My offer numbers from big companies
us.teamblind.com
us.teamblind.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Silicon Valley salaries are pretty decent and I’ve heard of new grads getting 100k signing bonuses at Facebook.
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.
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...)
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
> 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.
What other industry has it's interview process so transparent with such high rewards?
A lot of people complain because this is the very example of cargo culting, you hire people who went through the same questions and reject those who haven't, even though it has no bearing on their ability to do the job.
Want to work in finance? Have fun doing boring shit and working long hours for years. Doctor? Blow your 20s on 4 years of school + several more years of residency and maybe a fellowship. Lawyer? First, get into a good law school then spend an enormous amount of time working to get your billable hours in. And if you're a woman and want kids, good luck balancing all that with starting a family.
You will get shortlisted for top jobs and bombarded by opportunities by recruiters forever and you will be able to skip any screenings and phone interviews and just go for final onsite interview mostly.
Investing several weeks or couple of months once might be worth it as you will reap benefits for a long time, perhaps until retirement.
You need to consider this before you decide not to spend the time to go through CTCI etc.
Maybe I'm not smart enough, but on-site rounds are a different story. I've practiced CTCI and solved my fair share of questions on Leetcode. Yet I find pretty hard to get back into it on a short notice. It's not a one-time investment. I assume I'm not the only one since
- The on-site to offer conversion ratio is typically between 6:1 and 8:1 at such companies.
- Most people do better with practice. It implies that a standardized process is biased towards people who have the opportunity and time to interview a lot for fun. (Some companies let teams do their own hiring though, where this is less of an issue).
Not everyone lives in the valley or in a place with a high concentration of tech companies. At least the Microsoft-era questions such as "how much would you charge to clean all the windows in Seattle" were more equally silly and unfair to everyone, including outsiders.
Funny thing is, I have been called by Google, Amazon and FB recruiters in London couple of times. But I never went for onsite interview. I figured they can't really match contractor pay and they only outsource "shitty" jobs to London (I told recruiters my contractor rate and asked them if they can match/beat it and answer was no).
Netflix got back to me within a couple hours after a one-click application on their careers page! Unfortunately I had to prioritize other companies at that time, we put things on hold due to the visa situation in the US and I never got the chance to have a technical interview.
Before I left Berlin, Twitch seemed to be hiring engineers there.
I applied to US. I was never interested in moving to Berlin.
Imagine you discovered an opportunity for arbritage in currency exchanges, for example. A normal person might quickly act to start printing money before the market corrects and the opportunity ends.
Meanwhile, programmers have noticed that being able to solve algorithmic quizzes with a smile is a free ticket to an oversized salary. Their collection reaction? Disgust and defiance!
As you say, people in other professions would probably be happy to replace their black box interviews with a set of relatively uniform tests. All a programmer has to do to get a job is ring up a recruiter and then complete some algorithmic challenges. From the perspective of the programmer, why do we want to replace this?
Now he’s choosing between FB, Google, Microsoft, a few other unicorns, and a tiny startup all with offers over $160k TC.
He’s incredibly smart, no question, but at the end of the day it’s all a game. For him, all it took was his first internship at a top-tier company to land future interviews and months of practice to get offers.
The trick is, you're worth whatever the market is willing to pay. But the only way to find out is to go out on the market. Most people stick with the same job for years, meaning they only check their worth a few times. Hence low salaries.
One thing that gets ignored on the west coast is how to specialize without hurting your career. In the southeast, we don't have endless tech companies, if you specialize poorly, you could get stuck with relocation being the only answer.
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.
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...
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).
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.
You could pay me 300k a year and I'd never want to go back to the Bay Area ever again.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Previously from a unicorn startup
Still, must have been some referral for those kind of offers.
Anyone could write up such a Blind post. And when it comes to anonymously bragging via lies on the internet, there is no shortage of prior art.
To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if the growth rate of engineering applications to these bigcos has declined over the past few years. A decline in the supply of candidates relative to demand, among other factors, could lead to an increase in compensation per offer.
That being said, I'm still leaning towards this post being BS.
We're looking at maybe 3.7% type U3 unemployment in 2018. The Fed's GDP Nowcast figure is projecting nearly 4% growth for the fourth quarter. Throw on corp tax cuts and possibly infrastructure spending in 2018, and the US economy might expand at something like 3.5% for all of 2018. There's a massive hiring rush going on around things like artificial intelligence, that is vacuuming up immense amounts of engineering talent (depleting the total pool for everything else). These salaries might get crazier yet.
If such claims were non-anonymous, they'd carry much more weight.
So SFO/Bay area is that expensive. Most people don't think of that and assume that SFO requires modest 20% increase in cost of living. Absolutely not true. So before you get floored with these numbers you need to divide them by almost a factor of 2 for the corresponding standard of living.
In addition, if salary does not increase with cost of living workers will leave.
As other have mentioned, the sign up bonus is quite awesome, but I assume is not the standard in the US either.
edited: nannies -> nanny
You might say "yeah sure, as a bachelor, it's easy to save money but with family it is expensive here". Well, I know a computer science PhD who lives in Zurich with his wife and two kids on 60k CHF a year (Phd salary).
In any case, my point wasn't about "me". I was trying to highlight the fact that in certain places, a high salary is driven by other factors, such as higher-than-average cost of life, low security (Saudi Arabia), etc.
This Kindergrippen-age is really the only moment when kids in Switzerland cost you significantly more than in the rest of Europe.
Think it this way: From the actual kindergarden age (4 years old?) you won't pay anymore. It's even free to send the kid to the best technical university in mainland Europe, which is supposed to be ETH (think MIT of Europe)
In any case, kindergartens are not entirely free. If the kids have to stay after 12.00 it gets very expensive.
For anyone else that was confused
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’m just sad I can’t get even a fraction of that at my Big4.
Source - multiple friends at FB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Have been interviewing people, many with 5+ years of experience and in my opinion it is not too difficult to spot somebody who is not fit for the job.
So well done again.
17 years ago I started out on £21k, which was considered pretty reasonable. Two years later I switched job and got £35k and over the next few years until I hit the 10 year mark I pushed it up to almost £50k. At that point AFAICT I was actually doing better than average.
I'm now contracting in the financial world, earning well over twice that figure, but while I can match the salary the various otions, bonuses etc put a guy two years out of college in SV well ahead of the game.
I like the bay area, too...
I haven't seen anything like that in Aus for that sort of experience.
Tech companies love E3 visas.
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.
Hell even I get $66k over 2 years if I take Amazon and my friends don’t even think that’s good.
Thanks
It's basically company stock you get after you've been there awhile.
> figures above are ANNUAL.
But if he is mistaken on the RSU part, then people might find these offers easier to understand. (-e- but the only thing typically not annual in these numbers is the RSU, so I don't think that mistake is likely)
It's strange.
> Are these numbers real?
Yes. I'm not the author, but they don't appear at all unusual to me. SF's developer market is nearly as screwed up as it's housing market (except not really, the housing market is truly something else).
> Is this "normal"?
No. Well… yes and no. These numbers are real and you can get offers like that too. But this type of pay isn't "normal" in the sense of historical norms. Tech isn't normal right now. We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived. That doesn't mean you should ignore you're ability to make unreasonably amounts of money for the next 10 years. If you're qualified to fill the positions that people are over-paying for, you should totally take that money.
> But this person had "special" access because of ${referral/previous company/magic}!
Yes. This person did have "special" access. But being granted that access is literally as easy as talking to someone who works for the company that you'd like to work for. Are they attending a conference? Walk up to them. It's really that easy. I know. I've done it.
> No really, this person got lucky because they worked for a unicorn before applying to these companies. They got lucky by picking a place that happened to turn into a rocket ship.
Little secret, you don't have to work at a unicorn _before_ applying to a unicorn. There's a phase after everyone knows it's a rocket ship where the company is still hiring like a madhouse. You can join during that phase and still get credit for "picking" a unicorn. You'll likely get a very small piece of an over-saturated employee pool so the equity won't make you rich, but it does allow you the pick of the litter amongst other top tier firms, App/Goo/Ama/book/Soft, which all pay along the lines of what the author posted.
> I have no desire to live in SF.
Yeah, SF is awful, don't move there. You can get close to these numbers in some cities that have a much better standard of living. NY, LA, Austin (the numbers are close but come down in that order).
Feel free to ask any questions about getting a job in a company like this if you'd like. I find it mystifying that people consider it some kind of secret so I'm down for sharing w/e people want to know (within some personal boundaries). I wouldn't say that it's easy to get a job like this, but the information isn't hidden. In my experience it's right in front of people and they either ignore it or choose different paths because they prefer the lifestyle that they have outside of these major US hubs.
ie... I graduated 10 years ago, I've got 2 or 3 years programming experience in there mired with periods of unemployment, moving/relocating a few times, health issues (resolved) and dealing with the fallout of a bad accident (I walked away, but had to transport wife for about a year while her foot healed)
If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for a close-but-high-paying jobs. It's a beautiful city as well, I love Austin. Would move there in a second. Remote work is possible but getting those positions is much more plagued with the whole catch-22 of needing previous experience in order to gain experience.
Obviously brush up on algorithms and data structures prior to interviews. Whether you think it's BS or not, that's just the best approximation of ability that most companies can manage to come up with.
You mentioned that some of your jobs had been paid hourly. My advice is to try to get a reasonable salaried position ($65k+/year) at a tech company and hold that down for ~2 years and ratchet your way up to companies that pay better. If you start that low it's not unreasonable to request 15% raises each year for several years. If you can hold a position at around that range for 1.5-3 years, changing companies should net you a 25% raise.
I've had co-workers with fairly scatter-shot resumes. It's a small red flag in interviews but I've never seen someone dropped from an interview because of sporadic work history. I've seen people dropped for lying about their work history.
Can you support the latter claim?
However this is very slow process and I personally think shortage of engineers will continue for quite a long time (next 10 years easily). So "short lived" can mean a decade or perhaps two. We should be fine.
I feel unreasonably lucky and make this claim to myself in an effort to engender urgency and grace — I have what many want and few have and it is fleeting.
The other two shortage that I was aware of during my primary education seem to have been filled at this point. I was told regularly that the best paths toward success was to study law or accounting. At the time law firms were experiencing a lack of supply similar to the current state of software that has since been filled. You can still make great money but you're going to need crazy hours + prestigious education or unreasonable amounts of proof-of-awesome. Similarly, after SOX there was an immense need for accountants but that demand was filled rapidly when higher ed was successful in pushing huge numbers of degrees out the door.
Education in practical skills for software development has been slower to fill demand. I see three reasons, I'm sure there are many more: Software doesn't have the same social prestige as law or accounting — the first dot-com crash scared people — demand has grown more quickly than any other field.
> 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.
I got a similar offer (>180K RSU/year) from a company, and I have less experience than this guy.
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.
Is this for real? This is Ministry of Truth levels of double-speak.
This will blow up one day.
There are plenty of other jobs that are much easier that pay the same. Australia is not an innovative or technology-oriented or entrepreneurial country. Some multinationals mine our land, that is it. It is a bit of a joke country compared to China or the USA.
The thing about the US though is that in places where you get offered 90k, house prices are about half what they are here. The amount of tech companies you have in Tennessee is more than all the tech companies in Australia. So you don't really get those types of jobs here.
Or email me (jchester@pivotal.io), my lot are hiring and I like referral bonuses.
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.