Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
latimes.com
latimes.com
I need help on getting to the salary negotiation part with multiple companies at the same time though.
This is the instruction booklet for landing a lunar lander on the Moon. I need the one for the Saturn V.
Lather, rinse, repeat for each offer. The better offer may be salary, perks, or just better work conditions. I once left a company after working there for 9 days because I got an offer working with my friend. I didn't even get a better salary and my friend ended up leaving after 3 months..
Then I attended a seminar - the question was asked who used agencies and who used their "network" for new jobs / freelance work.
I was the only hand up to go used agencies and the traditional job hunt.
So it's the old saw - keep a profile up - blog, project, podcast whatever, so you can use that as an excuse to stay in touch with ex-colleagues so that they might think of you when they are hiring in 3 years.
As I said not a lesson I have learned but people who earn more than me recommend it
Log on once a week and like posts by other folks (job posts, interesting articles, whatever). Send a congrats message as suggested by LI when someone starts a new job. Send someone a job that seems like it might be of interest to them when you see it. Post something you wrote/built/read about.
The goal is to keep in touch so that when you are ready to start looking, you aren't starting from ground zero.
2nd: Submitting resumes goes nowhere. You need referrals. Ask for them shamelessly. You don't need to know the referee. That will at least get your resume looked at. This is their game, so play it.
3rd: have an idea of the timeline to an offer for various companies. Do your Google/Facebook interviews early, more nimble companies later. Start the whole thing off with some practice interviews at companies you don't like. The goal is to have multiple offers in play at the same time.
4th: Don't tell recruiters about your other offers until it's too late and they've decided that they want you. Only tell them about offers that they might compete against (usually their direct competitors), 2 others max. If you'd work at company A for $80 b/c they have a cool product, but would need $100 to work at company B b/c they suck, when you tell company B about your offer at company A, fudge that company's numbers upward. Otherwise, you'll get an offer for $81 from company B and turn them down.
Seriously.
I interviewed with one company, things went well, I was interested, but they came out of the gate with total comp that was lower than I was looking for. They were looking at a stock grant of X over 4 years. That would have worked, provided that I was basically guaranteed a refresher each year for X (so that by year 4 I'd making X per year in RSUs). I found out that refreshers were usually not for that amount, and not guaranteed (barring performance issues). I indicated I was looking for X per year in RSUs (given the salary and bonus they were looking to offer). The recruiter was a bit shocked, but went and asked anyway...she came back with an offer granting 4X RSUs upfront, meaning, yeah, I'd be getting X every year, starting from year 1. And I'd still be eligible for refreshers and whatnot each year.
They were actually looking for two people for the role I was applying to. After starting, I met the other guy that was hired a few months before me. He had moved from even further than I had. After talking, he mentioned he was given relocation assistance. When I asked him about the explicit mention that that would not be offered. He simply told me he noticed it, but asked anyway and got it.
Even if they stuck with no relo, they might have extra budget for sign on, which is equivalent. For whatever reason, companies tend to be sticklers for budget allocation, even if total amount equates, even to their bottom line. Relocation assistance might be frowned on as an 'unnecessary' overhead cost ("can we not find good people already in the area?!"), but a higher sign on wouldn't ("it's a competitive market"), despite also being overhead.
I've certainly had recruiters bring up the comp at the start, and I've indicated it was too low, and we've moved on. From the company's perspective, that probably makes a lot of sense, especially if they have no wiggle room. But from a candidate perspective? I've never had a company who wanted to hire me fail to meet my ask (with the caveat my ask has never been completely outside of market, even if it's outside of their own guidelines, and with the stipulation I was willing to take comp increases outside of just salary); if the role sounds good, the company sounds good, I'm willing to spend the time to make them want me before I ask about comp. If they come in high enough, great, no time wasted; if they come in low they have every reason to try and negotiate with me.
2. When asked, give this number as your desired target, but a lot of times they ask about old pay. if the old pay differs greatly, avoid the topic by pointing out how 'the old job requirements are different, benefits are different, etc. But if they press on this number, tell them, don't lie or completely avoid it
3. Assume the hiring manager has 15% over the offer amount. this amount may also impact your future raises, so it may be better to cap your ask at 10%. but don't be afraid to go ham asking more for starting bonus, longer vacation, golden parachute, etc
4. Good luck!
Compensation really is as high as levels.fyi suggests, and even higher once stock growth is factored.
It appears to matter in practice. Perhaps some people are struggling to talk around the question.
> A study published in June 2020 from researchers at Boston University’s School of Law found that, following the implementation of salary history bans, workers who changed jobs saw their pay increase by 5 percent more than comparable workers who changed jobs in the absence of a ban, with even larger benefits for women and African Americans.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2021/0...
Now you get to negotiate fridays off, 2 months of vacation, and a golden parachute of $X per year worked. Everyone is mad at CEOs but I once negotiated a $25k golden parachute for when I left, _just to see if it was possible_
Been in the industry 25 years and never once agreed to disclose my previous pay. Don’t do it. Ever. It’s none of their business and will only be used against you.
Once you're there, figure out how much sounds like a lot and ask for even more. Either they'll surprise you and accept the terms, or you will negotiate "down" to the amount that sounded like a lot. Worst case scenario, they don't take the deal and you reject them to go find a new negotiation until you get what you want
Happy to do coding questions, but not 8 hour long take-home projects. Those have screwed me too many times
The fastest way to avoid companies like that is to set boundaries on what you will do and will not do. Good recruiters LISTEN and respect this. I do not want my time wasted and likewise for the recruiters and companies I am talking too.
I admit I'm speaking from ignorance here, and am only curious to gain more insight into this.
Yes, absolutely they can! And almost nobody talks about this. Most of the conversation about take-home projects surrounds cost/benefit ratio, but almost never as a negotiating tactic and sunk costs.
With the greatest respect, the vibe I'm getting is "this person is prone to reacting in a volatile manner when things are not to their liking."
I've ended up wasting a lot of my own time with this strategy. I'll get to the point where they want to extend an offer, I name my number, and then we have an awkward 15 minutes on the phone (e.g., "the VP couldn't ever approve that amount") and then I say I'm not interested 24 hours later.
This is impossible to know though, as is its breakdown. Many places have very fixed limits on salary and bonus, for instance, but RSUs and sign on they have a lot of freedom.
Even the places that have fixed budgets all around may have multiple openings of varying levels; a strong interview showing may cause them to bump the level they'd look to hire you at, just to meet your comp expectations (I've seen this happen numerous times as a manager when a candidate came back asking for more).
If they bring it up at the start, great, it saves a lot of time for both of you. If -you- bring it up at the start, though, you're just closing off opportunities.
Fair enough if you only want to work for a company that offers your target comp -without- negotiation (since even if they're open to negotiating at the start, you're doing so when your hand is weakest), but otherwise there is nothing to be gained by bringing it up at the start.
It seems so strange that they’d offer X and just after being asked would switch to 4X. That’s a huge range.
Yes, I was surprised as well that they were willing to move that much. However, I know RSUs tend to be a lot easier to move on for companies than salary or bonuses (in fact, the salary offered was about 5% lower than my prior; I didn't even touch on that, instead looking to make up the difference, and then some, in the RSUs), and vary a lot more in the market. There are some companies that don't offer RSUs at all, pre-IPO startups whose grants are of questionable value, companies that grant RSUs yearly but only to a percentage of their employees, companies that give comparatively small amounts of RSUs to all their employees, and companies that give comparatively large amounts of RSUs to all their employees. That means the market range is huge and increases can more easily be justified; market range for salary tends to be far more constrained.
It's possible this may have also been due to being outside of SV; while the company has an office in my metropolitan area, I don't believe it's mostly dev, and while they have salary guidelines for outside of SV for dev, they may not for equity. So it may have been that the initial RSU offer was tailored to the locale, and my ask was okayed because it was in line for dev. Point still stands; they were incentivized to move, and they were able to. Had I asked at the start they would likely not have, simply because a recruiter isn't going to ask to make an exception for a candidate they haven't even interviewed yet.
If you're playing chicken on who can waste the most capital against these guys, you're probably going to lose (otherwise, you wouldn't be applying for a job there in the first place, they'd be asking you to hire them).
They've got a pool of other people like you, they know it and they know roughly what it'll cost to find another you. They might be willing to jump a little to avoid that but they're not going to bend over for it. They also want someone willing to take orders, not someone too aggressive, so that might signal that you could be a problem. I'm not saying don't stick up for yourself and try to get your piece, just that you should be careful playing these games unless you're prepared to lose and walk away.
But be warned that if your current company decides to let you go then you probably need to commit to the new company.
(I've not done this as such, but I'm a technical writing consultant and the way you get more money from clients is similar.)
Also, I enjoy the posts by Josh Doody: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/
2 of these offers where double my current TC through negotiation. It's not just FAANG but startups making very good offers. I have 3 YOE.
For negotiation:
Always ask for at least 20% more + a signing bonus
Have competing offers
Interview well
Be willing to walk away. If they can't do it there's another company that will.
My best two offers:
200k CAD Base, 390k USD RSU /4 years, 20k CAD Sign on
200k CAD Base, 330k USD in Options / 4 years, 20k CAD Sign on
I'm also still waiting on some numbers from Google Canada but I doubt they will match.
edit: also in Van.
The other is a Series D startup based in SF
What types of companies were the 2 best offers?
Wish is one so post-ipo.
The other is a Series D startup based in SF.
I think remote is your best bet for high salary in Canada.
My background: I'm somewhere around the 20 years of experience mark, a bit more than a quarter of that as a dev at a FAANG, a bit less than a quarter of that as a hiring manager / senior executive for startups (in one case, nearly quadrupling the number of devs in my org in a year; in another, managing a 4-5 dozen devs org).
The ideal situation is looking for a job while you have one that you are at least mostly-happy with. Or at least one where you can stay for at least another few months still -- in case you don't get the offers you want. And have a honest idea of how much you should or want to make. Ideal scenario is having close and honest friends that are peers (or even better: hiring managers) in your domain that you are comfortable talking money with.
Go through those companies in some order (most excited to least excited if you're in a hurry, least excited to most excited if you want to get the best offer possible) and interview at 1-2 at the same time, in order. Pass the interview at least up to the point where you're talking salary. In my experience, it's rarely upfront, which is an annoying waste of time if the candidate and company are on totally different planets regarding salary expectations, but having been a hiring manager, I get it [1].
Then get offers, or not. As hard as you can without pissing the company off (pissing off a hiring manager is harder than most people think, just be at least somewhat nice and reasonable about the whole thing) -- make sure to skip over HR and talk straight to the hiring manager, before and after the interview [2]. Preferably, ask to book the post-interview meeting during your pre-interview chat, so the hiring manager has extra peer pressure to actually show up "in person" (well, on the phone). Bonus points for reaching out to a senior director or (for a small enough company) a C-level executive on LinkedIn.
If you get all offers, you probably are asking less than you should. No offers, much more. 50/50? You're asking just the right amount. Not all refusals are salary-related, but for now, companies can't afford to be too choosy, so overall, market bias should be on your side. It's a time consuming process, but for a lot of people, frankly there's a 10-20% salary hike on the line every few years -- how much time is that worth to you? And don't feel bad for the "poor hiring managers" whose offers you do not accept in the end [3]. Keep in mind most of the advice on the internet is from recruiters and hiring managers that have a vested interested in candidates not shopping around (for a tangentially related topic, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... and think about this topic, hard).
Finally, do this every year or two, even if you have no intention of leaving your current place. First, it'll leave a trail of companies (and hiring managers, that may go to a company you're a better fit for) knowing your name and wistfully thinking about the great candidate that got away. And second, it's a great thing to know exactly your worth on the market. I know folks who've doubled their income in less than five years this way.
To be fair, there's the (I believe very small) chance that your current employer will hear about your shenanigans -- and that could bite you in the ass in the (very) short term. Personally, I've never seen that, either as a candidate or hiring manager and for me personally, the risk is 100% worth it. Caveat lector.
[1] When I hired, I usually had 5-6 roles opened in my budget, and if your interview process proves to me you're a talented but more junior candidate than I hoped for, I might compromise but offer you below the bracket I was thinking about and raise the experience bar for the next hire. I usually have some kind of wiggle room of that nature, wiggle room which mostly disappears if I told you the expected salary bracket upfront.
[2] Admittedly, this is significantly easier at smaller company, where a formal HR is oftentimes just not there yet. You'll get significantly better feedback straight from the horse's mouth, including fun statements like "your salary expectation just doesn't fit in my budget"; though that either means you really asked for more than I can afford, or you did not convince me you're worth that much.
[3] First, they did a poor job convincing you to work for them and that's explicitly their job during the interview process, whether they know it or not. And second, if the company they hire for is any good, they usually only hire an absolute maximum of 30% of the candidates they interview (usually, much, much less: that FAANG I mentioned way earlier? more like 5%). If they can be choosy, why can't you be? Plus, I remember most of the candidates that I made offers to and said no to me. Not because I'm annoyed at them, but rather (until I left my hiring manager position) because I followed them on social media just in case they said something about their current job being a PITA or otherwise hint they might be looking. Telling a company no is a great way to leave a reputation of being better than they thought, and the good ones will not forget and keep the finger on the offer trigger. Keep in mind the good hiring managers also have a reputation they want to preserve, if they're even half thinking about their own career prospects...
If you work at FAANG - your RSUs (most likely) have doubled in about a year. You could easily already be getting paid more than the max offer for the level above where you're currently at.
FAANG is also a horrible acronym for the top paying companies since two of those companies don’t even pay that well. Companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, LinkedIn and many others will outpay FAANG companies and their equity is fully liquid.
I also got an offer from a crypto exchange which is a household name, but they claimed they switched to non-negotiable offers and wouldn't even match my current TC. I had to walk.
Now wondering if this is just some game that companies are playing to either make themselves seem more selective or show "growth" through hiring / headcount to make investors happy. The interviewers also seem less enthusiastic about selling their companies to me, and more like they already made up their minds that they do not like me. One kept asking me more and more questions to cause us to run out of time so that I wouldn't be able to code.
The questions I'm being thrown at all are ridiculous in difficulty now, and the interviews feel like they are designed for me to fail. Who can code a segment tree in 20 minutes? I ended up completing this one, and it wasn't even the hardest question I was asked. I even had a recruiter ask me to prepare for their company's interview by doing TopCoder Div 1 500 problems. That's absurd (IOI difficulty level). There are people in Eastern European countries who do nothing but train for these competitive programming problems with coaches and all since secondary school.
I suppose I will just remain in my relatively cushy FAANG job. Despite having very little time to prepare, being employed while interviewing can be a good thing, after all.
I like my boss and team, but if someone offers me enough money and a fully remote job, well, it's going to be hard to say no.
That doesn't seem surprising -- why would they?
https://nz.linkedin.com/jobs/gitlab-jobs?position=1&pageNum=...
Now, that creates two markets, those who can't move to the US (won't pass the higher bar for US immigration) and those who won't. I've seen SV comp for the latter. But we're talking O-1 tier engineers.
London, U.K. is about the same as Japan. I don’t have experience with India, and my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful.
All those salaries are very good for the local market, but are also much lower than SF.
I don't know anything about the income tax rates, but 65-70% pay seems like you'd take home more than an SFer being paid SF rates.
All I can say, is in personal anecdotal experience, I make about the same money (with better hours!) in my current factory job than I would have if I finished my degree and went into software, and with none of the stress or crunch time or deadline associated. For example, looking at Glassdoor they have Google's Toronto office reporting starting salaries of ~$90-100k - while my base pay is only ~$62k ($29.50/hr) we get double-time overtime after 40 hours, I can (and have) clear(ed) well over $130k/yr with minimal effort.
They're offering decent salaries compared to other tech jobs in the area, but it's average-at-best if you start comparing unskilled labourer salaries in as a comparison.
Now you've got Shopify, Instacart, Uber, Snap, Wish, and others, all of them strongly competing on total comp, all growing rapidly.
Starting to wonder if there is simply no chance of getting even close to the FAANG TC and whether I'm stuck for the 4 years at my current job.
Local/non-FAANG companies pay around $50-130k USD equiv total comp (£35-100k) for junior -> senior software engineer
FAANG pay $150k at least for junior positions. If you're a senior engineer in London you can get a 50% pay bump for becoming a junior at a FAANG company. (I personally went from senior non-fang to mid-level fang for roughly triple my total comp)
It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.
For the first N months, sure, but then, you have a senior and a trained junior, who is hopefully on their way to being a mid. So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes.
But like any upfront investment, there is a time when the costs outweigh the benefits, especially in the early days.
Too bad companies don't see it that way.
But I agree, too few companies have that perspective.
But even junior salaries are going up, I've noticed.
I don't know. I feel like most dev compensation is kind of random. Like does that senior really produce $40k more in value per year?
I used to think this way. Then I became a manager. (Now I'm an individual contributor/IC again.) Oh, how wrong I was.
Managers do coordination, which is far different than building, but typically more valuable. Why is it more valuable? Leverage.
If I as an IC do the wrong thing and it doesn't get to production, it typically wastes my time (and any time needed to fix the mess, if doing so is harder than `git reset`).
If a team of people do the wrong thing, then that's an entire team's time wasted. Managers exist to ensure that a team is pointed in the right direction. Figuring this out could include meetings (oh so many meetings) with other parts of the business or customers, discussing priorities and timelines and ensuring dependencies are understood and met.
You also need to foster intrateam communication so that Bob learns that Alice has already partway solved problem X, or Alice learns that Tracy has experience in technology Y. Sure, you could rely on ICs to do this, and good ones will, but I've seen communication short circuit big issues and save lots of development time.
Is the manager's effort overhead if, by their efforts (even partially, with the help of other team members), the team solves the correct problem, rather than the wrong problem correctly?
This explanation ignores the political aspect of management (protecting your team from budget cuts, layoffs and being pulled into extraneous meetings/other efforts). I've intentionally ignored this because it was minimal at most places I've been a manager, so I can't speak out of personal experience. But I've heard about other places where this was a large chunk of the value added by management.
I don't envy the politics, but the coordination and meetings are easy. I'd rather be doing that, but you can't get there without moving up the ladder. I was a tech lead for a year and it was probably half coordination and meetings and the other half was troubleshooting and development. It was great... except they didn't promote me to that level.
For support roles, their value comes from the costs that they help prevent. A security expert is like insurance, where they provide value by ensuring the company's product has the minimum chance of being exploited as that could damage the business in multiple ways.
I guess I'm just skeptical and jaded based on my past experiences.
Then how does it work? It seems that senior devs should make the same as junior devs if the numbers aren't tied to value.
"The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything."
On an individual level that might be true, but that doesn't address it at the aggregate level.
Since you bring up a security team, it absolutely can be estimated there as well, what other companies have had hacks and what did it cost them? How does that compare to the risk on your product and the damage to the business if you were compromised?
Not to mention a $40k salary difference means you should be providing multiple times that difference in value to the company. Just providing $40k of additional value is a rounding error for most reasonably sized companies, I've worked on projects where two people provided >$1M of ongoing cost savings per year.
Next PR, more of the same. Now we have a $150k AND a (hopefully not more than) $65k dev fiddling with a simple change.
Officially, my company is only hiring seniors, but if a decent junior applied (at least a year of experience inclusive of internships), I could see us taking them, especially with the right tech stack.
So, apply anyway.
* The company doesn't have a clear idea of what they want, so they fall back on 'years of experience'. Lazy. I've written job descriptions and I know it's hard, but c'mon.
* This will turn off talented folks that might make great team members (esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications).I doubt they would openly consider that person, but when there is a candidate in front of them who has reasonably passed some questions and is willing to accept, I would hope they would budge.
This group disproportionately including women and excluding referrals (people who have the same experience, hobbies and education as your current employees)
- got his last job via referral.
Gotta say, I respect the hell outta that fella for being so honest about that, partially because I've observed the very same phenomenon.
Market conditions are making it hard to retain and very hard to hire. We've done a bunch of other stuff to recruit - which I described in another comment here - and it's making a huge difference. Employers who don't respond to these market conditions are in for a rough ride.
My old employer gave me a 3% raise in January and tried to make it some big gift. I left anyway in April for a 50% bump. New company, same level of responsibilities.
The old employer underpays everyone, so that percentage is higher than it otherwise would be, but still.
I think it's healthy for all of us to reflect on how fortunate we are in this field, sometimes.
This has been one of the driving motivations behind literally every job change I've gone through since I started working in the software field.
If so, I bet they can help you get past the coding tests.
An alternative is to grow your connections by going to meetups or something similar (I know, more unpaid labor! But it will pay off.) After 2-3 months, you should know the regulars and can have the same conversation with them. For bonus points, offer to help out--meetups I've encountered are usually looking for some kind of help, whether that be running a meeting, finding sponsors, helping speakers or something else (even, in the before times, setup and teardown of chairs/meeting space).
Please don't get me wrong: if it was just a few days of practicing, I'd just get it over with and do it. But realistically, with the leetcode arms-race that's gone on for the past few years, where you're expected to solve multiple hard-level problems back-to-back, with no assistance, and as quickly as possible (ie: under 30 minutes), I'm staring down the barrel of probably 3+ months of full-time grinding to memorize as much of them as possible.
Just not worth it. I'm terribly depressed as it is already, and that would just make it much worse.
maybe after a while it would be second nature once a real opportunity presented itself?
Overall currently I don't hate my job anymore and the salary is slightly better. Best decision I made this year.
Where would I get a job like this?
I hate my job a little but the hate is not strong enough for me to leave a 1m TC job for a lower TC.
I'm stuck basically. I'll be gone after 4y definitely
The stock can 3x more.. so I'm holding and hopeful.
Though I admit, it’s hard to imagine walking away from 1m per year, even if you don’t necessarily need it...
1m for a senior (not staff) engineer is very hard to come by.
And by my experience if you don't need to work, live gets really boring quickly. All your friends are at work, can only do such travel, if you do your hobby 8/5 a week it gets boring.
I totally get that it would be so dull to do no work for more than a few weeks, ha. I’ve taken a couple months off between jobs before and had plenty to do, though.
I don't think people should work for below market wages, only observing how it can change what kinds of products and services are available. And in the case of tech talent, salaries are being driven up by a few key industries that arguably are not where society would like to see tech product and r&d investment concentrated.
In my experience, autonomy, impact, psychological safety, remote work and flexible hours can all make up for substantial differences in pay, and would make the team more productive to boot. These are all aspects of the job a company can directly control; I'm not even talking about things like prestige, "mission" or super-deep technical problems. And yet, it seems like these aspects are all positively correlated with pay: higher-paid positions also come with more respect and a better work experience.
What's keeping companies from changing this? Trust and respect go a long way. Of course, everyone and their dog claims they have a great culture, so a team would need a way to show rather than tell, but that's an eminently solvable problem.
I've seen this work first-hand. For the same level of pay, hiring people on a Haskell project was markedly easier than other projects at the same company: people actively want to use Haskell and it also acts as a real signal that the team is willing to do things differently. The latter might actually be more important!
Or are no longer viable with US based software talent. I know a company that couldn't seem to keep/hire/find US based talent. Now they employ a couple folks from South America. The company gets competent developers and the folks from SA get jobs that they are happy with.
I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at immediately remote roles which just makes things harder. I also am about 90% I could not perform on interviews at most places. Digging myself out of the aforementioned stagnation and prepping for interviews is likely to take years at this point and who knows what the market will look like at that point.
Hell, pick a dumb company you'll never want to work for, like Uber, if you want real-world practice. Then you at least know what real-world failure looks like.
I felt the same way over the past few years and decided to switch to a Technical Product Owner role at the beginning of this year. I used to be your typical HN user who was extremely passionate about programming, learning new frameworks, functional programming, etc, but at some point over my 10 year career I kinda stopped caring about tech entirely. Switching to a product owner role was great for me. I still get to leverage my technical knowledge without having to worry about the actual implementation too much. I also get to develop my soft skills like planning, communication, and conflict resolution, which is frankly a lot more interesting and satisfying than programming ever was.
I'm sorry, but what does this even mean?
Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation".
Having "stagnated" is definitely a hiring plus. It means you're less likely to slow down my systems with eight quadrillion layers of dynamic dispatch and abstraction, and you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.
I can't imagine anyone being more highly sought after than a "stagnating" programmer.
So by stagnating I don’t only mean not up on all the new hype tech, but also the caricature of a “code monkey”. Certainly on paper at least.
> you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.
Sadly this seems to be the sort of thing that most employers want.
It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.
The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.
Also, you’d be surprised how much you can get done on a modern PC with vms or containers, it isn’t the nineties or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.
Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.
I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there.
A lot of companies are not allowed to interview the contractors (since they are not employees) and the contract firms can swap anyone into a spot after they get the contract signed. (Granted there is a lot of wink and nod stuff that goes on)
Horrid pay, not allowed to say you worked for (GE, Microsoft, whoever...) and crap benefits but you get real world experience and may even get lucky. You can say..."while at Microsoft I..."
Green field code is easy-mode, not hard mode. Nothing is in your way, nobody expects anything from you (yet) because they have no basis of comparison. The real reason people want to do rewrites is that they want that greenfield experience without having to quit. It almost never works.
I'm someone who's (supposedly) quite good underneath but has stagnated a lot over the last few years (and on and off before that, sadly) as other issues drained away my ability to work. I'm gradually stabilizing things and trying to find the best way to maneuver, and I'm pretty worried that everything's going to pass me by because my experience isn't of the right kind and I'm not legible enough. The people who are getting the jobs with all the traits I want are the ones who got a Real (that is, close to culturally archetypical) Job in 2018 and did their time in the salt mines with the three verifiable contiguous recent years of experience.
If what you say is true, then it's possible what I mostly have is a marketing problem, and it may be that e.g. some of the “actual demonstration of ability” is more readily solvable with “pull some stuff out into public repositories and freshen it up” than I've been imagining.
Aws is like 800 services, but under it all is ec2 and s3 -- just get familiar with those and the rest are conveniences.
bonus points if you created a vuln or two :)
Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the time. Learning never takes a time out.
The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an interview or negotiation related to you springs from that viewpoint. That's one of the most basic you will repeat infinitely. Use it boldly, not arrogantly.
It’s just about time really. I could skill up but what’s the market going to look like by the point I’m ready.
This is not a flippant reply! I’m totally serious.
I'm assuming you have actually learned something and can show the results. Don't just declare yourself a learner, unless your real skill is amazing charisma.
Graduating and acing leetcode is evidence of ability to learn something. What's yours?
I've broadly tech-savvy, and I can do some programming. I taught myself Lua for the sake of making game addons, I've dabbled in Java and Javascript (and tiny bits elsewhere). Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared. My career thus far has been a decade of retail, but at least I'm currently in an entry-level management position.
Is there a core there worth trying to sell for a tech job?
Getting your foot in the door is the hardest part (like many other industries). I don't have a lot of recent experience, but a boot camp or something similar might be needed to get past the first line of hr screening.
But doing some leetcode and sending out some applications is a pretty low investment way to start!
> Most of my projects of note, outside of gaming, are simply little utility scripts for my own curiosities, nothing shared.
Put this stuff up on GitHub or similar.
I was recently involved in recruiting a junior dev at my company, and I was baffled by how lackluster people's portfolios were. Many people didn't have one. Those that did, had one or two school projects, or had a bunch of empty 0-commit forks.
Even one single passion project will make you stand out from the rest.
I used a software support role to get a foot in the door of the tech industry without any college degree, then used that was a way to learn whatever I could/display that I know how to code to get into a SWE role. I think the biggest learning curve I faced was learning "enterprise" software development in terms of design patterns, testing, etc. but it's all learnable once you unearth some of the unknown unknowns.
I'd also avoid using wording like "dabbled" because I've found that people are off-put by that and it comes across as selling yourself short, especially without a formal CS background.
To the point where I went back and had to rethink applying only to companies I really want to work for.
Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you have right now, but in a different place, you'll see a significant bump. But it's highly likely you can do better than that.
Why not try?
Because I doubt I could get the bump I’m looking for doing the same thing I do now with current restraints
> Why not try?
Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage interviews. Without some level of confidence I’d rather not use all my PTO or try to schedule hack at the moment.
From friends who are at FAANGs, it sounds like the prep work has been about 100 hours. That's re-reading things like Sedgewick and burning all your spare time at things like leetcode.
But I was mainly referring to the actually interviews themselves. 4-5 seems like so many, especially if they fly you out vs just being done remotely.
If your job is comfortable, pays well enough, and doesn’t demand all your waking time then why chnage?
Sure you can always get more money elsewhere, sure there are jobs that pay double what you’re making now, sure there are jobs where you get to do insanely cool shit… but it’s a lot of luck and effort to get these jobs. And then, you free time might vanish (either because it turns out these jobs are “always on” type of jobs, and/or because you’re so drained at the end of your day that you don’t have energy for anything else)
There is really nothing wrong with contempt in my opinion. Especially after 10+ years when you understand how most jobs are basically the same, that there is more to life than work, and that we can’t all be doing cool stuff all the time.
To hedge against being in a position where you’re laid off and can’t get a new job anymore, consider saving aggressively. 50% of net pay is a good starting point. This makes you give very little fucks about whether you’ll get laid off or not and after about 12 years of doing that, you won’t even really need a job anymore.
I recently went from a start-up to FANG after a gap in my resume, and the new job is in an area I have no experience in. Many people I know have gone through similar experiences.
You do need strong interview skill though.
You’ve already decided you would fail, and that’s all it takes to seal the deal.
Dare a little. You’ve already made a list of your weaknesses. Now make a list of your strengths. Then sell yourself on how each weakness can be explained as a strength. If there’s nothing there at the end of the exercise, you haven’t lost anything. But you may just end up with some useful clarity on your worth in the marketplace.
I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen.
Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or remote jobs are far more competitive.
You need the LinkedIn profile to look good both to humans and to robots, and a worthwhile recruiter will give you substantial help tuning both that and your resume because these will both help them place you, which is how they get paid. Make sure a new recruiter clearly understands this and is happy that you clearly understand it, too. Those who fail this test are not the ones you want to work with.
It will be harder to work with top-tier recruiters if you're working your way up and not yet established. That's not fair, but it's the way of the world, and as always you mistake the ought for the is at your peril. If you're smart and capable, just not yet tested and proven, the ideal is to find a recruiter who will invest in helping you develop. This is tricky and I lucked into it. The best advice I can offer there is, bigger firms with deeper pockets are more likely able to support that.
The unequivocally good news is that there is a lot of interest, money, and good roles sloshing around the market right now. While that's less good for a newer junior than for a proven senior, it is still good for us all.
Don't wait. The article compares the tech industry labor market to the housing market, which I think is accurate. It also compares now with the boom before the 2000-2001 crash, and I think that is accurate too. We can reasonably predict another crash. We cannot reasonably predict when. So get while the getting is good.
I've had calls with recruiters; during the call, I told them "that's not something I'm looking for and thanks for your time" and moved on.
I've also had multiple late-stage interviews that started this way and my current job was found this way.
None of them know tech but a few of them are smart enough to understand that they don't know tech and to focus on mastering the social market.
I'm going to throw my voice into the ring on this specific line; recruiters get a bad name (often deservedly), but I found my current job (coming up on 3 years) through a local recruiter that contacted me. The whole job search once they got involved turned into an incredibly fast, easy process; they were great about finding companies that matched up with my skills/conditions, they even did some salary negotiation (which I am terrible at).
It was a really positive experience. I'm not going to say every recruiter would be like that, I'm sure many (even the majority) are not. But if you're looking for a job and having a lot of difficulty just finding places to apply, think about finding a recruiting firm to help.
Do make sure:
- A) that you aren't required to apply through them for every job. My recruiter let me keep applying for my own jobs on the side while they scouted out.
- B) that they actually have some domain knowledge about the industries you're applying to.
- C) that they're actually meeting with you and putting in some effort to understand what your goals are, not just trying to pressure you into taking every job offer that pops up.
I think if you're already a qualified programmer, recruiters can fill in a lot of the groundwork of finding out who's hiring and getting your resume in front of companies, and that just increases the number of options you have. I expected to completely hate the process and instead I came away feeling like it had made my life a lot easier and a lot less stressful.
Cover letters are a waste, and rightfully ignored.
YMMV
Call it what you will a cover message or note perhaps.
And they contradict each other, constantly. This is what the difference in culture between companies is.
We can't even globally define what a resume/CV is.
The other area is that DS means something a bit different at each company you could work for. Some may want SQL experts, others want SWE's with some ML and still others expect 100% modeling all the time. You may get filtered out if you don't have the appropriate buzzwords/skills listed on your resume e.g. AWS, BigQuery, Java, python, Tensorflow etc.
CS is easy: Do you know the languages they want, know some algorithms, are you familiar with the same tools and libraries, how's your experience working with people on big projects?
DS: The field is so broad and so deep, you need know everything and if you don't, be prepared to be shredded. Your interviewer may have a PhD in physics, or a master's in economics, or maybe they're just a math major that did a bootcamp course. Do you know NLP and how to build a pipeline? I feel like I get whiplash when I look at DS job postings they're so all over the place.
consider setting your linked in to "looking", which might cost money, but this gets the attention of even internal recruiters
Check out what people in other industries go through, for context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5sfbh/my_...
On the other side, last time I was hiring, I was shocked at the low quality of a lot of applications. Applications that weren't complete, didn't have a resume, cover letter and work samples of some kind got immediately sent to the trash.
Every applicant that included a cover letter was way above median quality, and worth interviewing.
I might miss some decent people this way, but it’s been a very helpful first-level filter of applicants.
When I look at a CV ahead of a 2nd or 3rd stage interview I take it for granted that they are serious about the role and qualified for it.
Some of the worst companies I ever worked at didn't value communication skills for senior positions, and I couldn't leave those roles fast enough!
In the 90's they scoured every math and science field for people to throw into 'web developer' positions. When the bubble collapsed a few of them had learned a lot and stayed around, the rest had to wander off and find something else to do, often back to what they were doing before, if they still could.
The data sciences growth was not organic, which means it probably isn't sustainable either.
For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't know how to program.
I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an interview".
Hmm. I agree 100% on the intersection of practiced and asked as a key indicator for modern tech interviews.
Have you done any estimates of how long it is going to take Facebook to notice your efforts? I looked and they hired 15k people since 2019. Even if you block three a week, you're only a couple percentage points of drag.
Maybe you need to consider collective action?
BTW I also did a developer interview at FB to transition role (after writing code for two years at FB) and failed. It’s just really random.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
With that said, and I know it's a first world problem, I'm looking for a place that aligns with my views and in some specific fields that I find interesting. I'm fine taking a pay cut depending on the company and the position, I don't care so much about money anymore as an employee.
Going to be hard going from 500+ back down to 150-200, but I imagine doing something I'm actually passionate about will be worth it.
I'd say that the interviewer seeing past that is a very good sign you might want to work with that person. And that person's implicit endorsement of the company is also a good sign for the company.
Separately, responding to something else in the comment... if an interviewer is actively sabotaging their own company's process.. Is the company very broken in this and possibly other regards? Is the company not able to fix itself, to the point of guerilla insurgencies, rather than constructive dialog and processes? Why is this person still there? Why do they think that sabotaging an applicant's individual aspirations is a good idea? Is the company so bad that discouraging the applicant is deemed almost certainly in that person's interests? Or does the person not care how this affects the individual applicant?
If you want them to change, you should be taking positive steps towards that change, by getting involved with things like debrief/candidate review, mentoring new interviewers, or making a proposal for a new interview type that could be A/B tested. Large changes to things like interviewing practice do happen, but they don’t come from out of nowhere, and they certainly don’t come from a single engineer passive-aggressively tanking all their interviews.
In general, obstructionism is not a good way to effect change; it just hurts everybody. There are exceptions, but this probably isn’t one.
People are literally spending months studying for interviews hoping they can get hired at FB and you are sabotaging their chances. You're admitting you aren't even trying to evaluate if they would be someone you want on your team or an asset to the company, and instead just wasting people's time and hurting careers as a protest.
I hope you get fired for said behavior.
It makes me wonder if this is really a person who works for FB at all, or just someone masquerading for the sake of making an already loathed company look even worse.
Have realistic goals, and know yourself well. If dedicating months for an interview and getting rejected on a whim is going to affect your mental health, don't do it. You can make a pretty good living without working at a FAANG.
> and hurting careers as a protest.
Sorry - but being rejected at one company won't hurt your career. If it does, you have bigger problems.
(Non-disclaimer: I'm not at FAANG, but I don't approve of their interviewing styles).
When someone comes in and is able to solve the 2 hardest problems I have cold there's no way I can reject this candidate in a debrief. There's people out there who are able to do this, either through practice or raw intelligence, it's just that they're very rare. If I said I'm filtering for top talent nobody would bat an eye. If you think I'm being unfair you can simply become more skilled at these problems so that I have absolutely no reason to say no, or to not interview in these places (the better approach).
It seems like your over-reaction is in fact counter productive and may make the whole thing less meritocratic.
My big assumption here is that FB and other places need to hit some numbers every year in terms of new hires especially with FBs no promotion by X years then you're out process.
You said it yourself you aren't trying to evaluate candidates you're trying to make it so no one can get hired. It's no different than if you asked the most obscure piece of technical trivia you could find and failed everyone who didn't know it. Sure someone might know it but that doesn't make it anymore or less of a dick move.
You just found a way to spike people that you think you can get away with. Insane.
Have you considered that you might be frustrating the interviewees and your colleagues too?
Also, your experience indicates that you are only applying to a specific kind of company - FAANG, or a company just about to IPO or a certain type of venture-backed startup. The job market is much bigger than these companies, and there is a lot more diversity to interviews than your post suggests.
I'd say it's less a dick move and more actively harmful. I really don't need any more to believe that FB was declining internally, filled with self-important engineers only propped up by a single revenue source and buying out the competition. In his attempt to prevent anyone else from hurting the company, he decided to hurt the company first?
Imagine working on any other system with 100s of engineers and one of them deciding he doesn't like how it's being run so, instead of raising his concerns, he decides to sabotage it. Absolutely insane.
I make ~110k, and I have no hobbies but code + contribute to a variety of OSS projects in my freetime.
What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of money?
My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in certain roles at certain HFT firms. I’m also pretty sure these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are stock options.
I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale.
I do know that there are x100 devs at FAANG that put out the groundbreaking projects that change landscapes -- but that's generally these well-known outlier developers for which there are a tiny handful in the world.
HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing business, FAANG I don't. But also, I've never worked or applied at FAANG, so I can't really form a valid opinion I suppose.
The cash and other benefits are still ludicrous by any normal assessment but stock makes it unreal.
It's not just insane valuation. If the employees are bringing in $1M per head, you can afford to spend more on those who are making stuff.
> Personally, I never understood how you could even pay someone 100k TC
Got better in later years towards the end of childhood.
But a combination of: the above, being homeless for a while, and working a lot of jobs like manual labor/landscaping, dishwashing, food service, retail etc for minimum wage gave me perspective.
I honestly don't have any clue why I get as paid as much as I do.
I'm not complaining. Employer, if you're reading this, don't take my money away lmao. I'm finally not poor anymore.
But my life was fucking miserable for $8/hr and in tech now I make (what feels like) ludicrous money for work that isn't even hard.
World is real backwards in a lot of ways.
According to 10-K reports, they print far more money. The net income per employee figures are never before seen for organizations of that size, for so many years:
https://seekingalpha.com/comparison/9e-FAANG-Stocks
For Amazon, you have to strip out the non tech employees, but similar numbers exist at AWS. That is the beauty of near zero marginal costs, winner take all markets, and extremely high barriers to entry.
I also try to make damn well sure everything we use is contributed too financially and we open source as much as possible.
I agree with you - hence why it is very hard for early stage startups to give meaningful offers in the bay area.
This falls on deaf ears around here over and over, but worth mentioning that money isn’t the only “meaning” there is.
This is why Amazon is as big as it is, because the vast majority of their employees are warehouse and delivery workers at low wages - so the margins they make per employee are insanely higher than Goog...
[0]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...
I work in one of the data platform teams at a social media company. Between our 3 HDFS clusters, we're storing more than an exabyte of data. At our scale, we have to tune our workloads carefully to make sure that problems of scale are not noticeable to internal customers (data scientists, analysts, etc.).
We basically have an entire org of highly paid engineers focused on making sure people can use that data efficiently. So we have a team of people working on storage, on Spark, on Presto/Trino, on data ingestion, and so on.
So my understanding is that we're investing in engineers to improve data science productivity, so that they can do analysis without having to understand the internals of all our systems, so that executives can make informed decisions backed by data to continue printing money. Or something like that...
Maybe you make it a SaaS so companies only need to hire daa scientists if you can optimize the ETL process.
In the same way, even 364 days a year the dev is doing completely boring work that someone making 80k could do, the one day they have the potential to do work that takes down the site for even minutes is worth the $ delta!
When seconds of latency even for hours can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, hiring to make sure someone is less likely to screw up one day a year is worth it.
This is what it's designed for, and it's doing it pretty damn well.
I don't know how you can work at a company that makes $1M+/per engineer every quarter and not think you are entitled to some of that.
Also to be clear, that’s total comp. Not salary. Salary is closer to $150. I think most FAANG cos top out around $200k for salary, but I know several people making over $1m a year.
Do you not actually care about the company you work for and you're just there for the pay?
You make so much money already -- what is the thought process here
Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase.
What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe in what you're building and the people you're around bring you joy?
For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit?
The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them.
If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best years of your life working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.
For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of a better term, Fuckless.
Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would say, "Spark Joy".
If you have to choose between:
- $150k Salary @ small startup working on something you're passionate about with a close-knit team
- $250k Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356
I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing, and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.
If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but you also can't turn around and complain about it or act like it's the only/a normal choice.
Bud you said you make 110k and we’re originally responding to people talking about 300k, 500k, and more.
There is no reasonable way to look at ~300%+ increase in compensation as “slightly more”.
You’ve got a point about working for a company you believe in, but that’s part of your total comp. You chose a package that’s lower pay + fits your interests. When people drop the “fits your interests” requirement they are able to get more comp as part of the package
So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.
Probably not since your government will most likely always require you to pay taxes, but you may be able to achieve financial independence for some definition of the expression.
The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this problem as much. If a company is having problems with it it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their employees.
I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then wanted to share it with every other developer.
So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt, and now that's what I do.
If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same quality as when I started or the company values have changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening -- or at least I really hope so.
Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or up for sale, unless that's what they want.
I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be someone I'm not.
Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely valuable and jobs I would do:
- Software for addiction treatment centers and rehabilitation
- Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
- Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
- Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
- GraalVM is fucking cool.
- Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
- Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
I could go on and on. The world has so many serious issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on -- just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies + people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain) until you get a job.
If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar career then I'm pretty sure most people with less disadvantaged life scenarios can too.
---
Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps" argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent beings that drive the force of history.
Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing what you like, etc.
That's really pessimistic and defeatist.
Where's the money in that? San Francisco can't even scrounge enough funding and will to effectively treat its own addiction-afflicted citizens and homeless population, the local VCs are likely even less interested in that line of work.
> - Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially making information accessible to regular people. Genomics for fitness/sports performance.
23AndMe, Verily, etc. are in this big industry. Of course, a considerable of this is going to lead to people's medical data being resold to Big Pharma, which is where the big monetization in.
> - Software reform in partnership with state/governmental agencies for criminal justice
They do exist, but again where is that funding coming from?
> - Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
Apple has that locked down, sure.
> - GraalVM is fucking cool.
That'd be Oracle's baby.
> - Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins, education software to make music theory accessible
That does exist, sure.
> - Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
Plenty of projects like that exist, sure.
> That's really pessimistic and defeatist.
Any industry with the amount of dumb money and hype as tech is going to lead to these emotional consequences. Ask yourself how much world-changing prosocial visions are on Wall Street, how many sunny optimistic dreams left unscathed by Hollywood. Silicon Valley is just another face of the bleeding edge of capital generation.
Don't you feel hypocritical -- you're supposed to treat others the way you want to be treated.
I assume if you were hiring people, you wouldn't want them to do that to you.
So why do it to others?
Because they don’t exist?
I think I'd sooner go back to drugs and homelessness than face the thought of waking up every day to give the majority of my waking hours to something I don't care about. For almost the rest of my life.
Or even worse, something I disliked/working for trash people.
I used to have panic attacks thinking about this when I worked mundane, dead-end jobs.
Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
At least if you're high, in a park reading a book or papers on the internet you're enjoying life.
I'm being genuine and not trying to be antagonistic, I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
> Pardon my language but: the fuck is the point even?
When you find out let me know. Some people seem to get lucky enough to have all sorts of other, non work things to keep them going, family, etc. so I suppose if you have that it’s motivation.
> I'm not sure I understand why you bother to work at all?
Because the alternative is throwing away both my past and any potential for the future, even if it looks grim. As stupid as it is, I’ve thought about though, if not at least because it would give me a blank slate and something to work towards again. Though the few fleeting moments of content was I find are generally at times I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t wageslaving the rest of the time.
> If you don't find anything in the world interesting, what gives you the will to live and not commit suicide?
There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
I and my partner don't have family either really. We have living families, but not the way most people consider family I think.
> There’s plenty of things I find interesting, just nothing that anyone would ever pay me to do. Maybe they aren’t commercially viable, maybe they’re not really career related things, or maybe I’m not smart/wealthy/educated enough to take them on.
6 years of a wildlife biology + animal behavior degree and she says she can't find a job doing what she wants.
I'm convinced it's possible, but that it would take a lot of hunting people down, knocking on doors, networking, emailing random people, basically taking every measure and avenue available.
I could also be wrong though, who knows.
But, she doesn't want me to do that and has something else she's doing so I go "Okey, if that's what you want."
I have no idea what it is you like to do, but if there's any earthly way for you to do it for a living, or make your living off of something tangential IMO you should quit tech and do that.
I'm sure you have pursued that at this point though.
In addition, work doesn't need to consume the majority of waking hours. If you have a high-paying job at a company with a nice culture you can spend ~4 hours a day or less working, with the rest of the time spent reading articles on the internet, browsing hacker news, occasionally replying to Slack messages etc.
Furthermore, what I enjoy changes radically from month to month. Earlier this month I was enthralled by geology and thought about how awesome it would be to be a geologist. Now, something else has captured my attention and I rarely think about geology. Soon, I'll move on to something else.
So, at best, a job can keep my interest for maybe 2 to 3 months, I'm burned out within a year and I can usually manage to stay for about two years total before my productivity abruptly drops to near zero. To me a job is solely a means to obtain money and time off so that I can go do what I actually enjoy.
To me, you're just as much as an enigma. How could you possibly enjoy doing the same thing for a long period of time? What do you do when you are consumed by the euphoria that comes when you finally find something new that finally scratches that insatiable itch inside of you? The indescribable joy and obsession that makes everything that's come before seem empty and jejune by comparison?
Though I have been diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD, so that probably explains a lot of it.
There is one employer in the world that will reliably give me work I care about and am happy to work on for its own sake, and that employer is myself. Unfortunately, I can't afford to hire myself full-time. I tried it once, and it turns out (unsurprisingly, given my career) that I'm interested in working on interesting infrastructure problems and not interested in building a product, let alone marketing or selling it. I got some PRs into an open source project and then I ran out of money.
So no matter what I do, I have to settle for an employer I care less about. At that point, the choice of employer is just negotiation.
Also, it turns out there are a handful of employers who pay really well - to the point where if I work a job I'm fairly happy with, I can then eventually save enough money that I can hire myself full-time for the things I care about.
There is no hypocrisy here, and bluntly you're being scammed by your employer if you've let them convince you there is. The way the employer wants to treat you is to pay you money in exchange for services. That's it. Would you feel hypocritical if you were an Uber driver who took rides from people you didn't care about? Would you feel hypocritical if you were a barber who cut one person's hair, and then the next day you cut a different person's hair?
I didn't make a vow of faithfulness to my employer, promising to be with them for richer or poorer, for better or worse. (And even that agreement is two-sided, and you can non-hypocritically break that agreement if the other party isn't holding up their end of the deal.) I signed an employment contract, promising them that I would do work for them and they would pay me, and that they could stop paying me at any time and I could in turn stop working for them at any time.
I need to be paid a risk premium for the new gig having potentially worse colleagues, poorer WLB, or whatever things I find after the interview process. With my current job, I know all of these things. So jumping from 300k, to say, 325k would be unwise and immaterial (8.3%). I might jump for 350, definitely for 400.
Capitalism.
Sounds like capitalist propaganda, unless you work at some sort of co-op which is employee owned or something, ordinary rank-and-file employees are compensated with absolute pennies in terms of equity.
That $300K gives me more flexibility, mobility, and choice in just about anything I want to do.
Totally removes any financial stressors.
Could you advise how you reached that level of compensation? Is grinding hundreds of Leetcode problems necessary?
You really need to turn around the interview on the interviewer. Best means of accomplishing this is to run through the technical evaluation as quick as possible, then turn the question around in terms of whether it would solve their current problems with what they're working on. It likely won't, so try to identify current problems within the organization/team/project. Dig into those problems and help identify solutions. Question the tradeoffs with the existing system and their current approach.
Just offer solutions.
My story (hence the throwaway account)... Last year we got no pay rises and were told "no increases this year because covid uncertainty". This year it's a rather megre 2% percent that doesn't even beat inflation, even more so when viewed over two flat years.
I'm obviously looking around and can likely get some small increase, but I'm not seeing the crazy increases or behaviour this article talks about.
The whole remote work move also seems like it would apply downward pressure to some of the top locations. For example I can now compete for remote jobs based in London and would be quite happy being paid a lot less than a typical local London salary given I live significantly further north where salaries are much lower. And potentially if any US tech firms are open to remote workers from the UK they'll find they can get top quality devs at a fraction of the price. So why is remote work being blamed for driving salaries up, shouldn't it have opened up the talent pool for hiring companies just as much as it's opened up the potential choice for applicants.
It feels like the US job market is so hugely skewed in comparison to the rest of the world that it's slightly insane.
Same reason house price rises are so sticky: you don't have to move unless you've got something better to go to. Rising salaries are about turnover as much as anything else.
So yes it increases salaries in some places, but decreases them in the headline areas where they were highest to start with. Remote work should be a force to move everything to the mean, not just a force for increasing salaries.
Also, FYI we aren't yokels who get paid half as much up here ;)
You can't just avoid supply & demand dynamics by saying everyone should just hold out until they get a higher offer. As a non-London dev myself I can tell you I'd snap up a remote job for a 20% payrise, and I suspect most would. Your suggestion of only taking the full on site salary only works if everyone does it, and most will take lower. It's a prisoners dilemma kind of problem, if we all agreed to hold out for higher salaries we would all benefit, but for each individual it makes sense to defect and take lower because if you don't, someone else almost certainly will. The salary will reach an equilibrium where supply at that price matches demand.
Also, no offense intended about the numbers ;-). I mostly just made those numbers up with no bearing on reality. I'm actually more northern myself, and I'd say average senior dev salary here is probably around £50-60k. I don't really have any idea about equivalent London salaries.
Huh? First I’ve heard of that
Many hiring managers (like myself) do not want to import the toxic, backstabbing, PIP culture from Amazon into our org.
Also I’ve noticed the quality of Amazon engineers is lower, on average, compared to Google, ByteDance, FB, Stripe, etc.
My advice is to work somewhere not-Amazon for a year or two. Then you’ll get more bites.
I don't think it's fair to blame this culture on individual line engineers.
I have seen recruiters red-flag FB/IG managers, depending on why they're leaving FB/IG for this reason. Engineers less so but it definitely comes up in the interview process. It comes up the other way too, when I interview - particularly senior - FB engineers, their first question is "tell me about your PSC culture."
All of the big, well-known companies have imperfect reputations. (And I suspect my own ideas about which companies are better wouldn't quite fully agree with an HN sentiment index.)
When interviewing someone from a company that you believe to be a concern/ambiguous, it might be very valuable to ask, "So, why did you first go to ___?" "What do/did you like about it?" "Why don't/didn't you like about it?" That might answer any concerns pretty quickly.
(But if they give interview-prep-book answers, or seem to be trying to tell you an answer that you in particular will agree with, that's also valuable information, IMHO.)
Since joining Amazon 2 years ago the rate of recruiters hitting my inbox has increased around 3x and I regularly get contacts from Google, Facebook, and MS recruiters, plus recruiters from random small shops in the Bay Area.
I suppose you are exaggerating.
I won't do them. Not worth the stress, I already get paid handsomely and treated with respect. If I'm going to go somewhere else it will because it's less stress or more interesting, and I expect I will get paid less anyways. So jumping through hoops and practicing skill testing algorithm stuff and coding on a whiteboard in front of some disinterested arrogant 20-something-year-old... Not going to happen :-)
It was leetcoding questions for days. If you didn't ace it, you'd get ghosted quickly.
One place, I did 3 rounds of interviews, an all day take home assignment. I still got ghosted!
So I call BS on this quote as well.
Maybe the first time, but I'm well above that mark now and I'd sooner retire early or switch industries over studying leetcode again.
In the end, the only companies that should be doing leetcode beyond the easier level questions are companies with an insane number of applicants where they can afford to turn away a lot of good talent.
Makes sense to me - if someone already has a reputation and track-record, and it's you that reached out to them, then why are you asking them to prove themselves to you? Most important thing is to prove yourselves to them!
I recently switched careers going from teaching to tech and the job I now have, during the interview, didn't ask me to do any coding tests. They asked me a bunch of questions in zoom about my experiences doing certain things relating to the job and I was able to answer them with examples of how I did those things with a previous project I worked on. Got the offer the next day and I'm very grateful it turned out to be such a smooth and stress free experience.
I've worked at some great companies with some great people and I certainly will again in the future. But my experience also contains burnout amounts of internal politics, radioactive code, Kylo Rens, "I'm just the ideas guy", et cetera. People love to glamorize it with foozeball tables and free pop machines, but in the end it's pretty stressful work for a lot of people and comes with few guarantees of employment stability or sanity. I'm not even going to get into what's happening at Blizzard right now, why would I want to work there? Do I want to listen to my friends yell at me because I work for the social network turning their grandparents into anti-science zealots? Do I want to be forced to live in a city I don't want to live in? These aren't salary problems for me.
A perfectly reasonable person may take their chances on a different profession, or downsizing their life, moving to a less expensive place and requiring less income, working on a small startup with their friend. Or living in a van and hiking a lot, which is a lot cheaper and probably also a lot more gratifying than an expensive apartment in a suburb of Expensive Tech Town. Perhaps the chaos, uncertainty, and mortality of the last year has simply made people re-consider their lives and professions. It's what a large percentage of my tech heroes ended up doing (I miss you all, but I understand).
From my experience, I would recommend these companies focus on creating environments that work for and reward sane people on a long term basis, rather than just try to coat over their problems with money. It's a far more better strategy for the people one would actually want to hire than trying to dump raw salary on people for six months until they're too broken to show up to work, then hiring new people that don't understand the code to clean up the mess. When I do startups, being a place people want to work is the only choice we can provide because we just can't out-compete most groups on salary anyways.
Although I think there's something to be said for very long term (years to decades) of high stress possibly qualifying for something similar to PTSD, but of course I'm not an expert on this.
Also he edited his post later so I'm guessing you didn't see the original context.
* https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/the-good-the-bad...
I've spent the last 20+ years developing C++ applications for Windows. Now I know how the Cobol developers felt 25 years ago - nobody's looking for the kind of skills I can demonstrate.
If I could show that I'd been doing full stack development at my last job, I'd have my pick of offers. But I never had the training to do server deployments or the opportunity to do client work, so I find myself completely unqualified for the jobs on offer. I'm certainly capable of picking up those things and have pursued things like Coursera certificates to prove it, but that's not enough - the companies doing the hiring want to see that you've done it previously on the job.
In other words, make your moves now, and with an eye toward the crash that's coming.
If where you are is stable, you can expect it to stay that way through a crash, and you're at least confident of being able to come out of it when things settle down again not looking like you've been standing still, maybe don't make a move at all.
But if you're already thinking of doing that, it's not wise to assume you have unbounded time in which to act, or that said bounds are as broad as they ordinarily would be.
Can anyone here share the links to where we would start to apply for such jobs? StackOverflow Jobs? Indeed? FlexJobs? Or some smarter approach, like putting google keywords when they search themselves or something?
Last time I worked doing FTE in the industry I was making $175,000 a year in NYC, and due to the pandemic, working from home. Say I wanted to do better salary-wise, where would I look for such jobs?
I have a distaste for full-time employee setups, btw, I much rather prefer to work on projects for businesses, bring my own team and solve their business problems directly. But the steady paycheck does attract a lot of people.
PS: At our company we experimented with alternatives to full-time compensation: https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...
One just got an offer for 200 base + 150 bonus and that is to work 100% from home far away from NYC (for an NYC-based firm).
At the same time, I'm participating in hiring for a UK company (for remote or onsite positions that pay nowhere close to Bay Area rates), and we're fighting off people applying, to the point where we can be very picky. These people are very qualified, and still trying to get into positions where you would assume the compensation to be under 70k £ / 100k $ based on public data.
From looking for a remote, well-paying role, I couldn't get a lot of interest despite having an okay resume, in roles where the tech stack is the exact one that I've been using for a while.
So, what is going on?
P.S. we'll hire you! Send the candidates my way plz!
Mentioned in another comment but I've had a noticeable increase in interviews (locations have included Chicago predominantly, Minneapolis, San Jose and DC) the last few weeks, I've made a point of asking about remote and I've been consistently hearing "we don't care where you work". Even of the local companies.
Look at the whole package.
3 companies I've had detailed discussions with so far all want someone to hire 200-400 new devs in UK/DE this year -- and I've seen several other posts with similar aspirations in diff sectors
So that's 1K-2K devs needed that I know (from management/investor 'needs', I'm not convinced the engineering requirement really needs anywhere near that) ... all in same space ... all same job spec ... some willing to pay whatever is required
Much of that in the new fast groceries sector -- I don't think people understand how disruptive that is going to be (in more ways than just wrecking current physical grocery sector)
It's been a few years since I've been on the "I'm gonna move to the US after graduating and become a techbro" train. So I'm not up to date on the latest H1-B regulations etc. Does this mean it might be easier for foreign workers to find a job as well?
I don't want to stay in the computer science industries and have made plans to go to uni again for something entirely different, so I'm mostly just looking for a job for a year or two max, until then.
I’ve run a mid level successful coding Instagram account for 10 months now and still hear the same problems from many new devs or just getting noticed.
I think this is reflected in my book addressing the problem hitting number 7 on product hunt last week.
Moral of the story, still give genuine advice to newbies as they aren’t always feeling the same love from the market.
I’m at $175k in central FL. I see a lot of people posting much higher pay on various forums and I often wonder if I’m underpaid. Now more than ever.
Outside of FAANG (and similar) I’ve only found companies paying around ~200k total for senior level engineers.
These places still have rigorous interviews but not quite FAANG difficulty.
Still, the motivation to even interview for such a small bump is not really there for me (wife and 2 kids).
For total comp that's really low. I'd expect that to be paired with RSU equity grants of $150 - $200k/yr.
Any publicly listed "tech company" that isn't penny pinching like Amazon will probably offer similar rates.
Maybe look for a tech company that is hiring remote? Negotiate a good total comp package if it isn't in line with what you see on glassdoor, etc.
What are you basing those numbers on?
Just look around...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Lyft/salaries/Software-Engine...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Airbnb/salaries/Software-Engi...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Twitter/salaries/Software-Eng...
https://www.levels.fyi/company/HBO/salaries/Software-Enginee...
Many of these are fully remote.
I also feel like companies paying more than Google (3/4 you listed) probably have a decently rigorous interview (I don’t have much spare time for prep, sadly).
Salaries for senior devs range from 30k to 50k, with very little exceptions.
How much does a beachside bartender make?
And why would anyone so much as look at a C++ compiler error message even once for those wages?
Spain in general is very anti-business, especially small/middle business. I had not started freelancing until late in my career because having a paying side job costs you ~$300/month in taxes, regardless of your income this month.
Near the end of 1999, I moved from SV to smaller hot tech market with more affordable housing. I moved totally cold with no contacts or job lined up. The week after I arrived, I had 3 job offers. I picked the smallest web tech startup. After a couple months they got acquired by a SV megacorp and I was pissed! I wanted nothing to do with being a small fish in a big ocean of a company. But I had just bought my first house and my wife was pregnant. I planned to stick around long enough to vest some options. Then the big crash hit and the majority of web startups were gone and my megacorp's stock had cratered. I had the feeling of winning at musical chairs - Pyrrhic though that victory was.
Am I predicting some future tech industry crash? No, but maybe it is plausible. It does remind a bit of the shoeshine boy stock tip. Maybe the world will finally push back against ad-tech stalker capitalism? Haha - I wouldn't bet on that...
Chewy.com did $7.1B last year.
That’s the difference between 1999 and today.
And that made them wrong. :)
No one will argue that holographic display VR is a bad idea.
Some people will try to get you to invest today.
* if I’m making 300k at nonfaang, and don’t feel like doing these crazy ass LC interviews, is it even worth it to look? Or is 300k+ all LC?
Original grant wasn’t meant to be that much but stock ipo’d well
Best thing is to build a solid LinkedIn profile. I've had multiple FAANG recruiters reach out in the past based on my LinkedIn profile, but my own applications have never received attention.
I have a LinkedIn but I don't really keep it actively updated. But for my current FAANG job I was sourced via LinkedIn. Received a random recruiter inbox message there and eventually was hired.
I found my current job through Stack Overflow, which was great (I'd prefer to avoid LinkedIn and the spammy ones). However, there aren't as many hits on Stack Overflow as there used to be.
Instead of the time and money spent, they could easily boost the compensation of an existing employee by $25k and not lose money or time.
But of course, nobody ever claimed that management is competent.
There's a reason why FIRE is so popular in tech industry. It is led by incompetent fools in positions of making arbitrary decisions without consequences, until it's too late to salvage anything.
But also remote options made highly paid devs more accessible.
I am currently in Norway and when I turn on "I am open" in LinkedIn, my phone just doesn't stop ringing.
We started hiring in 2015 and have always been 100% remote. We have a team of 38 now with around 25 full time US based employees. Hiring has always been a breeze for us because we've always been 100% remote. Until Covid hit and the word 'remote' started being used by basically everyone, even companies that are hybrid or are going to go back to in-office at some point.
There's another factor, and that is growth in the tech sector. There is just a shortage of great engineers right now and very high demand.
In response, we raised the salaries of our developers that are already part of the team significantly. Then we raised the advertised pay range for our PHP devs to $120K to 150K, we added a $20K signing bonus to all developer roles, and we started using recruiters for the first time. These changes have made a huge improvement to the candidates we're seeing. Keep in mind that these are 100% remote roles and always will be, with candidates based anywhere in the world - not confined to large tech hubs. Our benefits are incredible and we have 21 days PTO - just for additional context.
I think the only viable solution for employers is to respond to changes in market conditions, and do what we've done. Pay your people more, increase your hiring salary range, consider a signing bonus that isn't bullshit, but actually is a huge additional tangible benefit for talented engineers joining your company.
I don't think the kind of pressure tactics described in the article, like "exploding job offers" are the answer. You're just playing silly games and wasting a candidate's time and your own, plus potentially trashing your company's brand in the hiring market.
I've have worked as an ops engineer and dev for a long time before building a successful tech business, and I've lived through a hot hiring market several times, as a talented engineer working to maximize my earnings potential. I'd strongly encourage you to look around and get a sense of what the market can offer you. Have conversations with a few recruiters. Don't let your company use meaningless enticements to make you stay. And don't get enticed by pressure tactics or things that don't actually help you earn more and have a better quality of life. Focus on the fundamentals when evaluating options - base salary, actual starting days of PTO, medical, 401K if you're USA based. And take action now, because this probably won't last.
It's a great time to be a talented engineer, pretty much globally.
120k / 12 months => 10K/month salary
10K / 22 working days / 8 hours each day => ~$57/hour. Kinda low, don't you think? Especially for senior level.
However, if things are working out well for you as an employer with your current pay + benefits stack, you probably grok the market better than I do. Wish you all the best!
Looking for full remote, normal hours etc.
Golang, python, K8s, AWS devop. 8 years
I assume "Senior X Developer" is the highest % of churn.
What if people want to move - but are also sick of their current role/pigeon-hole -- is the market on fire for them as well?
I'd not mind seeing something that reaches a lot more down into the lower skill, lower cost of living areas where employers still are at an unfortunate advantage.
I have started a new job a few months ago. My now former manager was trying to come up with a counter offer, but my new offer is too far off from my old compensation package.
I haven’t been actively following up through to figure out which ones are permanently remote.
Every candidate we do interview, generally also has multiple other job offers.
Plenty of places have not increased wages yet and interview process seems around the same.
I'm a good generalist and like doing different things, but note that I don't call myself a "React Developer" and so if that's what you want, please don't contact me. Also don't contact me if your first step is passing a hackerrank test. Other than that, I like contracts of short or mid length, but am open to different arrangements.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gogv-06KONN3-WNURSEtwZDubLv...
Some tech jobs may feel like a dead-end, but better than low-paying and dead-end retail/service jobs.
Anyone in the ag-tech sector state side?
> Flock Freight’s algorithms help companies move products more efficiently, combining small shipments into a shared truckload (like a carpool for freight).
This sounds cool to me. Certainly more than all the ad tech and blockchain companies out there. A job here could mean revolutionizing logistics with AI, slashing greenhouse gas emissions, this stuff is core to our economy and modern life.