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Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

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Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#191

Post by cxx »

nuclearnice3 wrote: post #134
cxx wrote: post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

> My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Hmm. I agree 100% on the intersection of practiced and asked as a key indicator for modern tech interviews. Have you done any estimates of how long it is going to take Facebook to notice your efforts? I looked and they hired 15k people since 2019. Even if you block three a week, you'r…

Yeah I know it's a drop in the bucket but for now it's all I can afford to do. I've talked to my SWE friends (inside & outside FB) and have convinced a few to do the same. Others simply don't care or feel it's disloyal to the company, which is fair enough.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#192

Post by skeeter2020 »

dbish wrote: post #4

Even if you think you’re well paid, now is the time to look around. I’ve had a lot of friends, mentees, and coworkers get huge bumps on total compensation even as relatively senior engineers and managers. Pay is jumping and companies aren’t doing a great job keeping that up for their people who have been around for a few years. As an employer, that should be the top worry, keep comp up, don’t lose your people because…

We just gave our devs relatively modest increases, and only one raised any objections and ended up with a more than a 15% increase. I worry about all those devs who won't say anything (why should they have to?) and will just go somewhere else for a 20% bump.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#193

Post by thr1236 »

Hard to know what is a good or high total comp in the current market.

I’m at $175k in central FL. I see a lot of people posting much higher pay on various forums and I often wonder if I’m underpaid. Now more than ever.

Outside of FAANG (and similar) I’ve only found companies paying around ~200k total for senior level engineers.

These places still have rigorous interviews but not quite FAANG difficulty.

Still, the motivation to even interview for such a small bump is not really there for me (wife and 2 kids).

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#194

Post by adnmcq999 »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #10

My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively). I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen. Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or…

I can’t capitalize on my interviews but I get a few through recruiters. Just get into one system - like CyberCoders or teksystems and you will get bombarded as resume gets passed around. They have a relationship w the companies so they forward you directly

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#195

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

tcbumperino wrote: post #83

Once you’re coasting in the 400-500k FAANG range, what’s the optimal move to get 700-800k+? Seems there are too many graybeards to get a Principal title. Better to switch to manager role? Or VP eng type at some startup and hope your stock hits? Or maybe VP at some non tech company?

I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy to invest further.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#196

Post by adnmcq999 »

adnmcq999 wrote: post #194
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #10

My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively). I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen. Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or…

I can’t capitalize on my interviews but I get a few through recruiters. Just get into one system - like CyberCoders or teksystems and you will get bombarded as resume gets passed around. They have a relationship w the companies so they forward you directly

Easiest way would be to just find a recruiter on LinkedIn and message them

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#197

Post by mixmastamyk »

caeril wrote: post #156
the_only_law wrote: post #100

I hate that the market is so great right now because I really can’t take advantage of it. I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise. Don’t qualify for the jobs I see I think I’d enjoy, and don’t even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary preferences that I’d otherwise dislike. I also would have to be looking at im…

> I’ve stagnated sharply skills wise I'm sorry, but what does this even mean? Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX is some sort of "innovation". Having…

While there’s truth to this, I’m gonna guess it’s a minority viewpoint.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#198

Post by gavinray »

baby wrote: post #176
gavinray wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any developer is worth that amount of money though. I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale. I…

Personally, I never understood how you could even pay someone 100k TC… it’s just that some companies make a LOT of money, so much that’s it’s just impossible to fathom.

  > Personally, I never understood how you could even pay someone 100k TC
I grew up fairly poor (what Americans consider "poor"), home was a double-wide trailer, best my mum could do for food was peanut butter and crackers.

Got better in later years towards the end of childhood.

But a combination of: the above, being homeless for a while, and working a lot of jobs like manual labor/landscaping, dishwashing, food service, retail etc for minimum wage gave me perspective.

I honestly don't have any clue why I get as paid as much as I do.

I'm not complaining. Employer, if you're reading this, don't take my money away lmao. I'm finally not poor anymore.

But my life was fucking miserable for $8/hr and in tech now I make (what feels like) ludicrous money for work that isn't even hard.

World is real backwards in a lot of ways.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#199

Post by lotsofpulp »

gavinray wrote: post #158
the_only_law wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of money? My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in certain roles at certain HFT firms. I’m also pretty sure these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are stock options.

Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any developer is worth that amount of money though. I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much different from the sorts of software I assume most people in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which never hits absurd amounts of scale. I…

>HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing business, FAANG I don't.

According to 10-K reports, they print far more money. The net income per employee figures are never before seen for organizations of that size, for so many years:

https://seekingalpha.com/comparison/9e-FAANG-Stocks

For Amazon, you have to strip out the non tech employees, but similar numbers exist at AWS. That is the beauty of near zero marginal costs, winner take all markets, and extremely high barriers to entry.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#200

Post by nickpp »

gigatexal wrote: post #75

This sucks. I’m finally at a company that I like with a team that I like but I KNOW I am underpaid compared to what the market is paying. And yet I know I should be looking elsewhere.

Choosing your employer based on only one criteria (compensation) is akin to choosing your life partner based also on a single criteria (beauty/money/etc).

Look at the whole package.

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