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Comment by notmars | Hacker News Reader

As a startup CTO that has done 15+ years of this, I believe very strongly that your hiring process relfects deeply on the core software belief system you hold on. That's why bureaucratic/non-engineering organisation will tend to over-emphasize references and tests, big tech will over-emphasize CS40021 style exercises and whiteboarding "shame on you", and the rest of us, other stuff. My advice for job-seeker: look very deeply why they ask things during the process and you will be able to fairly predict your future there. Make sure it matches you needs and wants. For the process-builder: are you sure those deeply-held beliefs are filtering what you need or is it filtering what you want...?

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I’ve been seeing and increasing mismatch in the challenges companies present you with and the role they actually want filled.

At this point, the cargo cult of Leetcode is often more of a hinderance to startups. Everyone wanted to follow Google thinking it’s the best system without asking themselves if they have the same problems or are in need of those kinds of people.

What's especially ridiculous about imitating Google's hiring practices is that the value in Google's search/ad business was largely built by people hired there before these interviews become the norm. They hired through social networks, like, hey, you and X who works here had the same PhD advisor.

There’s nothing ridiculous about it.

Second approach is just not scalable in the long run. And you need someone to do grunt work.

The ridiculousness isn't that Google has changed their hiring process to reflect their current state, it's that other companies are copying what Google does now with the hope that it will allow them to replicate the success that Google had 20 years ago.

If your premise is "We look a lot like Google circa 2015, and I really like what they've done since then, how did they do it?" then it might make sense to replicate their hiring.

But if you want to achieve what Google achieved between 1998 (founding) and 2004 (IPO) then asking what they do now (or have done over the last 10 years) isn't particularly relevant.

Absolutely agree, and smaller companies can even afford to fully disclose their core values and non-technical expectations towards the candidates to make sure the process is a win-win for both parties.

We update and share these points within the team and with the applicants even before they make the first contact with us:

https://stratoflow.com/our-recruitment-and-onboarding-proces...

Nice list. What does "Distanced from themselves and their source code." mean?

The code has bugs and might cause a new pandemic. So they follow social distancing.

That’s all nice in theory, but new college grads want to make as much as possible. They don’t do that by “arguing that gravity shouldn’t exist”. They do that by playing by the rules as they exist.

That means “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” (c) r/cscareerquestions.

I am 25+ years in the industry. But if any new college grad asks me for my advice. That’s what I tell them.

I definitely wouldn’t tell them to take a chance of working for any non public company hoping their “equity” may be worth something because they heard that early engineers at Uber struck it rich.

No. I don’t know how to say it more clearly.

The vast majority of people I’ve hired want to be happy, and I have completely qualitative conclusions from having hired such developers for decades: It works well for everyone.

If you want a job at FAANG badly enough to suffer it, go for it. But don’t ask me validate “that’s what everyone is doing”. It’s not — you’ve been sold a bill of goods, or you’re greedy. Either way, you be you.

You realize you’re replying to someone who is 49 years old on their 8th job? I’m far from a naive college grad.

But I bet you dollars to doughnuts that if I told any of them that they could double their compensation by “grinding LeetCode” they would trade the “equity” in a private company that statistically won’t amount to anything for real stock being in their brokerage account every six months.

As far as being “greedy”. Are you running a charity?

Yea, this is an interesting thing. I see plenty of smaller companies still doing the shady stuff that FAANG does and then trying to offer 50% the salary. I'd maybe take that if I was trading money for feeling like I was doing something Good, but if it's just "which privacy violation do I want to support" then you don't really have an advantage to offer me to offset paying me a lot less.

And, if they want to live in any of the same locales where FAANG people happen to live, show them `levels.fyi` for FAANG, and tell them those are the people they're going to be competing with condo/house offers and apartment rents. (Well, in addition to the other parties snapping up real estate.)

Students might know starting salaries, but maybe not know just how huge the income difference can get in a few years. Nor understand how adversely the relative difference can affect their quality of life.

Doesn't that make your sample size very small?

> If you want a job at FAANG badly enough to suffer it,

I mean, you have to agree, for a lot (if not most) people, the ROI is massive.

>The vast majority of people I’ve hired want to be happy

You can't possibly know that for sure. Are you making that judgment based on what candidates tell you during interviews? Because the meta-game of a job interview is literally just figuring out what the interviewer wants to hear and then saying it.

Having worked at a couple big tech companies I’ll say money isn’t everything in life. I’ve been much happier working at well paying startups with a great group of people making half the money.

Would you say the same thing coming straight out of college with $0 in your bank account, student loan debt and no experience?

As I said in another reply, I could afford to ignore BigTech recruiters at 45 making about as much as a returning intern makes where I work now. I already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, a family and a son graduating from high school.

I would never tell a new college grad to ignore the same recruiters I did.

I could and can take jobs I enjoy, actively run away from promotions, etc.

It's cultural and personal. I started my career getting paid less but doing fun stuff. I paid my way through university with no debt. I only started to think about money after having kids. i.e. I couldn't care less about myself, and I didn't need a lot of money either, but I did care about my family.

I had a great time, and learnt the most, at smaller places and lower paying jobs. Then I also had a great time at some better paying startups. I probably enjoyed my "big tech" better paying jobs the least. All that said, you're generally so much above the average as a software developer that you can't even imagine what most people are struggling with.

YMMV

You saw the part about my spending my entire career from 1996-2020 doing your bog standard enterprise dev?

In 1996, I graduated from an unknown state college in South Georgia and I made $11/hour as a computer operator working on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes.

Because of…poor career choices …I didn’t hit six figures until I was 40. Even now I make about what a software engineer II makes at my same BigTech company at 49 in cloud consulting.

As I say, please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me.

Last year, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 3 suitcases - including our cars - and bought a vacation/investment property in a resort area in Florida. We stay here half the year from October - mid March and we fly around the US the other half of the year “digital nomadding”. My wife in the meantime is retired at 47 and she is involved with her passion in the fitness/wellness industry and meets up with people everywhere we go and flies to conferences from wherever we are staying in a given week. I also fly for work a few times a week.

We take Uber everywhere.

This is what I meant by I can make different life choices at 49 than I would recommend a college grad making. I can be okay barely making L5 compensation.

Our fixed expenses are really low.

By cultural I meant American. Just to be clear I am not American.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You seem to be supporting what I'm saying which is you can get by perfectly well with various choices. You made choices (poor or not) to not go after the biggest paying jobs and you're doing great. Why does a new grad today have to go work for Google?

In the US there are lots of really good paying software jobs that aren't with the biggest tech companies. I've worked remotely for a small US startup many years ago and got paid really well. The current market is tight but over the last decade if you had a pulse and could code you could get pretty decent job.

I can make different choices at 49, after having a 25 year career, a house that doubled in value in four years that I could leverage, no family responsibilities, parents that have been retired for 20 years who still have four sources of income (2 pensions and social security) that are healthy and independent at 80 that don’t need me (for now).

I also had no college debt (scholarships and going to a cheap school) and I was able to get into BigTech by being old, with industry experience that allowed me to bypass the leetcode grind. But only by pivoting into consulting.

These are life choices I could make that a new college grad couldn’t. Also when I graduated, $BigTech wasn’t a thing. Apple was barely hanging on for dear life and MS wasn’t paying more than your average company adjusted for cost of living.

If you're a parent, you probably are long enough out of college that you don't know what most new juniors are getting out of fresh from college. There's very few to no ways to pay your way through university with no debt, these days. Cheap in-state tuition & fees is over 5,000 per semester, not including books, equipment, travel, housing, food, healthcare...

When I was still in college, most kids were graduating with debt. Tuition and fees have only gone up since I left. Lots of people I knew who dropped out to try and save for college ended up in dead-end despair jobs.

Well, for one thing not everyone is in the USA. I was not. My older daughter graduated from university. So I do know. But also not in the USA.

Does nobody in the US live with their parents while going to university?

It's not uncommon where I live for parents to save to pay for their children's education. Believe it or not, the government even gives you money if you do that.

EDIT: That said, the US has plenty of good paying software jobs. You can pay back your loans even if you don't work for Google. I'm sure this isn't easy for everyone (especially these days).

> Does nobody in the US live with their parents while going to university?

The tuition fees are probably a bigger expense than your living expenses if you go to college in USA.

Here in North Carolina, the flagship state universities are still only about $10k/year or less for tuition. If the student lives at home with their parents, it really wouldn’t be difficult to pay most of their way through school. College is expensive in general but it doesn’t have to be as bad as a lot of people make it out to be.

> If the student lives at home with their parents, it really wouldn’t be difficult to pay most of their way through school.

Please tell me how a full-time student can fairly easily earn 10 grand a year (plus books, clothing, phone bill, entertainment, laptop, etc)?

If you paid your way through uni with no debt you most likely didn't graduate recently, which makes your advice to current students (or ones that have recently graduated) not very well aligned with reality.

At least in a big part of the world, student loan isn't part of the problem when looking for a job straight out of university.

100% if you are in a hole, get out of the hole first

> Having worked at a couple big tech companies I’ll say money isn’t everything in life.

That’s because you have enough of it now.

Hah exactly. I've noticed that people who say "money doesn't matter" either come from a childhood of privilege and have no real concept of value, have earned and spent enough of it to lose sense of its value, or have subconsciously de-valued money as a defense mechanism to cope with the anxiety of not having it.

That's not to say that one should work in oppressive conditions or make other people suffer for a little more money; there is nuance. But, seriously. You can't pretend that money doesn't matter.

Of course it matters but to a point, I would rather feel happy with the short life I live than miserable so I can buy a fancy car

>so I can buy a fancy car

You're assuming that everyone's goal in life is to be happy as defined by material comfort or hedonism but that's just not the case. There are many non-hedonistic things that are enabled by having money (philanthropy and venture capitalism of various forms, freedom of various forms, sense of security, etc.)

For such people, because hedonistic happiness is a worthless commodity, trading it for money, and by extension all the non-hedonistic things that money can buy, is a very favorable transaction.

It's easy to see why earning more money by sacrificing comfort doesn't make sense to someone who considers happiness as their goal in life -- it's a longer route to reach the same point.

I think the point is I would have enough either way

Do you have anything constructive to say? I worked at faang for 3 years, donated 90% of what I made to charity before changing my life to work at a place with half the salary.

Don't assume things and don't comment here with bland reddit one liners. Only say something if it's constructive.

IMO this is 100% right and not just for new grads. The compensation for software engineers is on such a broad spectrum. Even if I think leetcode style questions are completely inane and reveal horrendous values, I'll put up with it for the prospect of double the compensation (or more).

I wouldn’t go that far. I did say college grads. I know a number of people who are 40+ (including myself) who would never want to give up their lives in the burbs with the 2.1 kids in the good school system to relocate and work for BigTech.

My story is that in 2020, I was 46 years old living in the 3200 square foot house I had built in 2016 making $150K (and getting offers locally for $170k) my wife was also working part time making around $25K in the school system.

We had more than “enough”. We went on two or three trips a year, had “date nights”, saving “enough” for retirement. I ignored every message from recruiters at BigTech. I actively didn’t want to work at any large company as a software developer nor did I want to move.

The only reason that the recruiter from Amazon Retail even piqued my interest was that when she suggested I do a slight pivot to “enterprise application modernization” cloud consulting.

The extra money is nice. But it really just ended up going into my bank account and didn’t make an appreciable difference in our lives besides “retiring my wife”.

I would have no problem going back to my (inflation adjusted) prior compensation.

Your case is a strong argument for remote work. Tech companies are kind of weird in that they all focus on the same cities, SF or Seattle, then NYC, Austin, Boston and then maybe they branch out from there. As if great engineers don't live in Kansas City. There is a lot of talent being left on the table imo when companies aren't willing to hire remote, or create more small satellite offices if they can't accept remote. There's a lot of great engineers working at say Lockheed Martin because that is the highest paying job around them, that would be a strong asset to any tech company.

I hinted at it but I didn’t make it clear. The software development job was “remote until Covid cleared” in mid 2020. The role in Professional Services assigned me to a “virtual office” permanently with travel when “things got back to normal”.

I think a lot of companies are okay with leaving that talent on the table.

Sure, but that means there is opportunity for other companies to pick up that talent.

You're phrasing this as disagreeing with me but I don't see your anecdote as contradicting me at all. A lot of people would strongly prefer to make $400k rather than $150k, and not just college grads. Not everyone, and maybe not you, but many people. Are we actually disagreeing here?

I’m saying that people who already have path dependencies and are making “enough” prioritize other things over the pursuit of money.

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

I know plenty of developers 40+ who would never give up their lives in the burbs of Atlanta (where I lived until this year) to move to the west coast.

Even now, I’m almost sure that the new college grads who I work with (and one that I mentored as an intern) that came in after I did at an L4 will be promoted to an L6 long before I will (if I ever get promoted). I actually told my manager and my skip manager that I don’t want to be an L6 or the responsibilities it entails. I’m already saving/investing every penny of my RSUs. My base salary is about the same as it was before I left “enterprise development”. My fixed expenses are actually lower

> ... didn’t make an appreciable difference in our lives besides “retiring my wife”.

Heh Heh Heh

Wonder if your wife would look at her being retired as an appreciable difference? :D

Well, the longer version of the story is that when we got married in 2012, we had both been laid off from the same company. Her job increasingly became “I need you to work for the benefits while I change jobs 5 times between contract and perm building my resume and getting my career back on track”.

By 2020 she was working for the school system part time on the school schedule.

I used the two year prorated signing bonus to pay off all of our debts, increase savings and reduce our expenses.

We also moved from the big house in the burbs of Atlanta to a smaller condo in Florida and we don’t pay state income taxes.

So yeah over the past three years I both increased my compensation and reduced our fixed expenses.

Big tech is not hiring now. Those absurd total comp levels may not be coming back.

Big tech includes more people, and pays more, now than it did in 2019. 2020 and 2021 hiring and offers were unprecedented. Things have slowed down, but this is no where near a dead, or even cold, industry.

Yea, I was just told by an AWS employee that they're desperately trying to hire as many people as they can still. Those companies are massive. The layoffs and divisions with hiring freezes don't seem to even make up a tenth of their capacity to hire.

Sigh. No one has stopped hiring SWEs. Only 5% of those laid off were SWEs[1].

[1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...

People who work for BigTech are still making those “absurd “ total comp levels. I see no indication that the offers are much lower or that when reviews come, they aren’t attempting to offer more stock to keep them at somewhat decent levels.

I’ll know myself in a couple of months…

Good luck putting that particular genie back in a bottle now that people know how much money is just floating around.

What do you mean? It's a market. Knowing the money is there does not magically make it get paid out to employees.

Have you looked?

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/job_categories/software-developme...

https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/?q=Software

https://careers.microsoft.com/professionals/us/en/

Maybe not. Probably so. Do you have any indication that tech is dead?

The amount that Big Tech can afford to pay is correlated to their revenue.

The amount that Big Tech is willing to pay is correlated to the market supply of employees.

But I'm unconvinced that a very profitable company will decide to pay less than it can afford, in order to acquire the best engineering talent it can, when their revenue is directly linked to their engineering products.

The only thing that would make FAANG pay nosedive is if they made an organizational decision that they didn't want to prioritize software development.

So basically, if one of them decided to hire an Eddie Lampert type.

> I'm unconvinced that a very profitable company will decide to pay less than it can afford

They are not o paying maximum of what they cam afford, they are making huge profits.

If they are not paying maximum that they can afford what are they paying? Provavly the minimum they think they can get away with.

Its all mind games.

I agree that they could indeed be paying their engineers far more and still make a profit, but that’s just supply versus demand. They found the pay bands that provide the sweet spot:

Relative maximums for profit and talent willing to accept those salaries.

do they? You seem to generalize a bit no? I have 2 grads that are pretty happy with their life and their salary right now, and are starting to look into buying a house. So I'm doubtful it generalize well.

You can have pretty good salary in non-FAANGs, make a difference, and match your own software values with what you're doing.

I would even argue that by doing so, you're elevating those company, allowing them to then compete a bit more closer to FAANGs comps, and "stealing your talent" away from those less-matching software values, creating what I believe (from my own values) to be a virtuous circle.

Or you can grind at FAANGs, accept stack ranking and elevated salary, play the yearly promotion game and end up with a very nice pile of money. Then clearly do not expect them to change, and I would argue: you do not get to complain unless you are actively trying to change them from the inside

I am not complaining. I work for one reason only - to exchange my labor for money to support ny addiction to food and shelter.

And let’s not pretend that startups are trying to compete with BigTech. They are just trying to survive long enough to get acquired. Out of all of the companies that YC has founded, how many have gone public?

If you are working for a company that has accepted VC money, your “values” don’t amount to much at all. The only values that matter are those of your investor and all they care about is an exit - statistically by getting acquired.

The opposite choice is accepting Monopoly money - “equity”.

True my unvested RSUs are half what they were at their highs. But at least I can sell them and trade them for real money once they vest every six months.

Don’t get me wrong, I spent my entire career from 1996-2020 working for mostly unknown companies working as an “enterprise developer”.

The only reason I fell into my current BigTech job is because I both know how to talk to customers and I can create pretty diagrams, PowerPoint slides and a shit ton of yaml and HCL and can develop (cloud consulting department)

Yup. It’s FAANG or almost don't become an engineer.

I mean, not really. There are plenty of us making US FAANG salaries outside the US and not at any major tech company.

My sample is myself and all my peers.

Industry is BIG and the demand for smart people with a track record for getting things done is even bigger.

Most years I barely do anything more than basic eng management and my teams build glorified CRUD apps.

I'm paid much more than others in the UK because I'm a sure bet. FAANG not required.

    There are plenty of us making US FAANG salaries outside the US and not at any major tech company.

Can you share some samples? The only ones I can think of are investment banks, but you need to be in the top 5% to be paid as well as FAANG and live in one of the Big Six global banking cities: New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hongkong, Sydney.

Amsterdam has trading firms

Had recently a message from LinkedIn: some trading company is hiring to Amsterdam office, offering 85k plus annual bonus up to 40%. Peanuts comparing to NYC offerings.

That is exactly my point!

I guess FAANG-level comp is less than 500 people in the whole city.

>making US FAANG salaries outside the US and not at any major tech company

Out of curiosity, what kind of non-FAANG domain are you in that pays soo good in the UK? IB? HFT? ML?

I'm asking since every single UK person on HN complains that UK tech wages are shit yet you claim otherwise.

What makes you the exception or why do you think the others would be wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Defence/gov £250k base. CRUD apps, nothing fancy, just lots of data.

The salary curve in the UK has a long tail of rubbish pay because that's what people accept. Budgets are often much higher, and supply of skills is low.

You just have to follow the money and negotiate well. Firms with deep pockets don't care if you cost 90k or 300k when the project is in the hundreds of millions and the fallout of failure would cost much more.

The important think is to show you represent 5x less risk for 5x more pay.

How do you show that? A large portfolio of successful projects/many years of experience?

Yes. Also be good at interviewing. 90% of getting what you want is being liked without appearing like you need to be liked.

Wondering the same. Maybe they meant "US FAANG salaries" very literally, i.e. just the salary, not the bonus and equity...

If they really mean US FAANG total compensation, my guess is quant trading firms.

I did mean salary, I'm not sure about total comp because UK firms don't seem to operate similarly for the most part.

even UK quant firms don't really pay similar to US quant firms unless for the very top roles or firms that have multiple locations

Do they pay similar to US FAANG, though?

That's the comparison sirsinsalot was making.

"FAANG" is long outdated for the reasons you say -- I think it's shorthand now for "tech companies that actually pay really well" compared to, say, the public sector, or startups, or small companies that can't afford to, or places that view software development as an unfortunate cost to minimize, etc.

In any case, even in that light, the claim of FAANG or don't be an engineer is absurd. Even if someone doesn't end up with a really well paying job it is still a solid career option "especially in this economy"

In the UK at least the compensation curve is weird. You can be on a team and be paid more than the senior devs above you.

You just have to play the game right. Excellent developers are rare in the UK in my experience or hiring. Mediocre ones who think they're excellent are everywhere.

Yeah with the opaqueness of comp, the same thing can happen in north america too. Someone beside you will be getting massively more RSU grants or something because privately management likes them more.

> Mediocre ones who think they're excellent are everywhere.

Absolutely

I think you are underestimating FAANG comp. Which non-FAANG companies outside the US pay >$300k USD?

I work at a FAANG and took a paycut to get here (from a startup).

What other occupation are you going to pick that you can a) get hired fairly easily right out of college, and b) make $150k+ in a few years with only an undergraduate degree?

Do I understand you correctly? After all that's happened in the last 12 months in Big Tech you tell them to pursue cheap Fed money infused talent hoarding jobs at FAANG companies?

As opposed to working for non profitable startups?

The second part is that I tell them to save aggressively and diversify themselves by selling their RSUs as soon as they vest. They wouldn’t use 25% of their cash salary to buy their company stock, why keep your shares once they vest?

I sell all of my RSUs within the six months after they vest and diversify

I would much rather to have loved and to have lost than to never have loved at all. I used every penny of the after tax difference between my “enterprise job” I had in 2020 and my BigTech job that I got then to “increase my net worth”. If I lost my job , it would have been a good three years.

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