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Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

cactus2093

Your example is not actually that crazy at FAANG level companies. I know a lot of people in their early 30's that are L6 or even L7 at big tech companies, maybe they've changed jobs every 2 years on average in their career which is well under 9 times, and those level of roles have a total comp of 500k-750k/yr. With a 4-year stock grant and some luck on the stock performance in that time, that can turn into well over $1M/yr in years 3 & 4 at the company.

You're right that there's a ceiling somewhere, but the ceiling is (or at least has been) ludicrously high for the past decade or so in big tech in the US.

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This is a thing that can happen and does happen for a very small number of people.

But when discussing the entire job market, it's a minuscule fraction of tech workers who could even get there if they tried (sometimes due to no fault of their own e.g. location), and it's a much smaller number that even get there at all.

Hitting L7 in mid 30s and catching a massive bull market to pump up compensation is mythical unicorn levels of lucky. It does happen to some people, but it's not useful at all when discussing realistic expectations even 95th percentile developers in the general population.

Getting into a bubble with top FAANG engineers can really distort perceptions of what the market looks like for the median developer.

I've also seen people get to L7 or equivalent by age 30, and they have done it by being phenomenal engineers who quickly produce great results of impressive scope. I'm skeptical that a median engineer can get to L7 by just job-hopping a few times getting promoted each time. If nothing else, organizations just don't need more than a small percent of their people doing L7 level work.

Yeah. Job-hopping tends to top out around L5/L6, in my experience.

I guess I'm somewhat lucky that I was able to double my compensation over 5 years within the same company, but at this point I've hit the ceiling for rapid compensation growth for the most part.

Maybe I should just grind leetcode for a few months (my dynamic-programming algo skills are a bit rusty) and switch jobs. I would miss the 30 days of PTO though.

leetcode is a good idea - but coding problems are more like to get foot in the door (pass phone screen). Senior and above candidates are "leveled" and judged using design and behavioral questions - so the way you answer them would impact level and target compensation significantly. So it make sense to spend time preparing for Systems' Design questions Behavioral questions.

From another point of view - design and behavioral questions original goal is to confirm that candidate have related experience from day to day work, so if you have enough practice on your current job - it is not so much time to prepare for design and behavioral part of interviews.

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