lowiqengineer

Are you advocating censorship? So much for the tolerant right!

“Irony” or “makes complete sense?”

> You should compare yourself now with your past self six years ago: are you a better person now?

Kinda? I had more potential then, I could have done Facebook after sophomore year and had my career set for life. Instead I failed that interview and my career has been treading water because I had to join Amazon out of undergrad.

Its apparent that I"m not good at these things...the problem is my happiness and financial security are related to them and I'm not doing well!

> We're not a majority, but it's hard to compete with us, it's not helpful to compare yourself to us, but it's hard because that's what interviewers compare you against.

This makes me so sad. I've prepped hard on leetcode for 6 years (since freshman year of college) and I haven't had much to show for it but a total compensation less than Stanford new grads despite two years of tenure. I wonder if there's any point of even living most days.

...only because other folks implicitly look down on me

I’ve never seen anyone from my company disclose, which has way more engineers.

> Funny to see this article—I was interning at a company that used S-expressions instead of JSON internally right around the time this post was written. (Seeing it for the first time now though.)

Weirdly long-winded way of saying you worked at Jane Street.

This is really less “sentinels can be faster” and more “assuming invariants can be faster because you’re reducing comparisons”.

I've seen your username before on CSCQ. Tell me - is there any hope for people like me? Any way that I can come even close to matching your total compensation anytime soon (Which I'm assuming is around $350kish)?

I make less than that ($150k for 2 years) at a FANG. Yikes. You're really not helping me maintain my will to live here.

> The job market is imploding around us while we work cushy tech jobs. Abject misery abounds as people lose their loved ones and their livelihoods.

This is also the case for people at Google, etc but they still manage to find time to complain about not being able to expense their lunches [0]

Overall I don't disagree, but the path to JS or equivalent companies seems to be astonishingly narrow given the fact that I didn't join there out of undergrad and I'm currently at a company that Jane Street recruiters don't consider to be impressive or noteworthy.

> And don't be so hard on yourself. If you've made it as far as you have, you definitely have successful characteristics. You're not special, and that's OK. But just because you're not special doesn't mean you don't have successful characteristics.

I'd say I'm exactly as hard on myself as society is. Everyone else gets constant external validation - all I get is signals to say I'm stupid.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/google-tells-employees-not-t...

- Recruiting/resume updates (not many interviews lined up, and even with offers would max out likely less than what I'm currently making)

- Interview preparation (not going well, but I blame my inherent intelligence for that unfortunately)

- Promotion work in my current role (would max out at like $180k)

That's kind of you to say, but I do personally know lots of people at Facebook, Google, Lyft, Citadel, Stripe etc that _do_ make this much or more. Meanwhile, even the L6's at my company make around $300k - that's about what E4's make at Google. Plus, levels.fyi is generally pretty accurate.

World income is irrelevant since I live in a nice part of America, not the world. And yeah, I do make about as much as your and my grandfather made over the course of their careers. Unfortunately, if I'm making an apples-to-apples comparison with people doing equivalent work (perhaps not at Jane Street, but definitely at Google or Facebook) I'm making about 80% or less. That means I'm worth 80% in the eyes of the fair labor market - I'm 20% less human.

> or have some other successful characteristic that you do not.

That's both fair and true, but I'm someone without any successful characteristics.

> You don't need to have gone to a particular school.

All of the interns in question went to top schools of course :)

> If you already got into one of FAANG, you almost certainly have a strong baseline skillset already

While I wish that were true, unfortunately, the FAANG is Amazon so I don't think that's much proof of anything. I would work towards achieving mastery of what I would need to do to pass an interview, but I can't even get an interview - again, because of my current company and undergrad.

This comment really did not help my depression as someone that makes $150k two years into a FAANG job. I've never even been able to get interviews from HRT or Jane Street, and my Citadel offer was less than $200k...

I mean I'm all of those things too but I have way less money and external validation

Ive never met a single one. I feel completely insulated from the top strata of society that looks down on me because of it - it’s really depressing what going to a state school has done to me.

What should I do if I know i have a low IQ?

Agreed. And this makes not even being close even harder for me.

I have steady employment too. But I don't have society giving me unlimited external validation. Instead, people think I'm subhuman for where I work and went to school.

I mean I can probably go on LinkedIn right now and find someone that fits these loose criteria. They’re fairly common!

I know I’m not anywhere close to extraordinary, but it still makes my heart ache seeing someone with a Google or MIT hoodie or a RocksDB jacket on my evening walk.

I’ll settle for being considered more than just a mental defective just because I work at Amazon.

I doubt there’s anyone at Google that doesn’t clock out after 8 hours and they make $200k starting. With my tenure closer to $300k.

I don’t really want to be Charlie Parker extraordinary, I just want to be Harvard CS major who makes $500k as a T5 at Google extraordinary. I assure you, that person has more diverse friendships and more leisure time than I do.

> There aren't as many uber successful people out there as the internet makes it seem.

I live in a city with two elite universities (guess which one). They're literally all around me.

Getting into either of those is my definition of "uber successful", with many of them being more successful at 17 than I'll ever be in my life!

I fully relate to this, but the worst part is being judged as being defective and unsophisticated by the extraordinary people that I surround myself with. It feels like I've already failed at life most days.

How do I maintain flow? I end up extremely depressed and disillusioned if I get stuck on a problem - that’s really what’s stopped me from doing consistent prep.

I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that if it was Google they wouldn’t have that opinion, eh?

That’s definitely not true at companies without incentive systems.