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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

The coding interview looks different when you view it for what it would be called in other industries: a licensure examination. It looks particularly insane to relicense for every single job you apply to. It also looks supremely unfair to have proctors for this exam with varying expectations and training to actually correctly administer it.

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- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality

- people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling

- licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships

Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

What kind of job pay 400k? Even when I worked as C++ guru at BMW and was hired as very senior my before taxes compensation was 40k (year).

Jobs at software companies in the US. Other industries don't pay very much for technical talent.

$40k is extremely low for a senior role. Even in places like India or China.

> Jobs at software companies in the US.

A few very rare jobs at software companies in the US.

The BLS median for 2024 is way lower, at $110k. (Yet at the same time, still much higher than parent-poster's $40k figure.)

I assume the BLS median accounts for all software jobs. That would include software jobs at GM (the US equivalent of BMW), banks, insurance companies, and the rest of the economy. Does it control for industry?

Going back to the phrase "software companies", the closest category-breakdown looks to be "Software Publishers", where the mean average [0] rises a bit to $149k. (I'm going to assume that the relative difference in means is similar to the difference in not-shown medians.)

You can see higher values, but I think they look suspiciously like generic labels slapped over large something-opolies such as Google ("Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services", mean $215k) or Uber and Lyft ("Taxi and Limousine Service", mean $187k.)

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm#ind

You can make double or triple that in total compensation at the staff or principal level in the Bay Area.

I'm not saying these jobs are easy, or easy to get, but yes, they exist, even in this market.

The reality is the biggest drop-off in recruiting is at the very top of the funnel. Your basic phone screen and first technical screen -- before you get to a full panel. Once there you have way more, qualified, applicants than roles. I'm not sure it really matters which person gets the job, and this is one way you can make a fairly arbitrary decision. It's nice because it's within your control to grind some leetcode lol. From the company's perspective it's fair and has limited negative selection risk, and doesn't lead to as many regrettable hires.

If you've got 100 great candidates and 1 role, does it really matter which great candidate gets the job, so long as the selection process is relatively fair and uniform? From the company's perspective, probably not.

Since there's no feasible way to select the local maxima, the second sort is consistency.

> You can make double or triple that in total compensation at the staff or principal level in the Bay Area.

Sure, it is possible, but that is a small number of roles at a small number of companies, and the vetting process will be more intense. I think the coding interviews we're talking about in this thread are going to be at the junior to mid-level for the most part.

You can make millions as a famous actor in Hollywood. So what? That doesn’t describe the average actor’s situation.

I think it's a lot easier to get a staff role than being a Hollywood actor. Staff+ comprises around 7-10% of a company's engineering team.

A quick Google leads me to believe there's usually about 15-20 A-list actors at any given time and 130,000 members of SAG-AFTRA.

I think it's certainly achievable if you put in the time and effort (and of course if you're good at your job) -- the question is do you want to or not. It can be incredibly demanding and may not be intrinsically rewarding to you. It seems folks generally believe "senior" is an achievable level -- they should, it's usually the first "terminal" level at which it's ok to remain for the rest of your career -- then you shouldn't view staff as intrinsically out of reach.

Perhaps they meant to say "studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles, after getting a CS degree from Stanford, moving to a city where a basic apartment costs $1 million, and getting 8-10 years FAANG experience, also like half that $400k is stock not cash"

But no licensing!

None of these things are true of me actually. Skill based interview is an equalizer which overcomes status education. And fine divide the salary by 2 and it’s still better than most “licensed” careers

Not to mention those of us who are self-taught and don't do as well in formal learning environments. One can be higher functioning, but not learn the same as others. It's harder to work around at times, and I do have to use various coping mechanisms in practice (same as setting lots of alarms for meetings through the day). I don't always do as well in converting literal leet code pre-screenings online though. I'd rather do a take-home type assignment (actually make a solution for X) or a person to person screening, where I can ask followup questions to better understand what I'm solving for in context.

Stock in public companies is effectively equivalent to cash, so what’s the difference? Sell on vest and buy index funds or anything you want.

That's assuming the stock price doesn't go down in the time it takes to hit your first (or any meaningful) vesting cliff.

To be fair I think most top tier companies vest quarterly so...

They do, but they don't do refreshers quarterly.

You definitely don't need 8-10 years or a degree from a particularly prestigious university to achieve this.

Also you can get this pay outside the bay area, still in high cost of living areas, but for that pay it's really not an issue.

Low level (L4) at big tech can clear $400k if the stock appreciates, otherwise L5 (“senior”, but really just mid level) will easily be there. Higher level ICs can make 7 figures.

Jobs in bay area with most tech companies with 5-10 years of experience at mid level gives you this. With zirp gone this may no longer be true but was the case 2 years ago

How are people still so misinformed about Tech salaries?

Are you in the EU? Salaries are lower across the board there for engineers.

In the US for Silicon Valley Type large Tech Companies the starting salary for New Graduate SWE's is 150k USD on the low end.

For a senior engineer at FAANG it can easily get above 500k USD.

Keep in mind that 150k USD can also be a terminal salary at 30 years of experience in most other places in the US.

Most jobs are not FAANG or FAANG adjacent.

Yes of course this is true but I was responding to this common idea that high salaries, say over 300k, don't actually exist in the US when they do and are very common for Engineers at large SV tech companies.

I am in Portugal yes.

> C++ guru at BMW

This sounds interesting--what did you work on?

I think the author is talking about comp data from levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&cou...

Maybe for the devs, but "solves fun puzzles" is not a measure of quality either.

The number of people who "aced the interview" but are borderline worthless for real product development is not trivial in my experience.

I still haven’t met the guy who is an algorithms genius who can’t program, but I can guarantee a license isn’t going to solve that problem.

What you want is someone who can break down a problem to the point where they can use the scientific method to come up with an algorithm on their own.

What you get is someone with canned responses in their head. And resultant mass layoffs. We're trying to automate picking just the right puppy instead of going out and playing with a few of them.

"Programming" is only half the battle. E.g. doesn't overcomplicate the codebase with weird one-off solutions, can actually work on features, some of which (God forbid) involve a UI or existing code.

In 20 years, most leetcode style genius types I've worked with really aren't great at this type of SaaS work.

Programming is a very small part of the battle of being an effective software engineer.

It leaves out:

- communicating

- teaching

- dealing with ambiguity

- navigating politics

- working cross-functionally

Most high level individual contributors at large tech companies don't even code.

i have experienced a lot of people who have convinced themselves they are adding value despite not coding, yes

System design isn't coding and reviewing all designs across 40+ people and leading cross team tech initiatives is a full time job.

What makes you say they don't even code? In my experience coding is indeed drastically reduced, but high level ICs still regularly code.

Looking at their commit history.

As an addendum to "communicating" is documentation. That said, plenty of those who do document/communicate well can still suck at teaching/training at a higher level.

But being able to program is table stakes to be an effective developer. There better be a lot more to the interview if you are hoping to find rounded developers with proven experience at the level you are hiring for.

For engineers at the mid to low level where leet code dominates the trait to select for is ability to program and be reasonable to work with.

At entry level fore sure, but not everyone is going to be equal after 5-10 years of experience. They'll all be able to code of course, but some will have gained valuable experience and moved on in capability and some won't, which of course is why you interview to be selective - to find those who can do more than just regurgitate LeetCode solutions.

> They'll all be able to code of course...

I promise you that's not the case, lol.

It's not about being able to program. It's much more about product sense and system design.

Only in other countries than the US there are also these interviews and you make far from 400k :)

Even in the US, "$400k" is almost certainly an outlier and not the typical case. Ever notice how people making these claims never provide data about actual comp distributions? I've been an engineer for almost 10 years and never had an offer come close to $400k per year.

Everyone on HN knows someone whose brother's uncle's girlfriend's nephew's former roommate works at Facebook and made $400K as a developer. And they'll point to that one person and say "See, it is possible to make $400K in tech." Yes, it is technically possible, just like it's possible to do plenty of difficult things. That doesn't make these salaries common. For every 1 person making $400K-800K at FAANG in the Bay Area, how many dozens are working outside the Bay Area and/or for some no-name company making $120K?

I dunno man. A good third of my class seems to be working at FAANG and we're all from an unremarkable university in Eastern Europe. I'd imagine the prospects are much better if you start in the States already.

The official estimate of software developer positions in the United States was 1,656,880 in 2023.[1] 10% of that would be a high estimate of FAANG software developers in all countries. And most in those companies make less.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

A high estimate? Google alone stands at 180k employees. I'd imagine at least a half of those are technical positions.

Technical positions is more than software engineers. 60,000 software engineers was the most I saw. And most other technical positions pay less.

It probably depends. I know at a very senior level in a lot of companies, you can hit a base salary around half that for Staff/Principal positions and some Architect roles, especially in higher paying areas. The value of stock offerings and other compensation, bonuses etc will vary a lot though. You may grind out 5-10 years to reach that level, then 5 years to fully vest at half that pay to see a $1M stock payout at 5 years bringing the average to $400k. Who knows. Different arrangements work differently.

As an aside, when the market is relatively good, don't be afraid to straight up ask where compensation is on given roles when recruiters reach out, or to ask for more than you think you might get. You're pretty unlikely to get $400k or anywhere near it as a base... but you'd be surprised how reachable say $150k+ is as a base salary for a remote position when you aren't in SF or another major/expensive city.

It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies, and specialist roles beyond that.

"software engineering" doesn't print money any more than being "in finance" does, you'll make more or less depending on what company you do it for.

> It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies

What are the tiers? It's close to typical for a Bay Area Google L5 according to levels.fyi.

tiers are about the quality of the company, not the internal leveling.

Google would be a tier1-2, Uber/Lyft/Netflix would be tier 1, Adobe would be tier 2-3, etc.

The point was companies usually considered tier 1 like Google did not have such compensation.

What makes Lyft higher quality than Google?

Do you work in California for a company in this list? Meta Amazon Google Netflix Airbnb Stripe Square Microsoft

If not it's unsurprising. But these actually are typical offers at those companies including Base Salary + Stock + Bonus.

in the sfba, levels.fyi shows it roughly at 85%-ile, not everyone - but hardly extreme outlier

I wonder what it is after accounting for self reporting bias.

The numbers are real. I was in a similar incredulous position 4-5 years ago. Hiring is still relatively weak, but you can always try to get an offer yourself. Or even just talk to and ask recruiters; they have no reason to lie. You don't have to take your cousin's girlfriend's uncle's word for it.

probably significantly lower, but still not all that rare. i make roughly that much as do most people i know in sf

A giant proportion of developers have no idea wtf “levels.fyi” is and are quietly writing Java or some shit in some suburban office park in a city you wouldn’t ever bother to visit, for $80k-160k/yr.

Hearing from people that did internships in other fields for almost nothing, during which CS students make more than most workers really drove that point home for me.

> - licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality… people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling

Agreed, I never asserted against these two points. The point of licensure is to make the first round, which is fairly routine at this point, more equitable and less susceptible to probabilistic effects. It also frees labor from administering this exam round to every candidate.

How often do other industries relicense? How often would you propose relicensing for programming jobs?

My concern would be skill atrophy between relicensing and then you'd still want to do the same sorts of interviews.

Other industries do not require repeating the license exam. Many have continuing education or other professional development requirements. These can be expensive and time consuming but not difficult generally.

> people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling

The licensed engineers I know think software interviews are insane.

And most mech/ee make <150k. A closer comparison is IB.

How is income relevant to the claim interviews are often just as grueling in licensed careers?

Most software developers make <$150,000.[1] The median aerospace engineer makes 99% of the median software developer wage.[2] Probably the median licensed aerospace engineer makes more. The aerospace engineers I know think software interviews are insane. Lawyers and doctors I know think software interviews and their professions' filters are insane. I know nothing about investment banking interviews. But investment banking is known for hazing.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes172011.htm

Can I join your bubble?

You could view the trial-by-Leetcode that people undergo when they switch jobs every 4 years or so as a form of relicensing. One advantage that the current setup has over officially proctored examinations is that you get to try again repeatedly until you are successful.

Real licenses do not expire without notice. Real license exams are more consistent, have clear pass criteria, and have higher pass rates.

The roughest outline for hiring as far as I can follow it is start with 100 resumes, filter it down to 10 by picking ones that are nicely formatted, then filter down to 1 by interviewing. Each level of filtering should be structured so that it biases towards technical competence.

It isn't really a licensure examination because, as you point out, the industry doesn't bother to put the resources in to make sure anything is systemically analysed. It is a process to balance supply and demand of jobs.

90% of the filter is resume formatting!!!? I'm open to hear your experience but that sounds like an arbitrary filter which limits your pool more than it selects for talent

It can depend, but yeah.. when you're filling 1-2 jobs and have a stack of 500 resumes, you're going to do quick filtering based on some pretty arbitrary decisions. Worse is that the recruiting companies will often do weird things to any formatting you have done. If even 50% of the applicants are technically qualified, dumping 90% at random is still likely to get you where you need faster.

It's worth taking the time to ensure your formatting is consistent, with no/few spelling and grammatical issues.

It will also vary by market/location. If you're looking at jobs local to you, it could be very different, especially for those jobs wanting domain experience. Different business sectors also congregate around adjacent businesses... so the choices and technology in one City will vary greatly to other Cities. As will the development process itself.

Missed the step where they filter out anyone w/o a degree in CS from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/UIUC/CMU.

As someone with no formal degree, but approaching 3 decades of experience, this last (recent) job search was rather brutal. Not enough feedback to know if/what was going on. Could be lack of formal education, could be my age (legal or not).

Got any tips/suggestions on how not to be filtered out because of "formatting"? Got any great examples to share?

In my experience, pure black-and-white text does extremely badly.

If someone is in a position where they have to read through 100 resumes, there is a limit to how often they can look at a paragraph-formatted WYSIWYG text edited black and white document that says "I did well at school, I worked some jobs afterwards, now I want to work here". They blend together something shocking.

It is worth having a tasteful dash of colour or maybe a formatted header/footer where possible. Low bar, but there is a big pool of serially unable-to-get-past-screening candidates who can't clear it and you want to stand out from them if at all possible.

I'm allergic to resumes that recite every single technology the candidate has ever used, leaving little said about what they accomplished using said technologies.

That's true and that's how I tried to have my resume but I've had quite a few recruiters saying something like "I cannot see a list of technologies you know". Which has been the opposite of what I've been told in the past, where impact and goals are more important.

So one can never win it seems :D

> It also looks supremely unfair to have proctors for this exam with varying expectations and training to actually correctly administer it.

Those are your top two problems? When was the last time you saw an exam where the proctor was expected to hold a conversation with the examinees?

Yeah, but the variation can be good. If I had to imagine what the hypothetical licensing process would be, I imagine it would be something easy that admits tons of mediocre devs. Plus, would it come in different language/subfield flavors to account for different roles? One job would ask me to implement a custom allocator, and I'd pass; another would ask me how to add Frondle to Artifactory, and I'd fail miserably.

> I imagine it would be something easy that admits tons of mediocre devs

Given that Medical boards and the Bar strike fear into the hearts of students and demand immense preparation, I think we could do pretty well. The test prep mentality isn’t altogether different from the “grinding leetcode” that happens today anyway. The difference is that it would at least be fair.

Actual engineering licenses in the US have kind of solved this.

There’s the easy exam that pretty much everyone passes eh e they get their degree (the FE), and then there’s the hard one that not even everyone attempts after a couple years of experience (the PE).

And within each level, you specify your discipline (civil, mechanical, etc) and then are required to have deeper knowledge of several subfields within that discipline.

Difficult to apply a lot of that, when in reality there are nearly infinite combinations of domain knowledge, software knowledge, architecture knowledge with languages and platforms. Some requiring more or less depth than others.

Software is a craft discipline... it would be better organized as a guild with reputation at stake in concert with endorsements. But then you risk what is effectively nepotism and politics.

you don't think other engineering disciplines have countless sub-areas of expertise?

I don't think other areas of engineering see the tooling options double every other year.

The sort of interview being discussed doesn't test knowledge of the latest tooling.

It would be nice. There are already too many devs and if we can lower that number by controlling the licensing our wages would also stay very high.

I personally think an industry-wide license would be an easier filter than requiring a degree: Schools don't often teach what you need to know, and sitting for an exam is a lot easier for the "I've been in the industry XX years without a degree."

It would also be easier for the industry to settle on some filters in the exam to block people who just SPAM job postings. For example, open jobs for doctors are only posted on websites that are available to doctors. There is no way for the general public to SPAM job listings for doctors.

We need our own AMA.

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