Be in a field where tech is the limit • Hacker News Board

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#211

Post by dopidopHN » Sun, May 09, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

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…

I’m a software engineer with a lot of demonstrable skills and good credentials.

Like I said in another comment the money is stupid high in this industry and country.

I take it of course. And I had unlimited PTO 3 times in 3 different places at this point.

It depend greatly of the implementation. But overall I feel that the only real time off I get is between jobs. Where I usually take one full month. ( if the next job refuse; I take it as a red flag )

It’s not the same, unlimited PTO have to be placed carefully and you have to be mindful about optics.

PTO that you earned and are enumerated on your pay stub are more enforceable.

I would rather have 4 week of normal PTO that a unlimited vacation policies that I’m not sure will be well inplemented.

Large companies tends to do it correctly. In that context I was usually taking 5 weeks. But with some stress and guilt and kinda check my work inbox.

Not the same. But then …you guys have those massive paychecks… I will take them while I can.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#212

Post by auspex » Sun, May 09, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

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...

Even startups pay somewhere between 120k and 150k for a fresh graduate in CS (Bay Area).

If you’re not then I would suggest learning a bit more about negotiating. Ask for what you want. The worst they can do is say no... but you’re very rarely going to lose an offer for asking for too much. They already spent months finding you. If it’s in budget or the pay band you’ll get it.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#213

Post by raffraffraff » Mon, May 10, 2021, 6:28 AM UTC

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 :)

Phd in unrelated field means nothing. Physics don't repair their own gas boilers, and civil engineerings don't plaster their own walls. Even if they have a lot of time on their hands and an interest in developing the skill, they still stuck compared to the person who does it for their day job. The physicist will probably kill themselves and their families. The pharma phd won't be able to build a service that's usable by multiple people simultaneously, with authentication, a sound database schema, CI pipelines. It's always gonna be a shitty collection of "scripts" when what they need is software. I think the point is that they have shitty scripts already. Also, who's gonna review their code? Is there even gonna be code review? Or version control?