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My offer numbers from big companies

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Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#221

Post by adventured »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #197
Redoubts wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, same impression here. Though it seems slightly aggressive for two years non-ivy.

Why would the school matter? I thought this industry keeps crowing about how “school doesn’t matter”?

Because Berkeley, Stanford, MIT and Harvard produce radically superior computer science students vs the average community college.

That doesn't mean no talent comes out of community colleges. It means the average ability level is far lower and the elite students are far more rare.

The school doesn't matter much if you have the ability and can demonstrate it. The kind of grads coming out of elite schools that Google & Co are recruiting, tend to have both the ability and the school. The schools, and the professors there, help more often than not with filtering.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#222

Post by astrange »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #197
Redoubts wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, same impression here. Though it seems slightly aggressive for two years non-ivy.

Why would the school matter? I thought this industry keeps crowing about how “school doesn’t matter”?

CS schools don’t matter because they’re so bad at teaching that any student from the #3 school or below is probably useless unless they’re self taught. But if it’s Stanford they’ll be okay.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#223

Post by lozenge »

siddharthdeswal wrote: post #158
simonbarker87 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK my wife and I loose 25-30% of our pay checks to tax and national insurance and I would imagine the cost of living in the UK is comparable to the US. Our household income is considered pretty high in the UK as well so it’s not that we are badly paid in UK terms

What kind of healthcare facilities do you get from the government?

In the UK you get everything for free regardless of work history or other factors. Every prescription has a £12 charge, topping out at a maximum of about £150 a year. Dental treatments are also normally charged at a low rate.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#224

Post by adventured »

richardknop wrote: post #219
adventured wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing about the post that seems off, is the experience level that's generating that income. It could happen though, it's not implausible. The income figures stand-alone are not abnormal for someone with several more years of experience. We're looking at maybe 3.7% type U3 unemployment in 2018. The Fed's GDP Nowcast figure is projecting nearly 4% growth for the fourth quarter. Throw on corp tax cuts and possi…

Which is good for us (software engineers). I have noticed the same thing in Europe. Even though it's nowhere near Silicon Valley, I have noticed salaries in London rising faster than they used before. So there's definitely shortage of talent and market (supply / demand) seems to be reacting to this and driving salaries up.

Definitely. Incomes and growth are starting to pick-up in Europe and Japan (finally) as well. Much of the globe is in sync on this expansion. I'm not sure if that means we're getting close to the next recession pull-back, or if the global economy is finally fully pulling out of the great recession era. There are some indicators aggressively pointing both ways right now. I'd like to see it continue for a while yet just so workers can see a meaningful net wage gain vs 10-15 years ago. At least in the US, corporations can afford to give up some margin due to a tight labor market, given the profit boom over the last decade (plus the inbound corp tax cuts).

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#225

Post by richardknop »

joshfraser wrote: post #176

I'm guessing he was working at Uber before. Would explain why Lyft wanted him so badly and why Uber is missing from the list of companies he talked to.

Could be. Also Uber pays top end salaries so it would make sense with these very high offers as they probably had to at least match but preferably beat his current Uber package (and potential counter offer).

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#226

Post by JBlue42 »

thisisit wrote: post #33

> 2. What's your background? > Male. Two years of professional experience. Bachelors. Non-ivy league school. Previously from a unicorn startup . I'm mentioning these because people ask, not that I think they matter. Being an alumni from unicorn startup is my guess on why he got these offers. People are obsessed with salaries and positions which I think is unhealthy. But what I find ironic is that I have always heard…

From a practical point of view, SF is expensive to live in so being 'obsessed' with salary might just be practical. Being able to know the range your in is also good, regardless of location, for not being taken advantage of, especially if you're young and new to the business world.

I think beyond salary, maybe you meant money in general or the social status that having a lot of it confers. That can be a particular obsession that is not healthy for a person or society in general.

Also, there are people obsessed with titles as status, which can be funny. A former co-worker made a stink about not getting a 'promoted' to a certain title level. At her next year's review, she finally did and she was ecstatic. She was doing the same job with the same duties and getting paid the same. But she had the title.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#227

Post by sytelus »

If you are making $100K in Albany, GA then to have same standard of living in SFO you need to make $201K: http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html

So SFO/Bay area is that expensive. Most people don't think of that and assume that SFO requires modest 20% increase in cost of living. Absolutely not true. So before you get floored with these numbers you need to divide them by almost a factor of 2 for the corresponding standard of living.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#228

Post by richardknop »

monaghanboy wrote: post #141
wwalser wrote: post #94

In every single thread where someone publicly discloses rates like this the comments are flooded with people who use all kinds of FUD to explain why what they've just read must be untrue. It's strange. > Are these numbers real? Yes. I'm not the author, but they don't appear at all unusual to me. SF's developer market is nearly as screwed up as it's housing market (except not really, the housing market is truly someth…

>We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived. Can you support the latter claim?

Well, nothing lasts forever. Given enough time the hidden hand of free market will cause developer salaries to get so high that more people will study CS eventually increasing the supply and lowering salaries.

However this is very slow process and I personally think shortage of engineers will continue for quite a long time (next 10 years easily). So "short lived" can mean a decade or perhaps two. We should be fine.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#229

Post by adventured »

woolvalley wrote: post #199
adventured wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a misconception. The US has a far more progressive tax system than Western Europe. People earning $40k to $80k in the US pay extremely little in taxes versus most comparable nations. If you're making $47,000 in the US, you're paying near a 10% effective federal income tax rate ( before any deductions). That income level, which is the median US full-time income, is far higher than nearly every other median…

Your not including the flat ~%15 social security / medicare taxes that you get, the ~%3-%9.5 state taxes. New york has city taxes if you live there making your high income. Also not including the ~%1 or more property tax rate, which doesn't really exist at the same level vs. places like the UK. That can add $2000-$10000 per year to your tax bill.

At $47k, Federal income tax + FICA + average state + local + deducations, you're looking at about 18%-20% all-in.

The VAT tax also doesn't exist in the US, you're not accounting for that, and it's dramatically higher in most of Europe than the US sales tax. In the US we think a 6% or 7% sales tax is high; in Europe 15% to 20% VAT rates are common.

We don't need to go over all of that however, we have the disposable income figures to reference. The US median disposable income figure is among the highest:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-a...

The US is better of in terms of median income than all of Europe except for a few nations (that gets even more exaggerated if you select for full-time employment):

https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...

And per the OECD, when it comes to taxation progressiveness, the US is the leader among developed nations:

https://taxfoundation.org/news-obama-oecd-says-united-states...

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#230

Post by jaredklewis »

40acres wrote: post #101

It always strikes me as odd at how much HN complanies about hiring practices in tech. Spend a few weeks with Leetcode and CTCI and you have a decent shot at salaries in this range at the BigCo's (depends on location of course). What other industry has it's interview process so transparent with such high rewards?

This is such a good point.

Imagine you discovered an opportunity for arbritage in currency exchanges, for example. A normal person might quickly act to start printing money before the market corrects and the opportunity ends.

Meanwhile, programmers have noticed that being able to solve algorithmic quizzes with a smile is a free ticket to an oversized salary. Their collection reaction? Disgust and defiance!

As you say, people in other professions would probably be happy to replace their black box interviews with a set of relatively uniform tests. All a programmer has to do to get a job is ring up a recruiter and then complete some algorithmic challenges. From the perspective of the programmer, why do we want to replace this?

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