281–290 of 927 posts
> In spite of these truths, people flock to working for TSLA and CosmosY. I often wonder how many of the people working at cool places are doing cool stuff and how many are doing the same things as elsewhere. Does it help working in a place building autonomous cars, rockets if you’re not doing that, but doing the same web dev or door knob release software that you could do in a hedge fund, accountancy firm, or evil c…
Purely anecdotal: In my experience as a hiring manager seeing trends change over the past 10 years, and selecting from the top 10% of candidates by some vague metric, it's primarily about "does it pay a lot" and secondarily "does it offer full-remote"? A lot of my friends, former colleagues, and candidates I've failed to hire end up going to either a FAANG or a very successful brand-name company (typically a SV compa…
A 3rd factor for me however has always been the tech stack. Engineers I recruit are keenly aware that if they get stuck in a non-modern or too-modern tech stack that it could hurt their future career opportunities.
You can’t just contribute to open source and reach a high level, at least not very quickly very often. They want to jump into a high growth company and contribute to large interesting apps / services that get used in production. Open source is great, but on a resume, it’s nothing like saying you launched an app that handles millions of dollars in transactions, or billions of API requests.
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> Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion Unlikely these are the same people tbh
It could simply be extremely small sample size, but I know 5 (!!) people personally who fall into this intersection. All of them are quite talented. All jumped ship from meh-paying start-ups to a high-paying role at AMZN after railing on AMZN the years prior for being an awful company. One of them even took a department leadership role (or whatever the title equivalent is) and cited a 3x increase in TC. It could be t…
Also, are they working on Java 6?
These are important questions because Amazon pays 300K for Rust. That seems like a combo that makes folks wonder maybe let's give them a shot, right?
Refusing to write out Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla comes off as juvenile which perfectly explains why this is such a terrible explanation for the current job market: Nothing in this article wasn't true two years ago; This could of just as well been titled "I think I know why you can't hire engineers" and been posted any time in the last 50 years.
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> Being masterfully either technically, socially, or politically have a lot to do with it too, it seems. I don't think you need to be a master to get more money. What I have noticed as a hiring manager/tech lead is candidates/team members fall into either asking for more money or not. I have guys on my team who if they asked for money I could easily add 20 - 50k to their salary. But they don't, they also don't shop t…
This just feel unjust for me. It bothers me to see a coworker getting underpaid just because they have certain personality traits (that are unrelated to their actual work). I will be less likely to stay at such a place, even if for me personally the pay is fine.
If a manager is just plainly average at their job, then they'll probably prioritize what is very clearly and evidently an issue/task for them to do, which is usually what their boss is asking them to do, for better or for worse.
So it's not that a manager is being deeply unethical and withholding promotion potential because they're evil, they just may not see it as a priority among everything else they have to do, especially if the subordinate in question appears happy and fulfilled.
I agree with some others here. To really ensure you're being paid fairly as an employee, you do have to normalize making it a discussion with your boss. If it's a priority for you, it'll more likely be a priority for them, assuming they look at you in favorable light.
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On the flip side companies don’t really seem to care if you’re interested either. I applied to around 200 companies in the final 2 years of my data science undergrad and no matter how much interest I showed in the fields of my interest: stream processing, network analysis, and recommendation systems nobody really cared. I added projects and hackathons and applied directly to teams working on that stuff, never even go…
> Companies mostly care about whether you fit some pre defined funnel and can pass their interview hoops they don’t care about how interested you are or “how much value you can bring” like you read online. I think this is overly cynical. Companies do want these things but at large companies you: 1. Cannot maintain a network of trust amongst people making hiring decisions to keep the bar high. 2. Want a plausibly "obj…
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> Someone boycotting AMZN one day will be happy to accept a very healthy salary + benefits package writing legacy Java 6 backend code if it means a good double- or triple-digit percentage in compensatory promotion Unlikely these are the same people tbh
It could simply be extremely small sample size, but I know 5 (!!) people personally who fall into this intersection. All of them are quite talented. All jumped ship from meh-paying start-ups to a high-paying role at AMZN after railing on AMZN the years prior for being an awful company. One of them even took a department leadership role (or whatever the title equivalent is) and cited a 3x increase in TC. It could be t…
So you could always go to another company competing with them for talent with a given offer and (assuming you performed well enough to justify it) you'd have no problem getting something similar. If there was a gap in comp after that you'd be talking single digit percentages, nothing near 3x.
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For most people in my circles Amazon is no longer a realistic choice for anything than using as a competing offer at a place like Google (which is known to lowball you without a competing offer).
And it's not even a philosophical or moral issue: Amazon just has a terrible reputation now due to URA/Focus shenanigans, on-call nightmare stories, etc... why go with the "worst-in-class" employer?
If you're good enough to get Amazon to give you some band busting offer, some other FAANG company likely will too and you just go with them. Amazon doesn't even have exciting work or prestige compared to the others anyways, so it's not like you're giving up some intangible benefit...
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> You can earn 5% investment returns after inflation during your saving years This is very unlikely long term. Right now treasuries are 5% less then inflation. Lots of FIRE people are going to get shafted.
S&P 500 returned ~25% this last year, and 110% over 5 years. That's excluding dividends.