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My Salary Progression in Tech

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Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#581

Post by minhaz23 »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #530
minhaz23 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can one get into this field?

I guess my pithy answer is I've never got tired of learning. Four straightforward steps that you've no doubt heard before, but I can confirm they do the trick: Establish internal credibility. That is, the confidence to speak credibly on a given subject, be it a platform or tool, a technique, a concept, a prediction. Roll your sleeves up and get dirty coding. Even on-rails tutorials force your brain to make the connec…

Wow, thank you for all that. I really appreciate the advice. I appreciate the time you took into typing all that out.

I have some follow up questions if you don't mind:

>have built up a pretty good "reading recommender" system of Twitter users, subreddits, aggregators, blogs, etc;

How can I do this? I follow a bunch of influential people in tech and VC last I logged into Twitter, is this what you're talking about? One of my favorite Twitter users is @patrickc, he always has book recommendations.

Any other tips or advice to better optimize my twitter feed?

>And not just technical books - books on business strategy, behavioral economics and psych, industry-specific blogs and journals - if you can't explain what you're doing in terms of risk, dollars, or time, you're doing it wrong.

Any suggestions? Book suggestions for business strategy, behavioral economics, and psych? I'm into these books too but sometimes it's hard to see the concrete connection it might have to my day to day dealings.

>(Also a good life pro tip: download every interesting thing you read into a single repo and put a crawler on top of them. Even if you don't know the answer, you know you've read it somewhere and can retrieve it.)

Sorry, I'm not THAT technically savvy, is there a tutorial or video i can gleam to learn this? It sounds super helpful because I do have a habit of referring back to something I learned online because its in one of many bookmark folders in my browser.

>These days I spent probably 15-20 hours a week just reading, learning, doing, in prep for the 20-30 hours a week I spend educating, communicating, and (hopefully) selling.

What are you selling exactly?

>One thing to add: I usually am focusing on 2 things at a time, no more, no less. If you can combine them, even better - learn Kafka for streaming and Grafana to visualize it; learn Azure SQL DW or Redshift for distributed DW and Spark for processing; etc.

This is good advice, I think. I'm attempting it right now. By focusing on learning java and selenium. Do you ever feel FOMO about what you're not learning or reading though? Any way to combat that?

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#582

Post by minhaz23 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #424
minhaz23 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this kind of progression not be possible in finance?

As other poster said, not without a relevant degree, and likely that the degree needs to be from a prestigious college.

So it's possible in tech, without a degree at all(OP says he has an unrelated degree)? I keep reading horror stories online of people with degrees, internships/experience, hackathons, projects, all that under their belt having a hard time in their careers. And also a lot of naysayers saying you can't make it far without a degree.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#583

Post by minhaz23 »

el_benhameen wrote: post #305
minhaz23 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this kind of progression not be possible in finance?

That kind of progression is probably very possible in finance, but not without a relevant degree.

So it's possible in tech, without a degree at all(OP says he has an unrelated degree)? I keep reading horror stories online of people with degrees, internships/experience, hackathons, projects, all that under their belt having a hard time in their careers. And also a lot of naysayers saying you can't make it far without a degree.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#584

Post by throwawhale »

barry-cotter wrote: post #366
throwawhale wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I worked for was a software shop. Most people there were developers. I don't really have algorithms and data structure skills. I almost never have to do these things in real life. I have done mostly front-end stuff (web and mobile). Should I go all-in on LeetCode? Will that guarantee a good paying job? It seems like 4 more years without income to get a bachelor's degree would be worth it considering the c…

You have enough work experience to be admitted into the Oxford M.Sc. in Software Engineering. If you want to get a degree consider doing that instead of spending four years getting a Bachelor’s. https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

That starts at $60,000 (CAD) and it's not clear what kind of experience is necessary to waive the requirements for an undergraduate degree. They say that experience + unrelated undergraduate degree (with excellent grades) can be sufficient. I'm not sure that 6 years as a front-end developer will cut it.

I'm still not sure whether that degree alone (without a bachelor's degree) is sufficient to get a work visa in the US (they generally ask for a 4-year degree).

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#585

Post by mettamage »

Retra wrote: post #565
mettamage wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Retra, I looked at your comment history, to see why you'd possibly be saying this. I've noticed two type of comments that you made: 1. Comments that have substantial reasoning, mostly technical but not always. These seemed to be appreciated. 2. Short comments that seemed to attack the person or a particular concept. These short comments did not have any reasoning from your side. Also, most of these comments are n…

I understand that what I said was possibly ambiguous, but I was not actually suggesting to someone that they should get cancer. I was 'bookending' a story that they were implicitly telling, in an attempt to point out that "going for your dreams" can easily run off the rails due to circumstances out of your control, and that a reasonable person might rather spend their efforts building a safety net for themselves, so…

Haha, that isn’t how I saw it.

That’s a sad bookending :(

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#586

Post by pjscott »

minhaz23 wrote: post #217
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most FAANGs pay well even without vested stock, Amazon in particular relies heavily on stock for compensation but provides bonuses the first couple of years to compensate.

What does vested stock mean exactly? You can't sell until after a certain period? If so, how long is that period?

A certain number of shares of stock are set aside for you. When they "vest", that means you get them.

The vesting schedule varies, but probably the most common arrangement is that you get 1/4 of the shares per year for the next 4 years. Often you get nothing until you've been there for a year, then get a whole year's worth of stock in one big lump sum, and then get smaller amounts more frequently thereafter.

In the US, the stock is taxed as ordinary income on the day you get it. If its price goes up before you sell it, you also pay capital gains tax on the change in price that happened while you were holding it. (I sell all my stock immediately on general principle, so my capital gains taxes are tiny.)

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#587

Post by barry-cotter »

throwawhale wrote: post #584
barry-cotter wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have enough work experience to be admitted into the Oxford M.Sc. in Software Engineering. If you want to get a degree consider doing that instead of spending four years getting a Bachelor’s. https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

That starts at $60,000 (CAD) and it's not clear what kind of experience is necessary to waive the requirements for an undergraduate degree. They say that experience + unrelated undergraduate degree (with excellent grades) can be sufficient. I'm not sure that 6 years as a front-end developer will cut it. I'm still not sure whether that degree alone (without a bachelor's degree) is sufficient to get a work visa in the…

The HN user peteretep got onto the M.Sc. without an undergraduate degree which is how I first heard of it. There’s no reason to believe you can’t get in. His email is in his profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=peteretep

> However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience.

You have the “more extensive experience”.

I would be surprised if a Master’s degree did not suffice in place of a Bschelor’s. I doubt you would be asked to submit the latter if you submitted the former. To be certain you could spend one or two hundred dollars on a consultation with an immigration lawyer.

If you really want a US Bachelor’s degree go to

https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb/

They will be more than happy to tell you how you can get a legitimate, regionally accredited US Bachelor’s degree in under one year. It involves doing many, many tests like CLEP, AP, DSST etc. and using job experience to get proof of prior learning before eventually matriculating at a university willing to accept a great deal of transfer credit.

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#588

Post by minhaz23 »

DVassallo wrote: post #573
minhaz23 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get past the resume screeners?

I do have a degree, but I participated in plenty of resume screening and education was never a filter for programming jobs.

What do they filter for? How do they keep just anyone from applying and keep it to qualified people?

How much is required on a resume to get past a screener and land an interview?

Re: My Salary Progression in Tech

#590

Post by minhaz23 »

aerovistae wrote: post #318
rubicon33 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web development and other easy domains like iOS / Android are quickly going the way of other craft jobs of the past: Blue collar. If you want to make above average salaries you're going to have to specialize. Find something that is both challenging (to reduce barrier to entry) and niche (to demand a higher salary). In other words - specialize. Staying as a generic web/ios/android dev is only going to guarantee that y…

I really don't agree with this. I'm a 27 year old JS-focused web dev @150k base. I understand that the bootcamps and proliferation of web-teaching schools have made web dev seem like the easy thing, and I agree that what I do is less complex than these $800k-earning data engineers, but web development in 2019 is no joke. The same goes for iOS/Android. The types of things these companies are trying to build are not ju…

Who is a data engineer here making $800k?
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