181–190 of 207 posts
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Google, Facebook, Amazon paying significantly more is a myth, even if you include all the "benefits" (most of which most of us would never use).
They pay significantly more. Microsoft is another that pays a lot, especially to poach from those three. It is not uncommon for a very good engineer with 5+ years experience to earn above $400K / year (total = base + bonus (if issued) + stocks).
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After you've worked for 4+ years, a typical yearly RSU refresher adds up to around $80k+/yr. Add in $150k+ base salary and bonus and it can easily hit $200-300k or higher.
You're saying you get a yearly refresher that adds $80K/year? After 4 years, assuming no increase in stock price or your grant, the equity portion alone of your compensation would be $320K/year.
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This is interesting, because I've also seen something that is quite the opposite. A codebase where an initially a small but quite inexperienced team wrote most of the original code and while these people are in fact still around they've been promoted to management roles based on their seniority in the company. Usually they never really advanced that far as software developers and are neither really experienced techni…
> These people protect and maintain the original code If business depends on robustness of that code - of course they protect it. > They resist better practices and refactoring How do you know that they resist "better" practices? It could be they resist fancy practices that would cause more problems than they would solve.
There is nothing robust about mountains of spaghetti code. If anything these businesses are spending countless dollars paying the interest on the technical debt left here. What's worse is it impacts their long term competitiveness as it resists even incremental improvements. Besides, there is nothing fancy about basic practices like solid design, proper planning or even just the appropriate use of tools for source control and build processes.
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I actually think more people should act as if their career is going to end in 20 years. Thinking in these terms really drives home what you need to do if you want actual financial independence. Even if the goal is not realistically attainable, it shows you exactly where you stand. Let's say you think $1M is good enough for your notion of financial independence. Well, how can you accumulate that amount in 20 years? On…
I've done a lot of work in human longevity estimates. I strongly recommend you think of your life planning as lasting 60 years after college. If you think you can work twenty and live for forty off that, well for you. There is a demographic shift and a lot of things are going to be different in 30 years. Plan for life-long learning and be able to be valuable in a changing environment. My 2c.
The idea is to use the most productive and highest-earning period of your life (per the hypothesis that the tech industry is ageist) to amass savings, so that you don't have to worry about socking away for retirement later on in your career if you ever do face problems with your age.
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One is not likely to get to the same place in life as that CEO by job-hopping as a software engineer.
One is not likely to get to the same place in life as that CEO. You can stop the sentence there. The rest of your statement makes you sound judgmental against job-hopping. Capital distribution in the US is a Paretian/long tail distribution. It is statistically very unlikely for anyone, regardless of their actions, to get to the same place in life as that CEO if they are from anywhere in the bottom 90%. http://i.huffp…
I agree that nearly everybody is unlikely to reach the same place in life as that CEO. If that were not the case, truly we would be living in a utopia.
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Have you seen any of Daniel Pink's work on what motivates people in business? It might inspire you to focus on other incentives than just pay salary increases. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Warren Buffett does not pay market salaries to his top level managers. Those managers can get a significant hike if they switch yet most stick with Buffett because they like working for him.
Besides, I'd hazard a guess is that the issue of being paid "enough" is well past the point of being an issue for any of these top level managers. They are all probably almost absurdly well compensated. This doesn't disprove the assertion that for the vast majority of positions and salary ranges, differences in salary, as the article discusses are significant to the extreme. is a point below which it does make a difference.
In the end there is little real benefit to these managers to be gained from walking away from one of the best and most well known people in finance for money you don't need.
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People should try to save early however for most people working a "normal" software development job being able to retire after working for 15 years is unrealistic. Learning to live frugally and to invest wisely are useful traits though. I've never switched jobs to make more money. In every situation where I switched a job my current employer was willing to match my offer. I will switch jobs to work with smarter peopl…
> In every situation where I switched a job my current employer was willing to match my offer. Doesn't that bother you? That means in every instance, your current employer agrees that you're in fact worth more than they were paying. Why weren't they paying you that in the first place? For these kinds of negotiations, I'd expect a 6-month back payment at the matched offer rate.
Here's one interpretation: People are willing to get paid less if there's something else that can make up for that fact. I wasn't looking to trade something else for money which is why the "deal" of offering me more money didn't work. I see it as more about culture.
But then again, if I look back, the things that I am looking for have also changed. So sometimes "It's not you it's me" :-) is really true. I used to work for a great company for a long while and I'd still be very happily working there if they hadn't been acquired and flushed down the toilet (culture + business broken). In a sense selling the company is the most selfish act a company can perform vs. its employees. Otherwise I might have been making a little less money, producing a little more value and a little happier. Our economy sucks at optimizing these things.
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My experience is the absolute opposite, but maybe that's the difference between the US (or CA) market and the German one. Germany seems to pay people by seniority, not by their abilities (which, I think, sometimes causes unemployment for older developers). Maybe it's an "equality" thing - so all developers your age will make roughly the same. Even with excellent reviews by my bosses (not to mention being a well-respe…
Start a consulting company with one employee.
Switching jobs works well when developers are in their 20's. But I've found in the 30's that a number of factors combine to make it much less attractive: 1) Each jump becomes less and less. There's an invisible salary cap for software engineers. By the time a software engineer is in their 30's, they've jumped a few times and are already close to the maximum. 2) There are costs associated with switching jobs. There's…
Young developers should save 50% of their after tax income. In some ways, this industry is awesome: to be able to make six figures in your early 20s is an incredible benefit and potential head start on financial independence. In other ways, this industry is incredibly cruel: you will run into age discrimination and the other headwinds mentioned in your mid 30s, if not earlier. I tell the folks I mentor to think of th…
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Young developers should save 50% of their after tax income. In some ways, this industry is awesome: to be able to make six figures in your early 20s is an incredible benefit and potential head start on financial independence. In other ways, this industry is incredibly cruel: you will run into age discrimination and the other headwinds mentioned in your mid 30s, if not earlier. I tell the folks I mentor to think of th…
Yes and no. Saving cash makes little sense in the current financial environment, once you have your rainy day fund of 3 months living expenses. Buy an apartment or a house and put the extra cash into overpayments, you can't retire after 15 years but you could own your home free and clear.