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Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

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Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#431

Post by cma »

pgwhalen wrote: post #357
cma wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low latency trading is so crucial to the economy that the market mostly shuts down at 4pm every day and takes weekends and holidays, adding 2^47 nanosecond delays every week without much outcry. And whoever wins by 20ns gets rewarded the same as the previous guy who was winning by 21ns. The magnitude of latency isn't rewarded, just coming in first, so more and is spent on less an less absolute improvements, none of w…

> Low latency trading is so crucial to the economy that the market mostly shuts down at 4pm every day and takes weekends and holidays, adding 2^47 nanosecond delays every week without much outcry. To this I would say: grocery stores (which serve as a sort of middleman to a whole host of necessary goods and are clearly crucial to the economy) close overnight without much outcry. (To be clear, I think grocery stores ar…

One grocery store doesn't bury another by being humanly imperceptibly faster at returning carts than the other by a microsecond, and if they were forced by the structure of the market to spend tons of money on that before investing in being open 24/7 which real customers care far more about and provides far more value, it would seem really weird and like something was really messed up with market incentives in the grocery store industry.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#432

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

someperson wrote: post #253
cj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I found out about it, yes, he'd be gone immediately even if he were our #1 engineer. It's impossible to trust someone with AWS production keys and access to customer data when they lie to you about something as simple as who they work for. People secretly working multiple jobs are looking for an easy way to make a lot of money. If it's within their ability to secretly work 2 jobs, is it also in their ability to do…

But there's no legal issue with working multiple jobs in the US. Most employment agreements pay for 40 hours per week. What employees do with the rest of their time is none of the employer's business. They could be spending all that time driving an Uber, developing an open-source project, do contract/consultant work for a friend's startup, or just play video games. As long as the work is getting done, the employer ha…

It doesn’t matter what’s legal, it matters what the company you work for thinks. Anything else is over analyzing the situation.

The bottom line is working for two companies full time concurrently is abnormal and it’s not a stretch to imagine you’re not getting 100% of your employee while they juggle two jobs.

I’d also fire the report if I discovered them working two jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#433

Post by TheCoelacanth »

intuitionist wrote: post #397
rco8786 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can talk about normal expectations without having to explicitly state that black swan events can happen. If you took a stance of “I’m not going to take any pay in equity because I saw what happened in 2001” you would have left millions of dollars on the table over the last 20 years.

Stocks underperforming cash for three years is hardly a black swan event; it happens in about a fifth of 3-year periods.

Underperforming cash is very different than underperforming cash by 60%.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#434

Post by selcuka »

kitten_mittens_ wrote: post #155
sofixa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 weeks vacation per year is pitiful. Do people really get on and are happy with only that? I get 5 weeks ( minimum legal in France), i use it to the max and it's okay, but sometimes insufficient.

American weeks are only 5 days long if you use employer accounting when evaluating an offer. I have "3 weeks" but it's only 15 days.

Well, isn't that normal? When you sign a 6 month contract that doesn't mean that you'll have to work for 180+ days either.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#435

Post by Gunax »

I just scored my first 250k at a faang after being erm... stuck at a regular/non-prestigious company for 3 years.

There's basically a cottage industry of 'cracking the faang interview' so I don't feel like repeating it here. But basically any faang/adjacent will pay mid level engineers mid 200s.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#436

Post by eric-hu »

distribot wrote: post #283
yeswecatan wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just received an offer from a unicorn where over a third of my total comp are ISOs. After reading many posts here about the number of ways they can be worth $0 even in the event of an IPO, I'm not so sure I want to accept.

I can accept that prospect, but the thing I find the be really messed up is how you can be diluted beyond what you agreed to? It's not a percentage of ownership. They can just issue more shares. I don't get that.

Dilution can happen when investors put money into the company, increasing the value of shares. Does it matter if you own 1% of a million dollar valuation company? Or 0.1% of a 10 million dollar one?

Separately, I haven’t seen an equity grant in terms of percentage of the company, so on paper one never agrees to a percentage ownership anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#437

Post by AmericanBlarney »

1991g wrote: post #405
lr1970 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how they would know (call all places to see if you also worked there?). It can be tracked during your background check (using SSN). They will make you sign a form that you authorize them to perform such a check. Fail to sign the form - job offer is rescinded. Again, depends on employer.

> It can be tracked during your background check (using SSN). They will make you sign a form that you authorize them to perform such a check. Can you show me a background check service that offers a list of previous employers found by SSN? I did not know that exists. Unless they're consulting the IRS, I don't know how it could exist. Background checks as I understand them, tend to check things like: credit score, con…

Had one done, received the packet and they had everything going back to my internships. I think many large employers voluntarily report the info to an employment verification service for mutual benefit.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#438

Post by AmericanBlarney »

rco8786 wrote: post #337
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public companies will sometimes tell you $X amount of stock and not tell you the number of shares, which is what actually matters. For the purposes of the offer, the dont generally use today’s market price as their price per share. In those cases, you can actually end up with less than is offered. And in pre-IPO companies that’s the norm, but that’s beside the point.

They will always tell you $X in stock, how else would they value it? But there will be a set date on which that $ amount converts to a number of shares, which then vest over time according to a schedule. I have never seen an offer from a public company that has a # of shares attached to it. Only a dollar amount. Then it converts based on market value at conversion time.

Work at a FAANG - received a specified number of unvested shares with my offer, and a fixed vesting schedule.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#439

Post by winternett »

throwawayboise wrote: post #324
jason-phillips wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever. My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do. 1. My role is to help the team. 2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position. 3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for them…

I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.) The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless…

>I'm tired of learning.

Me too friend... It's also quite exhausting to see things change so much when the overall results and methods are mostly just ways of doing the same things that were done before (Since Ajax) and they're also becoming more complex than the methods used before to implement with no major added value and just an alternate set of unresolved issues to work around.

For new gigs, frequently get vague job descriptions which at the end of the day mean that I'm pretty much boing everything by myself and reporting to 3-4 useless managers that know buzz words, but don't know tech at all.

I've pretty much had enough, if we weren't stuck in a pandemic currently I'd be on a beach somewhere exotic, but at least I moved out of the expensive & stressful city work hustle.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#440

Post by mnemotronic »

nathanfig wrote: post #179
omosubi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is sales engineering? I have never understood this term or what the work these people do is. To be fair I haven't spent much time looking into it but any insight you have is appreciated

It goes by a lot of names (sales consulting, solution engineering, sales engineering, etc) but sales engineer is probably the best literal descriptor: basically your job is to go to prospective customers and engage their engineers/architects and work with them to solve their problems using your company’s software or techniques. If you do a good job, the prospect signs up and you make a commission. Engagements vary- y…

In my limited (2 years) experience, the pre-sales engineer, "solution architect" is someone who knows the product and about 85% of the client's environment and requirements. Their job is to say "Our product can meet all your requirements easily. I could code it up in a week." The sales staff moves in and gets the signature, collects the bonus and they and the pre-sales engineers spend the next 5 days on a private beach in the Caribbean. Meanwhile the company's Customer Consulting group sends in a developer and tells them they have a week to understand the requirements and get the thing designed, built, implemented, tested and signed off by the client. By the 2nd day on-site, the developer discovers a customer requirement missed by the pre-sales engineer that will require at least 3 weeks to implement correctly. The developer's boss says "fuck correct and fuck maintainable. Just make it work good enough so they'll let you leave. We're only charging them for a week of consulting". The developer spends 20 hours a day getting something working then leaves the customer with a fragile hodge-podge that mostly works with ideal data as long as the users and IT dept don't do anything unexpected. The developer gets home at 3 am Saturday, does his or her laundry then on Sunday afternoon gets on a plane headed for the next poor schmuck who bought the pre-sales BS.
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