461–470 of 547 posts
Two tried and tested methods, neither guaranteed of course. 1) Be better than the overwhelming majority of your peers, and be noticed for this. You are quite likely to find interesting opportunities come your way. I do mean overwhelming though - small fraction of a percent. 2) Specialize in something most people can’t or won’t do. This includes difficult, obscure, and unpleasant work. In both cases some of the bigges…
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> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with Some people, but not many people... > Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig Why? > Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company Why? Why take time out of your day to tiger parent strangers on HN when you can just have your own children and damage them instead?
I agree with your first 3 sentences. But let's try to keep the guidelines in mind: >Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe the thing to be focusing on is maximizing savings on the high average salaries that we all can command instead of trying to maximize earnings. Controlling spending is something one can control to some extent once the necessities are paid for. And then that’s the way to accrue and stay wealthy or become independently wealthy over time.
I’ll be sure to tell that to my landlord.
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> Alot of getting hired into these roles depends on your upbringing/perceived social class by the people at the fund, the school you went to, how you present yourself, whether they want to work with you, how trustworthy you are, etc. The technical pieces are pretty far behind. I'd disagree about your perceived upbringing mattering at all. I don't know of any fund that hires technical staff like that. I mean we're her…
These are for very under the radar hedge funds that chip their programmers 500-2 Million for just writing basic software. I'm not talking about sweat shops like citadel. I'm talking about places that hire very rarely. The fund manager makes 25-150 million. Rest of the employees are in the low millions. Their employees are always a reflection of the firm, and to their outside investors. Its about more than technical a…
Perhaps if you could name those funds, we could have a talk since I know the industry very well.
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Maybe for Canada.
I say this as a Canadian living in Ottawa, their salaries are not good.
The non-FAANG big and mid names offer dramatically higher comp than Shopify, and it's pretty sad.
I just wrapped up a long job search process, where I got offers from a handful of companies. I currently work at FAANG, so I was looking for a pay bump. The only companies that could beat my current comp are other big tech and finance, but there were a couple of surprises along the way. For example, a Tier 3 (i.e. you never heard about them) company offered me 450k TC for a Staff level position. This compares to the…
What in the world... I'm a FAANG employee - I think I'm around 18 years of experience now (I stopped counting) - with a great resume (or so I'm told), and I can't even get 100K jobs to respond to me let alone FAANG jobs. I'm talking about the initial step too; I've had zero interviews or screenings.
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> instead of learning how to start and run a business Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5. Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines…
I get that, but if you’re trying to get a job at one of the best paying companies in the world, is the stress level actually that different? And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
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You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.
I'm not sure how I made it sound so easy, because presumably getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either. Which is what my point was - if you're going to deal with the time and stress to get one of the most desirable jobs, why not use that same time and effort to build a business?
Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.
Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.
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Interviewed and was given a "huge" offer from them. 50-70% of the comp is non-liquid equity at the valuation of their choosing (ok, technically a 'third party' decides this, but I call partial shenanigans and it fluctuates wildly anyway such that a ton of their employees hired a few years ago at a ridiculous valuation are getting shafted - check blind)
It looks like they will IPO at some point, so that valuation issue should go away.
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Statistically, you'll make more money working for someone else than working for yourself (and have a better work/life balance as well). And you might say, "well - you'll never become a billionaire working for someone else". That's not true. There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires. And the chances of you running your own company and becoming a billionaire, is about the same probability as you becomi…
> There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires. Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder. No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
Yes, they can and do.
Safra Catz, $2B - CEO Oracle
Sheryl Sandberg, $2B - Meta
Jamie Dimon, $1B+ - CEO Chase
https://www.forbes.com/profile/safra-catz/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/18/how-shery....