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Be in a field where tech is the limit

mathiaskirkbonde.substack.com

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Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#191

Post by dougmwne »

scubbo wrote: post #118
cameronh90 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good vacation policy in SF? I'm tempted to move from London, but I currently get 28 days holiday a year + 8 public holidays + birthday + Xmas to NY (so about 40 days give or take). I know there's a lot of "unlimited" holiday policies - but would they really be okay if I took that kind of holiday? I earn a lot here in London, but moving to SF would be a significant bump. However, I very much value my time off…

My Anecdata - I moved from London to SF ~4 years ago (working for the same FAANG company before-and-after), and have never even bothered looking at my PTO accrual because a) I wouldn't even spend it fast enough to run it down, and b) my managers have always been very clear that I should take whatever PTO I want whether or not I officially have hours accrued. Officially, though, I (just found out that I) have 20 discr…

2 weeks is considered minimal/entry level, 3 weeks is average and 4 weeks is quite good for the US.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#193

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

datameta wrote: post #159
jsolson wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a glance at levels.fyi, in NYC for people with one year of experience there isn't a single entry from Google below $150k. Similar for Amazon.

FAANG salaries are outliers, no doubt about that

Are they outliers? Most public “name brand” tech companies I can think of out here pay like that. Uber/airbnb/lyft come to mind. Hell, I’m at a under the radar (but still public) company and we get paid the same as FAANG. Sure it’s not the norm, but outlier is a stretch. Especially when you account for the disproportionate headcount at the high paying companies.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#194

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

datameta wrote: post #144
kmonsen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not double, easy 10x for a decent senior engineer at a top 10 software company. I am sure you are making the best trade off and respect that, but use the real values. Double is for a fresh grad in top US markets.

108k for a fresh grad? That's just not accurate. The Greater NYC area will net an entry level dev 60-75k max in most cases. 108k is much closer to the average, taking into account highly experienced outliers. National average of entry level dev salaries for reference: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Software-D...

At least in SF it’s totally accurate.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#195

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Rapzid wrote: post #190
dopidopHN wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will respond as a French dev working in the US since a small decade. Let’s just start by saying that back home, every worker has 5 week of pays vacation by law. Most qualify worker get 6 , and it’s not uncommon to go in the 7 or 8 with seniority. Just with that simple fact the « work life balance » a US company has to offer is kinda cute compared to what I would get automatically. Then come childcare, education and…

> Let’s just start by saying that back home, every worker has 5 week of pays vacation by law. The laws and baselines could be better for sure. But in the context of Software Engineering for a talented person it's possible to work for non-FAANG companies that pay quite well and offer things like "unlimited" vacation. Unlimited enough that up to 8 weeks a year spread out a bit is not going to cause any issues. > how po…

> Unlimited enough that up to 8 weeks a year spread out a bit is not going to cause any issues.

That varies by a huge amount depending on company and team and manager. I have unlimited PTO and if I took 8 weeks in a year, I’d be an outlier. I’d also have to be very very careful about optics.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#196

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

fridif wrote: post #69
_Wintermute wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit…

I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

Rewriting a silly library like numpy or spark from scratch to make your life easier? Rewriting numpy in java for speed? Hell rewriting spark in java for speed?? That’s a hugely massive undertaking that wouldn’t gain you any benefit.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#197

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

nitrogen wrote: post #165
jwitthuhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has about a 50% chance of telling me that every time I follow a link there. Hit f5 a few times, maybe a ctrl+f5 and you'll probably get there.

That worked. Amazing that it can be so flakey.

Assume you're on Firefox? This has been an issue with Twitter since I started following links to it on Firefox.

Crazy that they haven't fixed it yet, but that's Twitter I suppose.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#198

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

roadnottaken wrote: post #113
2bitencryption wrote: post #43

> Biotechnology sounds to me much like computing in the 60’s. One thing I've always wondered about biotech... I imagine there are many non-obvious correlations and interactions in medicine, which would be easily detected using nothing more advanced than Excel-spreadsheet level data analysis. Making up an example: people with a certain DNA trait/allele who also have a diet with a high amount of XYZ tend to not develop…

This has been going on for decades, it's called GWAS [1] and it has had a few successes but basically hasn't worked as well as everyone hoped it would in the 90s. The reason it doesn't work that well is that the human genome has ~3 billion letters and human physiology is complex. So trying to establish stastitically significant correlations between genome variations and human physiology is hard and requires more than…

Lasso (L2 regularised) regression was actually invented to solve these kinds of problems. To the best of my knowledge, this has not yet appeared in Excel.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#200

Post by akarma »

d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #23

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

From what I've seen, much of the delta in pay is actually the result of lower profit margins.

Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years.

By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k).

Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.

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