how I was the smartest person in some anecdotal room.

Every person I ever met who really impressed me, did it without telling me I should be impressed.....at least, the ones I liked being around.

From no experience to teaching web dev at a bootcamp after three months? one year later offered roles by Google and Airbnb for $250k a year? Is this truly possible?

No. I've been pretty aggressive at getting raises and the fastest increases I've been able to get are from $55k in 2009 to $110k in 2011, to $140k in 2013, to $175k in 2015, to $250k in 2016.

These are base salary figures, no bonuses or options.

Where do you go for a $250K base salary?

I should put a disclaimer on that...under $175k I was a software engineer, at $175k director of engineering, $250k I had to become a freelance consultant, which is variable but averages $250k+ for me.

This is all in Los Angeles, CA

Any chance you'd be willing to share some pointers on how you've done so well as a freelance consultant?

Any chances you could update the previous post to reflect which are salaried, and which are contracting? The two aren't really fair comparisons.

For context, in the UK, an engineer making £60-70k salary can expect about £500/day contracting (£120k annualised at 48 weeks working).

And the contract gigs tend to be 6-12 month contracts anyway.

Yeah in terms of salary progression that's how I thought it worked. The more confusing thing in this story for me is going from zero experience to flying through Google et al technical interviews within twelve months. Are they really that easy?

Haseeb probably has some high level skills with negotiation and technically (at least with interview passing) as well.

I've went from $51k starting in end of 2012 to $75k + equity fall 2013 (both in DC) to $135k in mid 2014 to $140k + equity a few months later then $160k + equity in mid 2015 (all in the Valley) - before taking my last job, I turned down a $350k position (but low PTO - about half in equity), all for frontend engineering positions except for my current job (full web stack engineering). High salaries are certainly possible for software engineers, but you're not likely to see the inflated amounts outside of the Bay Area.

I have a friend who managed to do much better than me in less time as well in software engineering in the Bay Area. The caveat is that you have to be good at what you do in addition to having the right negotiation skills/savvy, and a bit of luck.

What was your main strategy? Going for promotions or negotiating with other companies?

Going from $55k to $110k looked like this:

In July 2009 got a raise to $58k at my company (Internet Brands, formally CarsDirect) so I started looking. I applied to a bunch of places and within a week I had an offer for $65k which my company matched. I told the new company and they increased their offer to $70k. I accepted.

The environment was pretty toxic at the new place so I was looking too leave when one of the other places I applied got back to me. Although I was making $70k, there were bonus opportunities of up to 10%, so I reported total compensation of $80k. The new company matched with an offer of $80k. So 3 months after I made $55k, I was making $80k. This was ClearChannel (now iHeartMedia), and sensing a major reorganization and possible layoffs, I left to work at a small startup in November 2011.

They offered a choice of low salary/high options or high salary/low options. I took the high salary, which was $110k. After 18 months I got a raise to $117k, but wasn't happy. They offered me more options but I wasn't interested. When I discovered a coworker's offer letter on the shared drive stating he made $135k, I started applying. I got an offer for $130k which my company countered at $140k plus a few perks like an extra week of PTO. In December 2014 I got a raise to $155k, and then a promotion to director of engineering at $175k in January 2015. I started consulting on the side in November and found it more lucrative, so I left in December 2015.

Thanks, so the main message is clear: it's worth to interview with other companies as well instead of just focusing on getting promotion. It was just not talked about that much before in the software community.

For me, the money quotes was probably the least interesting (other than the take-away that a ~100k salary is probably a fair target for software engineering). The idea of someone only having a rough idea of what software-engineering is (1 year of self-study, more or less) can get an interview at Google at all was far more interesting. Also the fact that pretty much all the companies were absolutely hopeless at evaluating candidates - they might as well ignore resumes and only go direct references, for all their "great hiring process" (this includes Google, apparently).

> From no experience to teaching web dev at a bootcamp after three months? one year later offered roles by Google and Airbnb for $250k a year? Is this truly possible?

I think the real take-away is that if you can pry open the door, intelligence will always make you an attractive candidate. Especially if you also have the drive to complete projects. Note that this guy went pro poker player at 16, and was in the top tier at 18 -- essentially self-taught.

It does seem that the interview process for pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley is hopelessly broken, though. I wish he included some concrete examples about the kind of questions he got, especially the ones he thought were hard. With the little detail in the post, it's hard to tell if it's "implement a linked list, and show some examples of how one could sort it." or if it's something less trivial. And not to mention how/why the problems/questions were asked: was it to see if the candidate could solve the problem, or to see how the candidate approached the problem -- with less emphasis on the outcome?

I think it sounds ridiculous to "prep" for a job interview. It kind of implies that the interview is broken -- after all you could learn something significant about a position in a week of prep-time, almost anyone should be able to fill that position...

Some previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780

Also, with regards to this quote from the conclusion~

> In the end, I didn’t get a single offer through a raw application. Every single offer came through a referral of some kind. (This I did not expect, and strongly influences the advice I’d give to a job-seeker.)

I don't know if I would call TripleByte "referrals"....it's not a raw application, but it's not really the same as knowing someone at the company either. This is a separate and somewhat new category of its own, these companies like TripleByte.

Is it ethical to disclose offers?

Where you come down on that question is an ethic.

Absolutely. Keeping these things secret benefits no one but the employers.

That's not so obvious; if a norm against disclosing lets employers pay better performers/ people they want/etc more, then the result of disclosing is a flatter pay grid, which benefits those that would be at the low end, but hurts those at the high end.

I don't know or have specific reason to think it's true, but it's one model that's not obviously wrong (if it is, I'm more than happy to hear why).

This is only true if there is a fixed pot of money to use on salaries. This is usually not the case.

There's certainly not an unlimited amount to spend on salaries; as long as a company is not willing to spend 250k on everyone, but is willing to spend it on some, this could be true.

Ethical, sure. Wise? I don't think there's anything malicious here, but the idea that a potential employer would see me announcing their comp strategy in a public forum would be enough to make me wary about posting about it.

There seems to be a bit of a gap here. AirBnB and Google don't seem like the target market for Triplebyte.

I find the beginning of the story more interesting than the end:

> Of the 20+ applications I sent, I was rejected from every single one without so much as a technical screen. One recruiter from Udacity did actually get on the phone with me—I had pointed out a CSS error on their website in my application and uploaded a private Youtube video showing them how to fix it. The recruiter thanked me and we joked about it, only for him to later tell me they weren’t looking for anyone with my skillset. Again, without even a technical screen.

> I began plumbing my network. I had one big advantage I hadn’t yet leveraged: the students I’d taught. Many of them were working at very strong companies, though they were mostly very junior. At least with their referrals, I’d be able to crack open that window.

> Every student I asked was more than excited to refer me. Finally, I had fast-tracked myself into the processes at several awesome companies: Shift, FutureAdvisor, PagerDuty, and Twilio.

> I was rejected at all of them. Again, without even a technical screen.

> somehow, through the flurry of rejections, a referral from a classmate of mine who was working at 23AndMe came through. He had paired with me during our cohort and spoke very highly of me, so they scheduled me for a technical phone screen.

> I was nervous, but once I got on the phone and got rolling on some concrete questions, I crushed everything my interviewer asked me. He was blown away. He told me he’d never heard as thorough of a technical analysis on this problem before, and immediately invited me to do an onsite at their headquarters in Mountain View.

> I killed the onsite. And when I say killed, I mean murdered with such ruthless brutality that my children’s children will carry the sin with them. To this day, it’s the onsite that I felt most confident in. I remember pacing back and forth at the CalTrain station as I awaited my train back to San Francisco, savoring how masterfully I deconstructed each and every question they posed to me. It seemed like everyone who’d interviewed me was ebullient at how quickly and rigorously I’d answered all their questions.

> Finally, it seemed like I’d cracked the code.

> A week and a half later I open my inbox, and there fresh and white, a reply from my 23AndMe recruiter. The subject: 23AndMe. I open it up to read:

    Thank you for your patience and your time to meet with 
    our SWE team. We appreciate the opportunity to consider
    you for employment with 23andMe. I want to update you on 
    our search and let you know at this time we are moving
    ahead with another candidate.

> I applied to the all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from their platform. I got no bites anywhere on AngelList or LinkedIn—not even cold e-mails from recruiters. Nothing from WhiteTruffle or SmartHires.

> I asked friends, students, anyone I knew for referrals. I started reaching out to non-engineers. I asked anyone at all who worked at all at a tech company I found compelling.

> [...]

> Now that I had offers in hand, it was time to turn the crank. I reached out to every company I was talking to and told them I’d just received several offers, but was very much interested in moving forward. With that, suddenly recruiters started tripping over themselves to get me on site. I was no longer the ugly boy at the party.

> I started mowing down onsites. My performance and experience were no different, yet I was treated completely differently. Phone screen from Google. Gusto raised their offer. Phone screen from Stripe. Yelp raised their offer. TripleByte raised their offer. Then the phone screen at Google converted to onsite.

My immediate reaction to this is "I can't wait to hear someone say 'the market for developers is so hot right now'".

They say nothing is more attractive to women than the quality of already-having-a-girlfriend (or wife). It means some other girl already did the hard work of evaluating you and you passed.

So I conclude a couple of things from this:

- these companies have absolutely no idea what they're looking for in an employee, and they know that. So they hire based almost exclusively on whether you have a job offer from somebody else. That somebody else obviously thought you were (or weren't...) good enough, and their judgment beats ours!

- these companies seem to be terrified of hiring anyone who might not work out. Judging by their behavior, the cost they suffer from hiring someone without a competing offer in hand must be enormous, far more than the full cost of employing an engineer. This makes sense in the dating context, given the tradition of marriage ("no backsies"). It makes less sense to me in the employer-employee context. What's going on? Whatever this gigantic impediment to letting someone go if they're not the perfect fit for your job opening might be, it's driving the whole abusive process.

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