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Comment by rejectedandsad | Hacker News Reader

This is correct, and it's honestly why I'm so depressed - I wish I had the innate ability to get into Facebook or Google. I make just $200k as a mid-level.

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Innate ability? It's not innate, you have to grind Leetcode and work for it, just like the vast majority of big tech company employees. The number of people who could pass a technical interview with no prior preparation whatsoever is vanishingly few as to be negligible.

I don't know anybody that's done more leetcode problems than me and has gotten a good offer. I do know plenty that have done far fewer than me and have gotten a lot of them though (at FB, Google etc). I also know a few that have done orders of magnitude more and yet still work at IBM-tier companies.

"Grinding leetcode" is not as easy you you seem to think. To low IQ people like me, it's literally pulling teeth because it's just a reminder of how stupid we are. Yet I've still done a few hundred, not that it has helped me get any impressive offers. I've never seen any evidence that you can just learn these things - most people just seem to practice a handful and then nail a bunch of offers.

I have to agree with you. I have done hundreds of leetcode, and every new one (or old one) is just a slap in the face. It’s not about practice. Some people, while being productive developers, just cannot effectively be leetcoders despite the effort. I am in that camp. This is not illogical. I couldn’t become a professional basketball player even if I exercised every day :-).

Eventually I gave up and these were my strategies for finding high comp offers:

1) Go for SRE roles: Google SRE, Facebook Production Engineer. The work is interesting, interviews are going to be domain specific (Linux, networking, … as opposed to leetcode), pay is the same (the offers I mentioned above were for FAANG SRE roles).

2) Enter to a company that doesn’t do leetcode but still pays highly. Like a hedge fund (that’s how I found my current job). It’s going to be a grind, but you do get those high comps.

Once you do decide to not look at leetcode ever again, it will be very liberating.

That's interesting, actually - I got an offer from a hedge fund that way too (non-Leetcode, UI domain specific questions). The problem is they pay commensurate with the difficulty of the interview it seems - about half of what the other engineers make.

Your SRE/ProdEng advice is good for the record, I've considered going down that path.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/01/Megacorps-are-not-your-dr...

This is all fair and true but I'm already at a megacorp so :/

A salary of 200k still puts you in the 95th percentile in the US. Don’t be too sad!

You make 200k a year still depressed. I have no job.

$200k is an absolutely great salary, congrats ! :)

It's my total compensation, and unfortunately I don't think many people agree with you. It's a pretty standard TC for new grads even though I'm nearly 3 years in.

I don't need people to agree with me. There's the USA salaries survey and whatnot that shows you're in the very top.

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