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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Let's say a company would pay you $250k base with an additional $100k in stock and bonuses. This comp puts you in the top 5% of earners in the world. The catch is that you need to learn to do a stupid dance where you wear huge feathers and do this dance in front of a panel of reviewers. Not only that they will insist the dance correlates with productivity and you have to nod and agree with them. The question is, do you spend the time to learn the dance?

That's pretty much it, it's just a stupid dance. You can get angry and say "No no no, this dance is stupid!" Or you can learn the dance, do the dance, then be richer than 95% of people in the world.

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This is an excellent way of putting it.

Also please understand that as employers we make people do this silly dance because it's the best way we, and frankly anyone, knows to reduce the risk of hiring high quality candidates.

I can understand the frustration of doing the silly dance for companies that don't pay competitively and think they are at the same level as Google minus the pay... but for companies paying among the top 5%, we get flooded and flooded with resumes and while you may be a good person, present yourself nicely (and those are all good things to do), and even impress with a resume, it's simply too risky to hire you on that basis without seeing a demonstration of your technical abilities.

When I started out I really was dead-set against hiring people based on the silly dance... after making a lot of bad hires and seeing people who looked impressive on paper but couldn't apply some basic algorithmic knowledge to solve some problems I succumbed to using the silly dance and honestly the quality of candidates I hired improved substantially.

Learning and reciting the silly dance is at least plausibly correlated with job performance, hence fizzbuzz.

Also as an interviewer, you notice things beyond just the dance. I and other interviewers I know have not passed people with mostly-correct answers due to things like being rude/condescending or other poor communication skills. One thing the “dance” does is show what someone is like in a difficult problem solving situation and how they respond to it. Is the stress a confounding variable? Yes, for sure. It’s an imperfect solution to a hard problem

I think this hits the nail on the head. For some people the safety and income that these companies provide make it worth doing the dance. For many others, we just think "Meh, there is more to life than money, I am not doing that dance I am going to do this other dance that I think is more fun." Like honestly, what I am going to do with that extra money? For me just now, the answer is waste it. 100% even if I invest it and make more money with it. Eventually I have to spend it and buy pointless stuff. An super duper exercise bike that has a built in screen and looks cool. A cool car. A big house that is too big for my needs. All while being annoyed about a stupid dance. While I can get by working on other things and be less annoyed. And get to do more of what I actually want to do.

Or give it to causes that, in your own estimation, make the world a better place.

There are lots of problems out there that need money to be solved.

To be fair, a lot of these problems are caused by the pursuit of wealth in the first place.

I pursue wealth to undo the problems caused by the pursuit of wealth.

if you hold the view that all jobs are more or less useless in the grand scheme of things, learning that dance is not even something to think about.

for most people not getting a job is not an option, because they need food and probably a roof to sleep in.

if you take these two things into account, the name of the game then is how fast can you get away from needing a job.

the higher you earn the more of your expected lifetime you can get to be your fully.

that free time you bought for yourself and the money you can spend doing research, sitting in a sunny beach, on non profits, on a giant room full of candy or whatever you deem to be worth it for you.

Tangent: Your 5% guesstimation is wildly off. In the USA alone, assuming 50% of your bonuses go to taxation, your 300k income is going to put you in the top 2% of earners.

Globally, 300k USD income would put you in the top .2%, so you're richer than 998 out of every 1000 other people in the globe.

> In the USA alone, assuming 50% of your bonuses go to taxation

50% of bonuses? That seems low, it's closer to 50% of total comp (maybe 40-45) in the places where these salaries are common.

The federal tax brackets are the same everywhere you go. If you're married and making 350k, most of your income will fall in the ~23% tax bracket. And a small portion will be taxed at 32%.

The main variable is state taxes. If you're living in California, most of your income will be taxed at ~9.3%. With a small portion taxed at 10.3%.

So your marginal tax rate will be 43%, and your overall tax rate will be closer to ~33%.

Nit: USA does not tax bonuses any differently from salary. They are both interchangeable, when computing taxes. Also, all income-percentile metrics in USA are based on pre-tax income, not post-tax.

https://taxfoundation.org/publications/federal-tax-rates-and...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/california-state-ta...

I'm seeing 38% effective tax rate with 300k in CA all things considered. But anyway I agree, 50% of bonus doesn't reflect the total amount or the way things are taxed.

Since silicon valley is in california, yeah you're probably paying about 39% to taxes, leaving you $212k of your $350k.

(using this tax calculator https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#zj8lo...)

Dont for one second think that if you only have a large income, you are rich. Earning potential is not earnings, and wealth/richness is accrued earnings. You'd be amazed at how much wealth that some people have isn't being produced by production, its their assets going up in value. They don't realize that value yearly.

Look at wealth in global real estate for a touchstone.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

I'm responding to the parent, who states "earners" which means income, not wealth. I may agree that someone with 300k may lose 40% to taxes, then they spend 1/3 of what's remaining on expensive housing, another few hundred on student loans and a new car payment-- suffice to say, life can be very expensive for those in SV or SF or NYC.

But still, having 300k coming in pre-tax earnings puts you in the top 0.2% of earners globally, not 5%, which was the original point in question.

Why do I stress this point? Because we need to realize we're not just the top 5% here on this forum. Globally speaking, we range from well-off to EXTREMELY well off, and we should have the humility to post the proper stats about ourselves.

> That's pretty much it, it's just a stupid dance. You can get angry and say "No no no, this dance is stupid!" Or you can learn the dance, do the dance, then be richer than 95% of people in the world.

I mean, yeah, that's what I'm saying: It's stupid and I don't want to be part of it. I'm taking it a step further and saying that the people who help propagate it aren't doing themselves or anyone else any favors.

There's more important shit than money, and it's lame that we have an economic system that rewards people so massively for doing stupid dances.

>There's more important shit than money

Sure but for people who have the opportunity, it's perfectly rational to invest a significant part of your 20s to accumulate enough wealth by doing the "silly dance" and then spend the remainder of your life financially free.

I'm not saying your path is wrong or you shouldn't pursue it, but it is risky for a lot of people to take a massive pay cut and only work a few days a week in their youth and expect that doing so is sustainable or that it can be done for the bulk of their life.

The less risky approach for many who have the opportunity to do so is to actually invest the time to understand the fundamentals of computer science. Really get to know data structures and algorithms like the back of their hand, spend an hour after dinner every night for a couple of months practicing how to apply that knowledge to solve leetcode problems, and then do the interview circuit to negotiate a high salary so that by the time you're in your mid 30s you're a millionaire and can effectively spend the rest of your life working on your own terms.

You don't become millionaire by knowing data structures and algorithms.

I became a multi-millionaire by knowing data structures and algorithms.

same.

I fully agree with this.

> There's more important shit than money,

For someone who doesn't want to spend their lives doing stupid shit like cocaine fueled parties and megayachts, at 100k USD (currently) buys you one life-changing event - basic lifelong security, you probably won't have to worry in the long run. At about 300k (currently) you can buy into a level of security that is probably resistant to major worldwide economic or political catastrophe.

If you want to change the world, say by doing an ethical capitalistic startup or meaningful nonprofit, you probably want to start with $5M all-in assets, it's unlikely to be easy to get there quickly on a 300k salary at a FAANG. You will want to roll the dice at startups paying you back in the 100k-150k range.

Please note that 300k is great for early/mid-career but it is entirely realistic that you get to 800-1mm+ comp around ~10 years.

I haven't any other avenue for such high levels of comp at basically no risk (but some opportunity cost).

Is it really that realistic though? I’ve always heard that those salaries are extremely rare and that getting to those levels involves some extremely cuthroat competition.

Didn't mean to imply it was easy.

I was just pointing out it's realistic in that there is a well-trodden path to it.

I think half the anger over the silly dance is people who are angry they can't do the dance or never put in the time to learn.

It's also not quite as silly as you'd think. I've programmed a lot and for a long time. Some for personal enjoyment, some for school, some professionally. That covered 80% of the dance and landed me good tech jobs. Working on my weaknesses in algorithms and doing leetcode for a month got me a very good tech job. Whiteboard coding will identify strong programmers who can perform under pressure and people who are practiced a lot of whiteboard coding.

He also says he's been working consistently as a freelancer so he's obviously hirable. That song and dance is only required by the Ivory Tower of Silicon Valley. I've never gone through an interview like and I'm earning a very comfortable living for the past 20 years.

This is exactly right, and I agree.

But instead of dancing stupidly, could we demonstrate real-world skills with real-world code and real-world experience?

And there's a flip side to that coin (from the perspective of hiring managers):

You want me to dance for a $300K comp package? OK, I'll dance, but don't be upset when you can't find qualified employees when you are selecting dancers.

You wonder why candidates are complaining about not getting interviews (let alone offers) and employers are complaining about not finding candidates. This is why, my guy.

The catch is that the dance is so technically complicated and physically demanding that you need to take years of very expensive dance lessons and be exceptionally fit in order to be able to pull off some of the moves, and even then nobody will tell you what order to do the steps in, where to acquire the huge feathers, or the specific song you need to dance to. Also even if you execute the dance perfectly you may get told you "aren't a good cultural fit", if they even bother to call you.

I'm sorry, what? You need to take _years_ to practice for algorithm interviews? You think that it's physically demanding to do BFS?

Nobody will tell you what to do? What about, say, the entire interviewing ecosystem that's sprouted up?

I was alluding to the near-universal requirement of a college degree, and to the importance of social skills that most engineers frankly lack. Maybe not exactly what the parent comment was referring to.

You can literally spend a few months (even just weeks you grind hard with no job/family obligations). You don't have to even spend a penny. Just go to leetcode.com and start doing problems.

This may be true for some, but is absolutely not true for everyone. Some people pick up leetcode easily, but for some it requires much more practice.

Love this take.

You’ve changed my thinking.

I've also made the metaphor of having to learn a silly dance. I'd argue the dance might be superior as dance practice every day will get people physically fit fairly quickly. Healthier employees tend to perform better.

Except for some people it'll take a couple of months to learn the dance, and they could also apply for jobs at a company that would pay you $200K and $50K in bonuses.

I would apply at the other job.

It's actually more like they will ask you to one of several stupid dances and you have to know how to do them all well.

There is another option that is not being angry nor doing the dance. Learning the dance takes time, a lot of time. And there is no guarantee of success. It is a risky time investiment.

I went with the third path of ignoring all that and applying to jobs that don’t require the dance and pay half of that. I am pretty rich with that money (specifically since I don’t even live in the US).

I'll do you one better: I can get you a job that will pay you $5/minute and all you have to do is lie in bed and move your hips in a particular way.

If you'll suck it up and do anything if the price is right, you're a prostitute. Professionals have standards.

No one wants this booty.

We are all for hire.

If that, in your world, means a prostitute, then I am one.

What do you have against prostitutes?

So if I asked you to kill someone, it's only a matter of price? How about a close family member? How about a school full of children?

I am sure that there is some line you would not cross. It's good to have limits. Once you accept that, it's simply a matter of placing those limits in an appropriate spot.

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