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Comment by dimitar9 | Hacker News Reader

if you live in bay area you would understand. this is how it works in US west coast. Wall street is pouring money to here and big companies just pay that much to new grads who can do algorithm questions on whiteboard. believe it or not, it is true.

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I don't know where you're getting those figures from, but they're off by more than a factor of 2 based on information I have from friends in Google and previous disclosures here on HN by Googlers. Google won't pay most new hires out of school much over $100k in the bay area, and they adjust based on living expense. AFAIK the higher end of junior compensation is close to $200k, which is where you start getting into the entry senior level salaries. There certainly are engineers at Google getting paid $350k in base + bonus compensation but they're not people who only know how to do basic competition problems and enough theory to get a 4 year degree.

For new grad (B.S.) software engineers this year, the standard offer is ~160k total compensation amortized over the first four years, including signing/target annual bonus but not including any raises or stock refreshers that may happen.

I'm graduating with an M.S., starting this summer. Using competing offers, I negotiated up to 190-195k amortized over four years, including 215-220k in the first year (because of signing bonus). I ended the negotiation a little early because of stress and likely could've pushed 210k amortized.

My resume isn't anything special, but I practiced enough to be good at the whiteboard interviews. The best-of-the-best new grads are probably getting close to 250k, but there aren't many of them.

There might be a few that accidentally fall into unicorn jobs, but best-of-the-best are right about in your range. There's just not enough data on potential hires to create that kind of valuation, and if they are best-of-the-best, they'll rapidly rise.

Off topic from parent. But which companies were your competing offers from?

I failed to negotiate recently with other offers.

Facebook. From what I can tell, Google's negotiating strategy is to offer max(their initial offer, highest competing offer+10k). The only people I heard of them not doing that for were those getting absurd amounts of stock from Snap, pre-IPO (like $300k+ worth at estimated IPO price over four years).

Any particular resources you'd recommend for getting good at white boarding?

Elements of Programming Interviews until you can do Leetcode mediums with a good success rate. Then grind Leetcode, try to work your way up to hards. Practice EPI problems with a friend on a physical whiteboard throughout. I did this for a month leading up to my interviews and it helped immensely.

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