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I just went through a long period of job hunting (thankfully now employed) and this post rings 100% true, especially the part about being rejected for inexplicable reasons. The "gotcha" question about Fourier transforms that you last worked with for half a semester in college 10 years ago? That question cannot possibly be a serious qualifier for a full stack dev position. Instead, i suspect it's meant to either (a) make the interviewer look smart to their (possibly nontechnical) startup founder bosses and (b) provide cover for rejecting you for some other reason that can't be spoken out loud, like "cultural fit".

I think you're right. They set salaries low and the bar insanely high, reject a bunch of candidates to make themselves feel like they can be the next Google, then ultimately settle on a lucky person who just happens to be there as they've gotten acutely desperate and given up hope of finding a mythical 10x engineer.

Asking questions about undergrad topics is a way to sneak ageism under the radar. Companies who do this should be named and shamed.

Sometimes people haven hidden agendas - they want to bring their friend in and want to show they had dozens of interviews and could not find anyone.

I was at a Fortune 1000 company and we interviewed one guy. He answered every technical question flawlessly. He was personable. The lead turned him down. I argued it since he was the best we had seen. He said "I don't think he'd appreciate it if we called him at 3AM to do some work". This was the reason to not hire him, since no other rational reason could be given. The position wound up being filled by his friend, whose skill set was way below the interviewed guy, and who ambled in at 10:30-11:00 AM every day.

I think startups have become too much of an industry unto themselves, and they are developing their own versions of many of the same issues that the big companies of the past inflicted on themselves. They are living on the (fading) memory of how well startup employees did 15-30 years ago.

When I saw a really positive reaction to YC posting a template sales agreement the other day, that's a signal that it has jumped the shark. Venture companies are supposed to be taking big risks, but it's a big deal to have a "best practices" based sales form? Sounds like when my big enterprise CIO looks for validation from Gartner, etc for any decision making.

I worked at a late stage startup in the dotbomb days and walked away with a decent equity position that based on the "best practices" discussed today would have been somewhere between 75-90% lower. If you look at total lifetime compensation, my decision to work for the government is financially much smarter than one of these startups. Salary is the midpoint between startup and a bank, but benefits are very rich. Add in the future value of pension & benefits, and it is a bad deal to leave unless I was a co-founder.

It's pretty funny because everyone told me that big companies like Google are bureaucratic and slow, while the startups are fast and nimble. In reality, I was interviewing for 8 weeks and places were asking me to come back for second and third on-sites. Google was the last company that I on-sited with, the only company that let me skip a phone screen, had incredibly professional and responsive recruiters, and told me they were preparing an offer a week after the on-site and had the offer a week after that. The interview was interesting and had creative questions. Even though I had no competing offers to show them, they still crushed the offers I was asking for and didn't get. When I expressed interest in Product (even though I was interviewing for an engineering role), other companies told me that engineers are not involved in product decisions, Google told me the opposite and had a few interviews questions where we talked about product. Yet the VC startups are still complaining that we go to Google for the free lunch.

How much do you get paid now ? Thanks for your insightfull post.

Also were you asked about linked lists / trees during your google interview? Did you have to write code on a white board?

Not comfortable sharing specific numbers, but check out Glassdoor for a range. The key to Google offers is realizing the value of target bonuses and restricted stock units. Typically a startup will offer you Common Incentive Stock Options. When they vest, you have to buy the shares out of pocket and pay capital gains on the difference in valuation, even though you have no means of selling them unless the company exits. The company can also exit via a sale, in which case if the sale is too low common stockholders get screwed (and they might do it intentionally to screw over ex-employees and grant retention bonuses to current employees instead). The reason for this is because "investors are putting up money" and therefore deserve preferred stock, even though they are asking you to take a significant salary cut for those common stock and that salary cut represents a far bigger portion of your income than the investment represents the VC's portfolio. Look up Liquidation Preference for more information on this.

Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting (or hold onto one of the hottest stocks of the last decade). No need to pay any money out of pocket and risk getting burned, you can only make money.

As far as the Google interview, there is a massive amount of information about it which the Google recruiter will provide, but check out Glassdoor interview questions, Cracking the Coding Interview, and Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" post.

Linked-lists/trees are absolutely fundamental data structures so of course you should know them. Every single engineering interview at Google _requires_ a coding question, so yes there was whiteboard coding in every interview. I would highly recommend buying a whiteboard and practicing at home because things like space management and hand-writing matter.

A lot of the industry has copied the Google interview one way or the other so you might as well study for it even if you don't get the job.

> Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting

But you have to pay taxes on those RSUs at the moment of grant (if you do an 83(c) election), or at the moment of vest (if you didn't). How does Google or anyone else work around that? Do they also give a tax-covering bonus with the vesting?

There is no 83(c) election. At the moment of vesting the amount is considered regular income (no RSU * market price on that day) and you pay taxes on that. A portion of shares is withheld and sold to cover taxes but you may owe more. When you sell you pay capital gains tax on the difference, short or long depending on how long you kept it. There is no work around, you just keep in mind taxes when calculating your grant worth.

So, it's just a bonus denominated in shares instead of USD. Is there any difference whatsoever to getting it in USD and buying it on the open market at the same day?

From your description, sounds like the only difference would be fees (instead of Google issuing shares, selling them, getting money, giving money to employee, who then buys Google shares) - but surely there's some other advantage?

Great point about the psychology of rejecting people and companies feeling the need to reject good candidates to "have a high bar." There is also something to be said for these companies demanding a vague passion for their product (or for you to fake it) rather than understanding it is a job and presumably the candidate is a professional.

> I'm pretty sure if you are a qualified heart surgeon, most places looking for heart surgeons will hire you, but if you are a qualified engineer you go through an insane interview process and no matter how good you are, 70% of the time you get rejected for some bullshit false negative reason.

Well, the obvious difference is that someone who is a heart surgeon has had about 16 years of general education and about 12 years of specialised education and has a certificate that proves that other doctors and heart surgeons believe that s/he can do the job EDIT: and can be sued for any mistake s/he makes... someone who is an engineer has a laptop (there's no such thing as a "qualified" engineer, IMO).

Uhh, I have a computer science degree with departmental honor, from a top 20 US school, I've been hired by companies with difficult interviews, I have a side project with users that I shared the source code with employers with, an active Stack Overflow with a lot of good answers, strong references, etc. I'm not a dude with a laptop. And I was asking for 125k.

My friendly advice as a former hiring manage for a startup, purely based on the details you posted here about your job search experience. Huge caveat: you know all the details and I only go by a post on the Internet, so I'm likely to be wrong.

The tone of your messages make you sound a little bit demanding, or difficult to work with. You may have voiced strong opinions during those interviews. When you say that a startup will make you come back several times, it's a sign that they like you, but have a concern that they are trying to figure out. My guess (again, just a wild guess), is that you were technically very strong, but had possibly a bit of an attitude. That would explain the startups behavior. The main two reasons a startup would hesitate to hire a good engineer is either they are asking for too much money, or the candidate seems inflexible.

Again, I'm likely to be completely off.

> The tone of your messages make you sound a little bit demanding, or difficult to work with.

Strongly disagree. OP clearly knew exactly what he was looking for and actually got it. It's the startups that wasted time on interviewing him but didn't make their hire that clearly lost out.

I don't doubt that some of those companies could have perceived an attitude problem, but that's a huge reason not to work for those companies. They're looking for serfs, not collaborators.

When I interview a senior dev, I deliberately test to see if they will contradict/debate me on something technical. If they won't, they're not really senior or they're just yes-men who won't call out my mistakes and make the organization better.

Everybody talks a big game about giving employees responsibility and autonomy, but many lack the guts to follow through and hire smart people who have actual spines and opinions.

No, one internal employee did state that as the reason. I have very strong references from every direct manager I've ever had. I am not difficult to work with unless you can't deal with having your opinions challenged. Unless Google retracts my offer based on this post I plan to work there for a long time so your advice is irrelevant. Its just disingenuous for startups to say they can't find talent when they mean they can't find cheap, meek, timid talent.

My experience has been similar to yours but in the Valley, and I have a strong set of GitHub contributions as well on top of a clearly sharply skyrocketing work profile chock full of engineering accomplishments & roles.

It is frustrating that startups do not want to pay anywhere close to what reflects what that quality of engineering may entail. Companies like Google will pay $100k more than what typical startups will pay for quality senior engineers as far as I can tell, and that too is even a bit of a bargain. Increased responsibilities do not justify a shortfall of that much when it means it is close to 33-50% of a potential candidate's salary that is chopped off for them.

This was the sense I got too.

I have over 25 years programming, have invented, marketed,and sold several products, have run teams, have significant IP on github, and I get treated like somebody with no experience with a BS resume.

Sure, I should get over myself, but I end up exhausted, we spend the day doing these stupid things instead of talking about what the job is and what I can do to help, and so on. Not to mention that I cannot remember the last time I had to delete a node from a red black time (grad school?), but I'm expected to be entirely fluent at that and potentially dozens of other things that I don't do, but no one can be arsed to ask me about the stuff I have done, because it's not relevant or something.

And, oh, give up 50K+ in salary because options.

I wonder... is there a widely know list (even if small) of what companies don't do this? If it's even possible to determine that sort of thing, it'd be valuable to share and make glaringly public. Even if it has no influence on the head-in-the-clouds startup leaders that play that game, it would at least be valuable for job seekers to have some assurance of who isn't wasting their time.

Trello (like FogCreek and StackOverflow) has a very regimented salary process that Joel Spolsky has talked about publicly here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em...

There are a few elements of it:

1. There is a set salary table based on objective factors (e.g. years of full-time, professional programming experience). Your salary is 100% determined by that table and isn't negotiable.

2. The table gets updated every year for market factors. Everyone gets a raise if the market moves. You get raises by progressing through the table's objective criteria.

disclaimer: I am an engineer at Trello and we're hiring: https://trello.com/jobs

I have had a lot of visibility of developer salaries in previous positions (ran development and hired devs at 3 startups) and I spent a year as a developer evangelist (in recruiting). I found the Trello offer in line with my expectations of salary.

Like OP said, AngelList gives ranges for salary and equity.

you should turn is into a post on medium, then share here lol

Not sure how Google will feel about it so I'm going to lay low and commit some code for them before I stir up any trouble.

But your comments are very positive about google.