bearmf

Market makers are actually an example of "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"

Hmm, like Knight Capital? Oh, wait..

There is no such thing as "consistent profitability" in trading. Trading is not a business where you make a product and sell it to someone, and the more and better you sell, the more you make. It is much more alike to gambling, but with probabilities of winning and losing a bet always changing. You need to know when to bet, but you have no way of knowing the probabilities beforehand. Thus you cannot be sure that your strategies will keep working tomorrow or a year from now. Nor can you be sure of always being able to develop a new strategy that is better than old one.

Sorry for being rude, but I do not understand your reasoning. Yes, technical people often learn quickly - but only if they are interested in what they are learning and if it is reasonably "technical". A "technical" person might have hard time learning social skills that are easy for most people.

Negotiation IS bad. Why would a thing that most people have aversion be considered good? There must be strong reasons for it to be good for the median employee, and there is none.

If you would just think a little bit, you would realize that negotiation is not a technical skill.

It is only good for people who are good at negotiating or want to get good at it. There exists another class of people who consider salary negotiations fundamentally unfair and have no desire to get better at them.

Negotiation is stressful, a waste of time and not interesting at all for many software developers. It would just be better for the public good for no salary negotiations to take place, because people would worry less about being underpaid. Less stress is almost always good for work productivity. And there will be more justice.

Just have clear salary guidelines for every engineer level. Levels would be public and so would be salaries, bonuse, stock grants and performance reviews.

Not being able to raise a family on less than 200k in NYC basically screams unrealistic expectations. There are plenty of software engineers with families in the city and suburbs. They are probably doing something wrong. Especially if both husband and wife are good software engineers (say Google), there is no problem at all.

And most quant salaries are not that high, I guess less than 50% of them make >200k. Again, you are probably cherry-picking successful quants working for big banks and funds and that gives you very high expectations.

Clearly designer jeans and fast food are more beneficial than casinos and zero-sum trading. The first two are at least somewhat useful, are not that addictive and do not harm anyone except maybe people who eat too much fast food. Casinos are of some entertainment value, but are very addictive and have negative effects on neighboring communities. Zero-sum trading is tricky, it is not that addictive but very few people benefit from it at all, less than from casinos and much less than from designer jeans. At the same time negative externalities probably exist but are not well studied.

Author is applying to wrong companies if he is getting lots of language-specific questions. The right kind of company for him is probably one that is looking for smart people who can program and not for Java jockeys.

Testing does not mean "writing tests". It means ensuring that the program performs its intended function correctly.

> People who write no tests are immediately eliminated.

Why would you need dedicated test code for a project that can be completed in an hour? This is definitely TDD-specific and most programmers would not do it.

I don't have data for Silicon Valley, only anecdotal evidence. If you look at Indians and Russians around 30, they are mostly married and having/preparing to have kids. It is a well-known fact that immigrant fertility is higher in US than native fertility.

I don't know where 35 years at first child came from. This is way too high for an average, even among well-educated. There might be a trend but at that age you will have all kinds of problems even with modern advances in IVF.

There might be a correlation, but it is almost impossible to prove that kids cause one to get better at one's job. For example, I am sure that people with kids (up to a certain number) earn more. But it might just be that they started earning more and then had kids.

What I believe is that kids are a normal part of life very different from anything you have experienced before them. Having them has nothing to do with your career (or should have nothing to do with it), and they don't really care where you work up to a certain age.

This is just not true. If you look at immigrant software engineers, they are usually married by 30 and then start having kids.

Negotiating for salary is useless for a business major who cannot get a job. You are also vastly overestimating their average intellectual capabilities with respect to options vesting rules.

CS graduates have it very good right now, much, much better than business majors.

It is ridiculous that people judge whether you should or should not be angry/happy/sad etc. with your situation. It is impossible to judge correctly, all people need different things to be happy. Assuming that money is the universal measure of happiness is usually wrong. That is probably why you sound happier than the guy in the OP.

Just curious, how did you manage to recover her story?

All of the above is also true regarding Silicon Alley in New York. Just visit expatistan.com and do a comparison. Housing is actually slightly more expensive in New York. As for your point two, Wall Street pay is not what it used to be while software engineering salaries outside of banks have been increasing steadily for a couple of years. Nobody doubts NYC status as a startup hub anymore.

Point one is also increasingly true for the SFBay area itself, but there are not enough banks there for them to be a problem for startup recruiting. You could also do a comparison on expatistan.com and see that housing is only 7% less expensive in SF than in London. However, IT salaries there are probably the highest in the World.

If current trends in London continue: startups start to pay more and banks keep laying off people. This is probably a good thing.

The benefits described by OP are not that crappy. Lost of large companies also have employee contributions for health insurance, especially for family members. $100 for employee+child is actually quite cheap. He acts as if what he was offered was somehow insulting (though we don't know the salary offered). 15-20 days vacation is also standard, not 30 days.

Hmm do all your finance friends around $1mil per year? This is huge even for finance.

Lost of large companies have employee contributions. No-premium health insurance is not a standard benefit outside of a few technology companies.

You are right that everyone's situation is different and it looks like your boss really went an extra mile for you. Did you share some common background with him, like went to the same school?

Keep in mind, though, that the situation when some (or all) current employees would not be hired under current job requirements for outside hires is more common than people think!

"talented", "huge number" and "very few" are all very subjective descriptions. For example, try posting a regular senior software developer position in Java or C# on monster.com: you will get at least 100 resumes. If you are looking for "superstars" or "ninjas", you might be unimpressed, but many of these people are perfectly able to do the job.

What I see from your comment is: 1) There was no immediate need to hire 2) You turned down 4 candidates. C#/C++ experience is quite transferrable to Java except at very advanced levels 3) Finally, you promoted the guy who was there all along and could have been doing the job for the whole year already

Basically, there is a shortage of software engineers, but they must possess very specific skills and have lots of experience. All the others are not considered suitable candidates for most positions.

Very true. Most "took a chance on me" stories are also biased towards people at the start of their careers. Many older unemployed people desperately need someone to take a chance on them.

Why is it that people are so grateful to their first employers? These guys did nothing special, they just hired you. It is normal to hire inexperienced people and train them. One should be reasonably grateful for that but understand that employer also benefits from it (hi Captain Obvious). If a person is reasonably smart he/she will be able to produce useful work after a month of poking around. And being grateful for not being fired? Come on!

Be grateful to friends and lovers, not to governments and corporations.

Which is completely arbitrary. Most software engineers do not need to be present at the office at a set time.

There is no abstract "government" doing it. It is the work of people who do not want new housing to be built for some reasons. They probably have lots of influence in local governments.

Local governments are small and arguably inefficient, it is easy for special interests such as homeowners to influence them. But there is a long tradition of local government in US and they have real power. The solution here would be for higher-level (state) government to intervene, keeping in mind interests of all state residents and not only homeowners.

There are plenty of poor people in Manhattan, inequality is very high. But maybe you are right and rich people in Manhattan have more opportunity and desire to insulate themselves. I wouldn't know.