251–260 of 280 posts
$ 250,000 a year must include stocks, bonus, 401k and healthcare. As is, it doesn't match the insider information I have about Google's salaries. Let's be realistic a minute, $ 250k/year is a lot of money.
>The revenue per employee at GOOG is $1.2M in a very high margin business.
$250k/year is not a lot compared to that.
Ignoring passion, does it make sense economically to join a startup in the Bay Area? It doesn't seem uncommon for very young (25+) top engineers in the Bay Area to be making anywhere from $175k/year -- 250k/year in base salary + bonus + equity. Over 30 years, that's a more or less guaranteed $5m -- 7.5m before taxes from a single income. (Ignoring things like promotions and older engineers possibly needing to retrain…
I just wouldn't figure the stock grant/options for any value at all. The odds are strongly against them being worth anything.
Maybe I can shed light on why some of us are "shocked" about this number, while others seem to think it's no big deal. I work for Cisco, which is certainly not considered a Google or Amazon, these days, but still a fairly respectable place. I'm a software engineering doing embedded work for the last three years out of my BS in CS. I got hired on at $73k with 300 options (now underwater). I have had consistently good…
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I see boxes in on job applications for "expected annual salary" and I don't know what to put. "Negotiable", "Market rate", etc. That box is asking you to compromise your negotiating position. There is no legal or moral stricture that says you have to oblige them. The people I asked at the time said it was a competitive salary and not worth negotiating. This makes me angry. Of course it is worth negotiating. What woul…
> the worst possible outcome would have been accepting the offer at $110k, and nobody at your company would care either way because the difference is bat guano to them. That's a pretty unimaginative worst possible offer. The company could pay you 115k, resent it, and use it as justification to give you various shit-work. I've seen that happen to a friend and it actually hurt his mid term learning and career growth. I…
So if that starts happening to you, you get out. And when the next place asks you how much you made at your last position you're $5k better off in the negotiations.
>It's also fairly common for a company to simply choose to fill the position with someone who's less troublesome.
Do you really want to win a race to the bottom? It seems like you have a terrible attitude (fear-based) about negotiation. I wish people who thought like you do would stay out of my field. You're pushing rates down needlessly.
This is a nice data point. But if you want to know the real deal, don't talk to fellow programmers. Talk to guys in finance who support the R&D function at tech firms. We know all and see all, everybody else except HR only sees data points. And are you seriously going to trust anybody from HR to interpret numbers? My advice: Do this work because you love it. But negotiate aggressively. Programmers don't push as hard…
Like the collusion big companies were already doing and got busted for? It's going to get harder and harder to distort the markets with instant communication. If anything is going to come to an end it's probably going to be the absolutely ridiculous overpay that executives have been enjoying for the last 20 years+.
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Being able to 'talk the talk' will not get you a job at Google. You have to be a very strong problem solver, a fast thinker, and lucky. All Googlers might not be rockstar programmers, but they are almost all unusually intelligent. There really are no average people there, apart perhaps those that came in through acquisitions (like myself).
So I've heard. And yet, I can guarantee you Google has hired at least two dim bulbs. Well, that can happen. After all, it can only be so efficient, and some people sound a lot more intelligent than they really are (which is why we hired them). But it all makes me wonder how good Google's internal processes are, and how long it's willing to wait for people to become productive.
No you can't. I really hate this kind of attitude people have. A person is not a static thing that is always X. Maybe they didn't like your company. Maybe they were suffering from burn-out, or had some kind of personal crisis. It could very well be the case that they're absolute rock stars at Google even though they were worthless at your company.
nothing is stopping these guys from coding something up after work/on the weekend. Sure it'll take twice as long to release a project, but it's a small price to keep getting $20K a month salary
Quite the contrary, you don't know Google's non-compete work-contract provisions and, if any, how would they held up in court, so your statement is quite speculative. Besides, the last thing you'd want to do is to work after-hours and find out your employer is owning the IP of your project (that's besides pager-duty and other after-hour things your employer might make mandatory anyway). Regarding taking twice as long…
Has this ever happened? I would imagine that if some guy got his FU money taken away and given to some big company where it would be too small to even register on the income statements that said person wouldn't just lay there and take it.
After all, what you're describing is literally slavery (i.e. anything the slave makes belongs to his/her owner).
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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…
The Market Economics Fairy doesn't work here because there is such a large lead-in time to making money as a programmer. I have had 2 or 3 friends want to become programmers just because they want to make more money, and also because they see the opportunity to make their own apps etc. I helped them as much as I could but none of them are now programmers because it's just too much work for no return to learn this stu…
Let's put it this way: how many people who go into investment banking are actually interested in investment banking? How many fooled around with financial models in middle school, then realized they wanted to parlay that passion into a career at Goldman Sachs? Maybe the odd freakshow here and there, but by and large, people enter the field for the moolah.
Right now, programming is still dominated by people who became programmers because they enjoy it. That they're well compensated is nice, but many of these people would probably be programming even if it didn't pay handsomely.
The Market Economics Fairy would indicate, however, that that'll change eventually. More and more would-be business or marketing or even journalism majors are going to choose CS when the salary average disparity becomes wider and more widely known.
As a point of data, I work at Google and am at a similar point in my career. My base salary a year ago was $136k, but there was a companywide 10% raise last winter, and now my base is $150k. You get a cash bonus each year that's around 15% of your base, but if you're a superstar it can be double that, or if you're a total disappointment, it can be nothing. But if I perform as expected, that's another $22k. Finally, I…
I'm web developer, 25 years old, I'm raising 21000 euro/year. What I'm doing wrong? :/
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…