531–540 of 609 posts
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As an underpaid European I welcome insanely high salaries in USA. It sets a precedent and it has also influence in the global wage market.
Especially since the pandemic showed that remote work mostly works.
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>"Stuck at 200K, and I doubt that's going to go up much because the layoffs have started and we're heading back into "lucky to have a job" territory." Where have there have the layoffs started? What evidence do you have that we are "heading back into 'lucky to have a job' territory"?
Were you around in 2008?
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Your argument I visualize as the floor falling from the room, the lowest paid have fallen, tech workers are “safe for now” but they are concerned and are trying to move to safer ground, and Bezos is in a spaceship above it all. People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet.
> People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet. I started my own fintech startup by bootstrapping and working 90+ hours a week and I managed to survive in Boulder where/when the average house price was over 1 million USD, you will get no sympathy from me. My investments are the only thing that saved me, and I didn't have health benefits that entire time. I treaded water and almos…
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20 years here too, UK, I've finally broken the 6 digit bar but I had to move to contracting. My experience made getting job offers simple, but no one wanted to pay more. I'd often get lowballs with the offer of kudos for working at that tech firm. £95k seems to be the upper limit at this point here for FTEs.
Contracting has been a very large component of the London market. Developers have been contracting at £600+ per day, more than £120k per year income, for 15+ years. It has historically been very easy to achieve that if you don’t mind working for a bank. I don’t even think I’m in a bubble with these numbers. I know and have hired hundreds of contractors over the years.
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Buddy of mine solved 1400 leetcodes and still failed several rounds
Did they fail because they couldn't solve an algorithm? Or was it due to something else - e.g. soft skills, solving without explaining your thought process, system design, behavioral questions. Algorithms are only one part of an interview. I wouldn't hire someone who was rude or condescending, regardless of how fast they can write an O(n) solution.
Like Michael O'Church talked about a company hiring a software engineer and another hiring a manager, and he and the engineer A/B testing trying to get hired as an engineer or as a manager. And in the interview, they wanted him to come up with the golden algorithm that took them months and was their hot shit with which they would win big, they wanted that in an hour. Actually less, you couldn't solve it in minute 59 without coming up with incremental steps to "show progress" as if that weren't counterproductive. So like 4 minutes, Michael O'Church lied through his teeth in favor of these guy's patience. 4 minutes of silence and it's over. And because he couldn't do it that's when they started discounting points, like you start at 100 and then get knocked points for not having gone to Stanford (or Berkeley as he puts it, but you still get discounted for Berkeley in reality), then more demerits for every flaw, negging over and over. Always communicating it's the engineer's fault he's treated like shit.
Whereas for applying to manager (which in many ways was more honest, it was arguable, he just hadn't been formally promoted with actual employees with a wage, he just pretended he had and had the knowledge to back it up), with applying to manager, he started at like 80 points and everything he did well added points to his value, they saw him as an ally. Against the software engineer, against his own alternate self, whom they treated as the subordinate, like enemy slash slave.
So that story I don't know how to judge, I don't have enough visibility on Michael O'Church and I have very negative opinions about a lot of his thoughts. But that's not the question. The question is, if I do crack the golden algorithm that took them months right then and there, in the heat of the moment under time pressure, in the interview, under adversarial circumstances, all of that, in the four minutes they actually give you without acting impatient, if I DO not if I don't IF I DO will that get me human dignity and a wage? Or will they still reject me because I'm not submissive, which I can never again be after standing up to torture?
[1] So what this means is, suppose a chess player is at a crossroads, and thinks for a minute. And from that point on, plays perfectly until checkmate. Every move correct. Saying I don't do it perfectly would be like saying the chess player didn't play perfectly because he didn't lay the pieces in the exact geometric center of the square when he moved them. I get every algorithm interviewer to say "what the fuck", "did you hear it before?" "that was fast" But it's never enough. Best job I had was $20 an hour, dream job, as a handyman, construction. Dream job. I got promoted into software, and was quickly fired.
Managers are primates first, mathematicians a distant second. They talk about being mathematicians a lot, like a lot, they pretend it's all about the bottom line, but no. It's about dominance, being alpha, a guy who stood up to torture is an alpha challenger, no hire, no matter what he can bring to the company. Mathematics is a distant distant second.
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It's more accurate to say that job-hopping has diminishing returns. Get a single +39% increase is one thing. Getting a +39% increase every single time you change jobs isn't going to happen. If that was possible, you could change jobs every year for a decade and be earning 27X what you started with. If you started at $100K, that would put you at $2.7 million year after 10 iterations. That's why whenever someone insist…
I'd still be very cautious about dissuading people from job hopping. My advice is always "Keep interviewing for new positions at regular intervals until you're bordering on retirement." A lot of people a lot of people are making less money than they could be due to being complacent about reaffirming their own value. America, and most of the modern world, runs a labour market and to properly value a good in a market y…
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If only Americans reignited their imagination and didn't just settle on having a few big cities in opposite corners of the country. America is huge. There's land everywhere. Start dreaming. China has 160 cities with 1+ million people. We have 10. Granted, there is a massive population difference, but we should most definitely have more than 10. There are major issues when you only have a few cities with the bulk of t…
China may have a 160 cities with a million+ people, but, do all of these cities have the infrastructure and opportunities that are the same as or come close to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzen? IMO, this is a case where quantity alone is a poor metric.
Ok yeah ok Australia might as well be a hollow disk (no one lives in the middle) but still!
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That's actually so much of why people feel underpaid. Pay varies incredibly widely. The job also varies quite widely, but when you're not in the job, IC sounds a lot like IC. You could be an IC with a total compensation of $80k (and actually getting $80k), you could be an IC with a TC of $300k (and actually getting $300k), and you could be an IC with a TC of $750k (and actually getting something like $200k-250k becau…
If your employee is private, it is silly to count non liquid statistically meaningless “equity” as part of your compensation. “compensation” is something I can trade for cash once I have earned it and then exchange for good and services.
>the average tech worker’s salary [will] reach $104,566 in the U.S. — a 6.9% increase since 2020, the report found. But inflation is over 11% since 2020. This isn't an increase. The average tech worker is making less than they were 2 years ago according to the Dice salary report. Why do tech workers feel underpaid? Many companies posted record growth and profits over the pandemic, but still give out paltry 3-5% raise…
> Meanwhile for those that have the time and willpower to grind leetcode, they know they can command a 20-40% raise every few years. One thing a lot of people forget about this 20-40% number is: It's only true early in your career. It might be hard for younger folks to believe, but you will all hit a ceiling and plateau. My first job hop was for +50%! The next one was about 40%, the next one 15%, and so on. Now, with…
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For some jobs sure, but tech job? The delta is >$100,000USD/yr, which after tax might be $70,000 which pays for all that stuff you get for free or subsidized in Europe, plus some left over .
Look at the cost of housing and rents in most US cities that you'd actually want to live in. The others? Forget about public transit. Need a car, and car insurance, and car maintenance. And the reality is most tech jobs don't really pay as much as you think. For the good remote jobs you'll be competing with people who are simply better than you ,so good luck.
> And the reality is most tech jobs don't really pay as much as you think. For the good remote jobs you'll be competing with people who are simply better than you ,so good luck.
I guess it depends on what "you think" tech jobs pay, but this has not been my experience. If you're even half-decent, there are countless remote software engineering opportunities that pay well above $100k, which is a great salary if you're not comparing it with the top end of the industry. Most companies right now are facing a labor shortage, so it's far easier to get a remote job as a SWE than ever before.