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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

You can make that much. You can also win the lottery. Your opportunity cost should not be measured against your best case alternative, it should be measured against a most likely case.

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If you want to look the average comp at FAANG or any well-paying public company it's "only" 250k. That versus the average case at a startup being closer to 150k (average options are worth 0).

I agree with this too. There is a tier of engineers that are good, but for whatever reason, can't get into the big 5. They're bad at white-boarding or maybe they don't live in an area where the big 5 have offices.

In those cases, maybe a startup makes more sense.

Often I find a number of great engineers that the big 5 disqualify for two main reasons: Location or Education. The big 5 tend to not allow remote work and if you don't have a college degree it's often hella hard to get an interview.

But the Big5 have tons of locations. Amazon in particular has tech centers in places like Phoenix and Detroit, while Google is in Chicago. Microsoft is even in Fargo!

Unless you want to be a digital nomad I guess. Then it’s probably not ideal, but I do know some fully remote positions exist at the L6 level at Amazon.

Google has an office in Chicago, but from what I hear it's almost entirely sales jobs.

I live in Chicago and periodically have Google recruiters contacting me, and it's never been for a position in Chicago, it's only ever been for Mountain View.

That is not true anymore. They have engineers now, and they're rapidly expanding.

They do have a low base though, $98.5k vs. like $110k or something in MTV (and of course most people negotiate that way, way up).

I'm pretty sure they all pay less outside of their HQ location. At least in London, salaries are significantly less for the equivalent role.

In America, they generally don't. It's a mild adjustment at worst. Chicago is the biggest I've seen - $98.5k base vs. $110k base for L3 SWE - but FB doesn't change their comp, Amazon and Microsoft only increase it in the SFBA and NYC (IIRC).

In fact, for new grads Amazon pays the exact same TC in Seattle and in Detroit.

Oh cool, didn't realize that. Hopefully London will catch up.

Historically, the money in London has always been in the finance sector. Both large banks and hedge funds.

I think even in finance you'll be unlikely to touch 400USD (~300 GBP) for a similar level. Sure there are outliers, but of the senior people I know in this area total comp is around 200GBP after many years. It's much easier to just contract (if you don't mind the mercenary role), you'll make similar due to the tax savings.

That seems about right. 100-200k GBP in London, 200k-400k USD in the USA. Standard packages for people with a few years of experience.

> But the Big5 have tons of locations

Name one Big5 job in the entire U.S. south. Or at least one that pays as well as them.

There aren’t any.

Facebook is in Austin; Amazon is in Dallas

Austin isn’t the south.

Raleigh / Durham probably is the best tech scene in the south. No mega companies but a good number of second tier, ie. Redhat, Sas, Epic, and so on

Last I checked, Austin is south of the Mason-Dixie line and has plenty of small towns around it that will be glad to remind you that you’re in the South.

RDU definitely has an enterprise tech scene. So does DFW!

Ok, so Texas is technically in the South... you got me.

I suppose I should have clarified: major southeastern cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, D.C., Nashville, Miami)

AWS has several thousand engineers in the Virginia suburbs of DC, with a bunch of local VP-level management

(and that's not including anyone who works on the us-east-1 region)

Apple and Amazon could end up choosing Raleigh for their HQ2. So maybe that'll soon change.

I've only ever lived in Raleigh and I'm very skeptical they'll pick Raleigh for HQ2.

I'll be very excited if Apple ends up deciding on Raleigh though, it could easily push up salaries significantly.

Then don't live in the south. You'll get paid more, the weather will be nicer, and you'll meet less numbskulls with confederate flags painted on the hood of their trucks. Win/win/win.

Google's Skia team* is in Chapel Hill, Microsoft has a team in Raleigh working on VSTS. I know a few folks that have interned there.

Yeah, I doubt I'll even bother to apply to the big 5, maybe even the big 20. I'm coming out of a yearlong software intensive in October with a liberal art major from a marketing background. I know a few people at those companies but there is also the question of leetcode. I think my chances are much higher with other types of companies, startups included.

As someone without a degree, getting an interview at the Big 5 was quite easy. Passing those interviews is another thing entirely but having the right experiences in your resume has been more important in my case.

That's the thing, right now, I don't really have the "right experiences" that's why startups do seem appealing.

I have the skills people are looking for but not the resume validation with internships, the right degree, or school. I got an internship at the start of my intensive where I got to work on some fun problems and used my marketing skills too.

I think the only other track would be through open source contributions. If we circled back in December or January, I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up at a non-tech SMB, small consultancy, or startup because of my prior experiences in marketing paired with my new SWE skills.

Something I was wondering, in your experience or anyone reading, do I have to always focus all the technology stacks for each role and project or can I focus more on the problem I solved?

For example, in my internship, for one problem that made a big difference was setting up all their email automation and tieing it into their website. That project wasn't a ton of programming but my work; but by the end got them about $150k in revenue with my other work on their Black Friday sale, as an intern. Most of the SWE projects I got started but wasn't able to finish in the 3 months (priorities kept changing) like a tool that converted audio from videos into searchable indexes for their youtube videos (granular text searchable video basically). I'm hoping to redo that project on my own. I did get their website to speed up though (an older WordPress website).

Absolutely focus on the problems you've solved, and also the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them.

They know that you'll have to learn their proprietary technology stacks, which are always both ahead and behind the public stacks they inspired. At some companies they won't ask anything about your resume keywords after the phone screens.

Most Big 5 companies use what's called "Behavioral Interviewing" or "S.T.A.R." to formally assess how you get stuff done, and the technical questions can be answered in almost any language you like. Hell I've given successful answers to Big 5 "tell me about a time when you had to…" questions based on experiences in bicycle manufacturing and nonprofit administration, but it really has to involve ownership if you're straying from the norms.

I'm good at "S.T.A.R.", most of my effort in the past is using CAR and PAR but it's not a hard shift. I'm glad to hear they don't limit it to just technology problems.

>"the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them". I have done it before in interviews when asked about weaknesses or failures; I've never done it on a resume though. How would you go about representing that on a resume?

You don't put the failures on the resume as failures :)

I think this might be true if your lucky I was up for a FANG position in London but I have an atypical education I I suspect my lack of a degree counted against me.

With the best will in the world some low level recruiter working out of Spain is not going to be able to read between the lines and work out that actually working for a world leading RnD org on campus at one of the elite UK universities might actually mean I was a good candidate.

I'm like you, I've got some really niche experiences. I went to a #1 program at an arguably #1 school for undergrad for the industry I was planning on going into. I also have a unique personal background (extensive life-long travel) which has been helpful in more than one way but it's hard to see that on my resume.

For what it is worth, we LOVE people with your background for both technical and non-technical roles. If you're ever interested in at least exploring a startup in the marketing technology space, feel free to reach out!

Thanks! What’s a way I can contact you? I’d love to learn about what’s out there. If you don’t want to post here then you can email me at “lassitergregg” at gmail.

In the bio :)

I checked there initially but it was empty and still is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8uodwa450lw0lh/Screen%20Shot%2020...

In those cases the big 20 make sense.

Stsrtups are great but you are always held hostage waiting to cashin

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