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My offer numbers from big companies

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Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#281

Post by wwalser »

aroundtown wrote: post #212
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…

I've got a really shoddy work history. What do I need to do to make myself attractive to these places? ie... I graduated 10 years ago, I've got 2 or 3 years programming experience in there mired with periods of unemployment, moving/relocating a few times, health issues (resolved) and dealing with the fallout of a bad accident (I walked away, but had to transport wife for about a year while her foot healed)

That's a good question but one that I'm not 100% confident that I'm qualified to answer.

If you have the flexibility it sounds like Austin is your best bet for a close-but-high-paying jobs. It's a beautiful city as well, I love Austin. Would move there in a second. Remote work is possible but getting those positions is much more plagued with the whole catch-22 of needing previous experience in order to gain experience.

Obviously brush up on algorithms and data structures prior to interviews. Whether you think it's BS or not, that's just the best approximation of ability that most companies can manage to come up with.

You mentioned that some of your jobs had been paid hourly. My advice is to try to get a reasonable salaried position ($65k+/year) at a tech company and hold that down for ~2 years and ratchet your way up to companies that pay better. If you start that low it's not unreasonable to request 15% raises each year for several years. If you can hold a position at around that range for 1.5-3 years, changing companies should net you a 25% raise.

I've had co-workers with fairly scatter-shot resumes. It's a small red flag in interviews but I've never seen someone dropped from an interview because of sporadic work history. I've seen people dropped for lying about their work history.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#282

Post by richardknop »

cyberferret wrote: post #276
richardknop wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. With Chinese people applying for jobs, for example, Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name. And they would use their English first name when applying for a job at US or other large international company. So you could definitely guess gender there. Sub continental names I would agree, if you are European or American it might be difficult to guess the gender from name. But f…

> Chinese people have English first name as well as their Chinese first name I've always been intrigued by this. I assume they do this when they decide to travel to the West for work or study (in order to make it easier to communicate with locals), as opposed to being given dual names at birth?

I think it might depend on country. Mainland China I'm not sure about but in Taiwan/HK/SG I think parents choose a second "unofficial" English first name for their children. This is useful exactly for reasons of traveling, studying or working abroad or for multinational corps.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#283

Post by Nursie »

richardknop wrote: post #238
Nursie wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I agree it's a fine salary, but it is at the higher end (if we disregard contractors (like me)). But the post is about someone two years past graduation! That's the mind-boggling thing to me. Those high-end London salaries are probably people with 10+ years behind them. I could be wrong about that but... I don't think so.

You are right. I am a long time London contractor too but am close to accepting a perm offer :) I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you. Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience. Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even ver…

So what finally turned your head? A bit of security? More of a management/architect type role? Or just an obscene amount of money?

Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#284

Post by pmiller2 »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #278
pmiller2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Live in the Eaat Bay and BART in.

How about that. Clean 1br for around $1500/month and 10 minutes from BART station. That's pricey, but workable.

That's actually cheap, depending on the BART station (not all are created equal), the size of the place, whether it's gated, and whether you mean 10 minutes walking or driving.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#285

Post by jeffreyrogers »

hocuspocus wrote: post #183
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?

If you have a job and any kind of social life, going through 200~300 questions like OP is going to take you more than a few weeks. A lot of people complain because this is the very example of cargo culting, you hire people who went through the same questions and reject those who haven't, even though it has no bearing on their ability to do the job.

Dude, any other job that pays remotely in the same range requires way more BS than doing 200-300 questions. If people want to make more they should just shut up, put their heads down for however long it takes, and signal whatever bullshit is required. That takes way less time than going back to school. If it were easy everyone would do it and doing it would be worthless.

Want to work in finance? Have fun doing boring shit and working long hours for years. Doctor? Blow your 20s on 4 years of school + several more years of residency and maybe a fellowship. Lawyer? First, get into a good law school then spend an enormous amount of time working to get your billable hours in. And if you're a woman and want kids, good luck balancing all that with starting a family.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#286

Post by mpeg »

richardknop wrote: post #164
wwalser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entry fee for a referral is striking up a single conversation at a conference. If someone from a big tech company is speaking at a conference, the fact that they are speaking isn't the primary reason for being present. They are there to recruit.

Just having a chat with someone at a conference is often not enough to get a referral tbh. I'd assume for a referral you need to know a person at least reasonably well, i.e. you know each other on first name basis and have been out for a beer or worked together on some open source project or something like that. I don't believe you can just walk to a person at a conference, talk to them to 15 minutes and then ask for…

Typically the referrals are paid pretty well, from my experience most people in a BigCo will refer anyone with a pulse as long as it's not to their direct team.

I wouldn't even bother going to a conference for this, just find someone on LinkedIn who is a 2nd connection, InMail them (no need for an intro), mention your shared connection and that you're looking for a referral for [job spec link] at their company.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#287

Post by richardknop »

Nursie wrote: post #283
richardknop wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. I am a long time London contractor too but am close to accepting a perm offer :) I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you. Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience. Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even ver…

So what finally turned your head? A bit of security? More of a management/architect type role? Or just an obscene amount of money? Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)

I actually got a really good job offer in South East Asia for one of the big unicorns over there so I’m going perm but to a different continent :)

If I stayed in London I’d probably keep contracting. But yes I guess it would be good for my career to settle down for 3-4 years in a perm job to get that sort of experience.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#288

Post by candiodari »

celdon25 wrote: post #116
ChicagoDave wrote: post #9

I guess I need to move to Silicon Valley. These numbers are insane for two years and an undergrad degree. I have 32 years experience and I don't get these kinds of offers. This is either complete BS or the guy is a savant. Something smells fishy here.

Don't do it. Silicon Valley is more favorable for the inexperienced, in part because they are a blank slate that can be more easily coached. His interviewing skills could be too notch regardless of number of years of professional experience. On top of that, there is a huge bias with interviewers to expect much more interview performance from those with more years of experience. The local industry favors the young in…

If you want those offers, most of those companies are more than happy to fly you out for an onsite interview. Get 3 San Francisco weekends out of your onsites, and see if you can get this kind of pay.

Practice basic algorithms. The guys at these firms aren't nearly as smart as they think they are so you can comfortably stop after part III of the "Introduction to Algorithms" (the R. Rivest one) book (which is about 1/3 of the actual book, but like half the text is exercises, so in total this is like maybe 150 normal pages of theory, which you can condense down to 3 really dense ones, which is a good exercise by itself. Make sure to have actually written those data structures in C++ or Java (Python if you must), with tests, and if you want to ace, with benchmarks. Of course you could super-plus ace and get to part 6 or so)

And yes, the "real" way to learn software engineering is not a good way to ace these interviews. The author and maintainer of 10 years of a VM system you guys all know about, who codes and designs circles around the best engineer you've ever heard of failed the big G interview (also good enough that using some connections managed to get that reversed and an offer extended anyway). Like most jobs, it's not about actual ability, it's about knowing the "magical" bit of theory that doesn't matter in practice, but is effectively a lock on the door.

Every last bit of it you can find extensive explanations on youtube for. Don't get distracted :). There's also a free coursera course. If you don't want to follow the time schema on coursera, download the course videos on piratebay.

Oh and for academic CS candidates. Please do remember: Stanford is a LISP school, not a Haskell school. If in any book you're training for these interviews with you see the words "dependant typing", you immediately slam the book shut and make SURE you don't open it again until after the interview. Sad, but you use that stuff, your interviewer won't understand and you'll get dinged. Yes, really. Don't go into theory that you can tell your interviewer doesn't know about beyond "oh yes, I know about some stuff relating to x". DO NOT talk for 40 minutes about advanced theory your interviewer doesn't understand.

Oh and one last thing. Give a small amount of thought to how you appear to others. You might be the best engineer on the planet, but if your interviewers all write that on the feedback form, they'll pass on you. You may have 10 years of experience and get interviewed by a 2 months hire (usually 2 years, but 2 months can happen). If you proceed to shout at the guy about how his person being there disrespects you ... things won't go well. Be friendly, be approachable. Talk about your cat, but for 5 minutes at most (not for 50).

Also, you can get a small plus next to your name by asking to get referred.

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#289

Post by handbanana »

joshuamorton wrote: post #157
cjhanks wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But checkout Austin cost of living https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare... and stack overflow careers https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Austin%2C+TX%2C+Unit... . That's essentially a parallel move if you consider nerdwallet doesn't consider local tax rates (very high in SFO vs 0% in Texas).

Again though, I don't know anyone 2 years in making 134K (the Austin-equivalent of 250K in SF) in Austin. I know more than one person 2 years in making that much in SF. And you're also ignoring that CoL calculators bias against high CoL areas in a few important ways.

When I had 2 years exp, I was offered 125k at a company in Austin. Not 134k, but I imagine that figure isn’t impossible

Re: My offer numbers from big companies

#290

Post by ChicagoDave »

candiodari wrote: post #288
celdon25 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do it. Silicon Valley is more favorable for the inexperienced, in part because they are a blank slate that can be more easily coached. His interviewing skills could be too notch regardless of number of years of professional experience. On top of that, there is a huge bias with interviewers to expect much more interview performance from those with more years of experience. The local industry favors the young in…

If you want those offers, most of those companies are more than happy to fly you out for an onsite interview. Get 3 San Francisco weekends out of your onsites, and see if you can get this kind of pay. Practice basic algorithms. The guys at these firms aren't nearly as smart as they think they are so you can comfortably stop after part III of the "Introduction to Algorithms" (the R. Rivest one) book (which is about 1/…

I’d fail all of these interviews.

I have never worked like an “engineer”. My brain takes information from many channels, I let it congeal, then I create solutions.

This means that I’m terrible at algorithms and patterns, but highly creative with real-world solutions.

I believe companies need both kinds of technical people (drone and creative), but I’ve only been in a few places that actually understand that.

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