431–440 of 508 posts
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I've tried. It doesn't work too well. I'm too used to my big monitor at home, and my build/test farm.
The monitor, okay, but can’t you access your build/test farm remotely?
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Yeah, gig to hire works great for my small tech company.
Gig to hire doesn't work if the job market is hot enough that potential employees have full-time job offers in addition to your gig-to-hire offer. I've been able to gig-to-hire for offshore developers, but never for onshore.
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Your fortune 500 company pays $250-400k total compensation to young coders (2-9 yrs experience)? Which company is it? You don't? Then you're not paying more or less the same...
Really? Who does that? Bit late to figure it out now. I'm almost 40 and I make way less than that range with 20 years of embedded/hpc c++ experience. But still curious.
Google, Facebook, Netflix, Linkedin, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc. typically^H^H^H often pay $400-500k for someone with that much experience who can be a team lead.
If you can be a more senior architect-type person, or a manager who manages managers, 7 figures can be within reach (though not easy).
This is why you're losing coders to Silicon Valley. If you want a big house, then yeah, that will be $2M and you might be better off making $150k in the midwest. If you're happy with a two bedroom apartment for $4k-$5k/mo, there is no place better.
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1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers. 2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a ho…
1. If engineers don't value stories as valid for exploring and explaining reality, then they'll be doomed to lamp posting forever. 2. You're just making my point for me. 3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no pol…
Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.
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>3-5 years is a pretty long stretch in this industry. That's a rather SV-centric view. Otherwise 5-10 years (or longer) is quite normal, including in tech. At many companies, a bunch of 3 year stints for a job candidate is something of a red flag.
> That's a rather SV-centric view. Trust me, it isn't. It's valid for every organization I've ever been in or consulted for (15+). I am in Eastern Europe and spent 9-10 years in offices, and the other 7 after that it has been all remote. I've seen a lot of companies for both consulting and normal 5-to-9 work. While the reasons why most people don't stick around above 2-3 years are many and varied (and some are frankl…
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Note that Google (and presumably the others) pay for performance, not tenure. 10 years in you might be L8-9 and earn a million or be L4 and, well, not earn a million ;) Source: I'm keeping a pace of 1 promo / 2 years in Google. I've seen people going both faster and slower (and some stopping at L4, because why bother).
Promos at Google get exponentially harder at each level, which also means the mean time between promos increases as you go up. L9 is Senior Director, meaning you're managing hundreds of people, and hitting that in 10 years is highly unlikely.
And with 15 years of experience I was being groomed to be promoted from an L6 to L7 "Uber Team Lead"... it wasn't easy and wasn't coasting, took a ton of very hard very impactful work... but it's possible for a mere mortal.
If you're doing the same thing for 30+ years you probably are doing something wrong anyway unless it happens to be the thing that you enjoy doing most.
...But living paycheck to paycheck robs us of the opportunity to give in to this very human need (diversification of our experiences). This has become one of the reasons I started to feel old and tired (while still being only 38) and lately I'm putting a lot of conscious effort to be financially wise so I can buy myself a few years of break eventually. That, or I'll improve my self-confidence and work as a consultant and a founder. Time will tell.
Did you have such a period in your life? If so, how did you handle it?
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I agree with this thoughts very much. The attitude you mention is key, at least in my reduced and anecdotical experience. It is true, however, as others say, that you have to start from a reasonable and relative good baseline and that part is just pure luck.
Children can certainly blame their situation on their parents. But once an adult, then it becomes their responsibility.
I saw people quoting Charlie Munger. Munger has done extensive study on the topic of incentives. If you want to know why Silicon Valley is so discriminating towards experienced people you should ask what their incentives are. Startups are incentivized to hire the cheapest, youngest, most naive engineers possible, work them as hard as possible then flip them. If you are old you are no longer cheap or naive. If you are…
> I was an engineer for a long time and I realized that all sides of this is a losing game. All I want is to be left alone and financially independent.
^ This pierced my heart very painfully. Describes my current mindset perfectly.
I realized the full extent of how screwed we the engineers are in the job market just a year or so ago. We can bring millions in value but are paid much less than people who basically only bark orders (good managers do much more... but are so incredibly rare).
The whole economy of today's world seems to be in favor of certain traits and most of them are luck or incidental -- race, family, area of birth, and most of all: network/friends! I've known people dumb as bricks who couldn't solve a problem if the solution was biting them on the nose yet they knew a few influential people and right now are making ~$90k a month for wearing suits and showing up to meaningless meetings 4 times a month.
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It's not easy starting to come to grips with the extremely rigged nature of the world's economy and NOT be bitter or self-loathing. Not hating myself for being stupid before and not looking objectively at the world is taking 99% of my free energy but I'll keep fighting that battle until I forgive myself and start looking forward to the future. Meditation and exercise do help.
Sorry for the personal aside. Your message resonated with me. I am currently 38 years old and just finished an extremely tough and terrible period during which I couldn't get a job even though I aced most interviews up until the last phase when the mythical "poor cultural fit" door got slammed in my face. This happened about 20 times over 6 months.
Now, even though I found the perfect company and team whom I very much like, I am left with a ton of existential questions which I don't have the answer to.
What advice could you give me?
(I'll look into the quantative analyst in more depth for sure.)