221–230 of 280 posts
At Google, Sr. SWE makes about $155K if female, about $180K if male. Base salary. Bonuses and refresher grants are also skewed accordingly. These are 2011 numbers, personally researched.
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The amount of politics and backbiting and sabotage that gets mixed in with partner-track programs is horrifying. Find an incentive scheme that empowers first-year hires to do amazing things for your company.
That's sorta the YCombinator model, isn't it? If you do really amazing things, you get acquired for a few hundred million. If you do somewhat amazing things, you get acqhired for a million or so. If you don't do anything, you get nothing. Seems to be largely working within the specific space of Silicon Valley YCombinator-funded startups, but I'm not sure how well it scales. There's a pretty sharp filter for getting i…
HN has a curious relationship to money some of the time. a) Many of us watched our classmates go into management consulting, investment banking, finance, medicine, law, etc. These are all fields where $250k is not exactly outlandish for a 29 year old. b) We have a lot of friendly, accessible fellow posters who write computer code and are financially very successful. c) We talk about $X million valuations and $YY mill…
The problem seems to stem from the fact that most people are presented with paltry-sounding offers from places like google. As is mentioned in many of the response here, it seems that the guy probably quoted total compensation. However, prima facie the only number people see is the salary number from their offer. The offer doesn't tell you how good the bonus will be, nor can you immediately appreciate stuff like 401K…
I'm working at the wrong place =(
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Adding to the data pool: I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows: * 166k base * 45k bonus * 35k stock grants (RSUs) Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks. When I too…
Isn't a perfect math score very hard to get, something like the upper 1%ile? Do you know your IQ? I'm scandinavian and could do a traditional finance/consulting/management/accounting thing in my home country but the software industry seems far more fascinating. I'm afraid my 120 to 125 iq means I'm too stupid to do well in SV though.
If you haven't seen the SAT math, it is a slightly creative twist on 10th grade math (Algebra and Geometry). Scoring an 800 means you could get an A grade in high school math, and are not so slow at solving the problems, and are careful enough to avoid sloppy mistakes in your work.
"120" IQ is supposedly 2 standard-deviations above the "(human?) population mean", which is ~98%ile of the population, which is well within the margin of error of these sorts of measurements.
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Tell your Google recruiter about your competing offers, especially if you're considering choosing another job on this basis.
Ah, I did, and he slightly more than tripled my RSUs (from 150 to 500), but left my base the same. Which is also weird since that base is lower than my current one.
I assume they give out RSU more than cash because it's a better-aligned incentive (both in motivations and risk profile), and it makes your x% raise cheaper next year.
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I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of sweatshops out there, but there are also plenty of tech companies I wouldn't touch with a barge pool. Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. H…
Besides working conditions, there's also the question of whether your work (and the company you work for) makes the world a better place. I'm not naive about that - large companies have their own agendas. But someone working at a silicon valley firm still has a better chance of doing something meaningful than someone working at a hedge fund where the answer is pretty much "no" by the nature of the business.
Is it "meaningful" to spend my days figuring out ways to get more people to click on more adverts? Not really. Build a social network for dogs' left testicles? Not really. Squeeze another dollar out of the equity markets? Not really. Build a faster database? Build a web analytics tool so people can squeeze out a few more conversions? Take a few cycles out of a market data feed handler to lower latency for a trading algorithm? No, no, and nope.
Are there good side effects from the above? Sure, we can come up with examples. For finance, you can take a look at the tightening of spreads (e.g. hft tends to make spreads go to their minimum making trades cheaper for everyone). Or adding liquidity in regular conditions so when someone small like a retail user comes along to sell some stock they get a good price quickly (not always of course, I mean really, you expect smart teams to take obviously dumb trades in an illiquid market?). Or more rapid price discovery (i.e. if something is mispriced it tends to get arb'ed away pretty rapidly, so that is faster info dissemination).
Can it be fun? Sure. Is it more good for the world than bad? Yup, I think so. Is it /meaningful/? Is it bollocks.
None of the above is meaningful compared to other things in my life. Important things like my family and trying to leave the world a better place than I found it (e.g. I give to charity -- probably more than most will ever earn).
That, and I'm with Vonnegut. "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.".
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I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of sweatshops out there, but there are also plenty of tech companies I wouldn't touch with a barge pool. Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. H…
That does sound like fun. Can you address how meaningful the work feels to you too? (I don't mean the question to be provocative.)
tl;dr no more or less than other silicon valley jobs I've had, but then again, I don't expect it to compare to the important stuff in life.
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Spot on. (d) in particular is worth stressing. There is no difficulty in attracting and retaining talent. There is simply an unwillingness to pay them what they're worth and give them an environment in which they'd want to work. Supply and demand. It's pretty simple. Yet so many (typically business types) want to treat engineers as an interchangeable cost center. "5 years ago an engineer cost $100k so I refuse to pay…
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibrate everywhere! If nobody can find good programmers to hire, it means that programmer salaries are too low! Raise programmer salaries until... ...erm, actually, students are remarkably goddamn insensitive to their future salaries when it comes to picking a major. And the other way S&D could equilibrate here is by fewer companies even trying to h…
This is the huge fucking source of programming talent that has remained largely untapped ever since CompSci became a recognized standard for employment qualification, due to the "monkey see, monkey do" best practices effect in businesses across the US. That blind best practices urge in hiring processes, in fact, keeps many actual programmers unemployed while firms in need of programming talent lobby congress to make it easier to import talent from other countries to fill the void created by their own hiring practices.
It's a perverse market right now.
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It is a made-up word (a portmanteau, if you want to get technical) meant to suggest that the activities of the tech companies were similar to those of a cartel. I frequently use non-standard English constructions for comedic effect when writing or speaking informally.
it's not a portmanteau, because a portmanteau is a combination of two real words whose meaning draws from both constituents (and it's not clear what real word that ends in 'icious' that is relevant to this context) According to OED (oxford english dictionary): "A word formed by blending sounds from two or more distinct words and combining their meanings. Also more generally: a term or phrase which encompasses two or…