How a Silicon Valley engineer negotiated his starting salary from $120k to $250k

This is pretty cool. One thing to note - he "killed" the google interview. Although it can vary from one interviewer to the next, it's nearly impossible to do this without becoming relatively fluid with a subset of data structures and algorithms, bit manipulation, and design.

Kind of cool to hear he was an English major. Although I doubled with math I did major in english as well, and it wasn't valuable only as something different from math/cs - in other words, it didn't build valuable but different skills such as communication and writing. I think that the kind of core logical, analytical reasoning we attribute to math or cs style classes is actually something you really can build through literary analysis. Lit and philosophy majors (not just because of symbolic logic) in general are much closer to talent and ability in programming than many of them realize. It actually isn't an easy major if you take it seriously. Unlike STEM majors, there's often an option to kick back, read the plot summaries, and rely on the relative indifference of most classmates to get a good grade - but these majors contain a small core of extremely devoted core of students who have pretty exceptional analytical and reading comprehension skills - these are the people who a professor can say "you know, you really might want to take a look at <dense obscure work of literature written in old language that is hard to follow>", and that student will be able to do it over the next 24 hours, with startling levels of understanding of the text.

It's not a long distance to cover between high levels of literary analysis and being able to find all matching sub-trees of a node, seriously.

I'm also glad to hera the guy got a strong salary, it gives me some confidence for the field. The reason is that while $120k a year is a fine salary in most parts of the country, people like this guy really do have a lot of options. If you have the ability to read and analyze a text like that, as well as an ability to transition into a more purely algorithmic way of reasoning, well, $120 isn't a particularly impressive salary for you. If that's considered a good salary, then people like this simply won't work in the industry - or if they do, they won't stay in it. They'll go off in pursuit of better options.

His starting salary is still 130k, according to the actual article. He just has another 95k of RSUs and a 25k signing bonus.

This is sounds like a competitive offer for a level 4 (PhD or junior industry hire) software engineer at Google.