> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers.
Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?
Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?
* Amazon
* Microsoft
* Apple
They work on security, mobile, back-end, and "I can't tell you what I'm working on," the last being the most common answer, unfortunately. The common thread is that they're all good developers. I got my offer in large part because of Android development skills on top of low level skills, which on Android means I'm comfortable and experienced with the NDK. But I also know Windows, full-stack web, high performance servers design, scalable server design, multithreaded programming, game development, and a half dozen other interests/skills.
Most of the compensation comes in the form of stock grants and/or signing bonus. My compensation was $160k "salary" plus nearly that much in signing bonus+stock grant. Actually if I hadn't left the company, their new stock price would have meant higher total compensation this year, but I wanted to pursue my own things.
For example if your 4 year stock grant was rated on the early 2012 price of apple, and now it's about double, then your making a lot more money!
Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.
EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff.
So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."
http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-...
They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact.
That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection:
http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-...
Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices:
http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf
So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.
It is true that I think of myself as particularly good. For reference, I was working for one of those companies I listed above, and I put in less than 30 hours in a typical week, and still got heaps of praise for how quickly I got things done (in calendar time). I kept asking for more to do, but never really got enough to keep me busy full time. Ultimately I ended up helping with related projects, or company-wide tooling, just because I enjoyed helping and had the time.
I didn't feel the need to prove anything, exactly, but sometimes things would go south and I'd put in more hours because I felt like something should have taken less time, yes. That's not "prove to me you're 10x!", but my work ethic coming out and keeping me on task until my expected workload was actually complete.
But even then I don't think I went beyond 45 hours in a week in my time there as an employee. And I didn't work on a weekend even once. If something really hadn't gotten done in what I felt like was a reasonable work week, I would have let it slide. That may have happened once, but only once. Making the proprietary company build system do things it wasn't precisely designed to do ... well, I just can't talk about it, since I don't swear in public posts. ;)
Shocking.
A recent graduate friend of mine just started in the field and he has a base salary of 160k (don't know what the bonus is), so 250k for a senior developer doesn't seem out of the question.
Keep in mind that equity makes up a relatively high percentage of a Googlers' compensation. Salary is usually only 40-60% of total comp.
But don't worry, the response of "can't say what he / she is working on" is the only reference you'll get.
This is a ridiculous claim HN, we should be above buying into this garbage.