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That's a common criticism of google; that everyone there is so educated and qualified, you have PHD comp sci people writing unit tests.
Would that be so bad?
I guess I'm assuming that said PhD isn't doing nothing but unit tests all data, but rather writing unit tests for their code.
Good unit tests are hard, often harder than product code. Smarts and experience help.
TIL that even students from top CS program have no idea about taxes if they think that housing stipend is taxed higher than ordinary income. He is not alone though - compensation director at Box tried to convince me that higher salary is significantly better than lower salary + bonus because of higher taxes on bonus.
That said, higher base salary is usually better than lower salary + bonus because your annual raises are larger on a higher base. Variable comp also just kind of sucks period - you get a big windfall at some point in the year, but you can't plan for it because you don't know how big it will be.
According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?
"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees." Not really. You can make millions if you're a founder... As a regular employee you have more chances to make millions by going to Vegas than with stock options.
In my experience the first 1K employees at companies prior to going public have a much higher chance of becoming millionaires as a result of their equity holdings in the company. I'll see if I can find a better source.
For 1K employees each becoming millionaires, their holdings in the company would need to be worth at least $1B, and if the IPO is 50% of the company, that means the company must be worth at least $2B. That's not a whole lot of companies, and I'm being deliberately conservative in my numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I eventually left the startup space to see what the rest of the world is like, and I can tell you that the money is much better out here.
Talking about top CS schools/going to Stanford is really irrelevant. I went to Carleton College, which has a nice little CS department but not really well-known, and got a liberal arts education. Because I did some open-source work and maybe because of some academic projects, I was able to get lots of interviews and offers, all in the same range as people are discussing today. All Stanford does at a company like Google is get your foot in the door--small, poorly run startups may hire on that basis, but that's it.
My one piece of advice for people who want to get into the tech industry: Choose one open-source project and contribute to it over a long period of time (ideally starting in high school, but never too late). The short time span of college courses and lack of large projects (a semester is not long) means that you can't really develop the skills that you need to be effective by that alone. Large, open-source projects give you real experience in structuring code to be maintainable, working with others and receiving feedback, and understanding and changing existing code that other people wrote. It might also get you some nice internal references.
TIL that even students from top CS program have no idea about taxes if they think that housing stipend is taxed higher than ordinary income. He is not alone though - compensation director at Box tried to convince me that higher salary is significantly better than lower salary + bonus because of higher taxes on bonus.
There is some truth to this actually. Companies often charge both sides of payroll tax on bonuses, which adds another ~6%. IIRC some states have a bonus tax as well. That said, higher base salary is usually better than lower salary + bonus because your annual raises are larger on a higher base. Variable comp also just kind of sucks period - you get a big windfall at some point in the year, but you can't plan for it b…
According to one recent grad. Why is this even an article?
I can say from my interactions with CS students at top schools that this attitude is common. Google is no longer seen as innovative; everyone wants to work for Facebook or Apple now. Google isn't seen as a bad company to work for, just not sexy like it used to be. It's like going to work for Microsoft: you'll make good money and get some interesting projects, but major engineering decisions happen in an ivory tower a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can say from my interactions with CS students at top schools that this attitude is common. Google is no longer seen as innovative; everyone wants to work for Facebook or Apple now. Google isn't seen as a bad company to work for, just not sexy like it used to be. It's like going to work for Microsoft: you'll make good money and get some interesting projects, but major engineering decisions happen in an ivory tower a…
... it seems to me like all that would be true for Apple and Facebook as well?
"For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees." Not really. You can make millions if you're a founder... As a regular employee you have more chances to make millions by going to Vegas than with stock options.