Compare career levels across companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#281

Post by Nashooo » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

nouseforaname wrote: post #234

seattleeng wrote: post #10

Huge fan of this site, for two reasons: - It lets “outsiders” to the tech scene understand salary and levels at big companies. If you went to MIT you probably already have frat brothers/sorority sisters or an alumni network that consists of senior engineers at these big companies that know the promotion and compensation schemes well. But if you were an equally smart student who went to a non target school, many of th…

Also a huge fan. When I got my first full time engineering job at $50k I thought that was amazing. It literally allowed me to leapfrog my entire family and secured what I thought of as a middle class existence. Then I got a salary adjustment to $70k because my new manager knew (although I didn't) that they'd lose me quickly. And then I picked up the phone and talked to a recruiter and all the sudden I had a counterof…

How did you make the switch to working remotely for a big company in combination with a salary increase?

Somehow it seems that remote jobs offer less compensation here in Europe.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#282

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:33 AM UTC

gregschlom wrote: post #222

morgante wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, a Google recruiter once told me to spend a few months becoming a Python expert, and then they'd interview me (in Python); Most SWE hires are generalists at Google, not tied to a specific language. Unless you're being hired for a specialist role, you should absolutely be able to interview in the language of your choice. It's sometimes harder to put together an interview slate for a less popular languag…

> you should absolutely be able to interview in the language of your choice. Except the choice is between Java, C++ and Python. They are very clear about that, asking what your preference is during the scheduling phase. I went through the interview process this year, and even tried to ask my interviewers if it was ok to do Kotlin instead of Java. It wasn't.

[deleted]

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#283

Post by Impossible » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:33 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #275

Zaheer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have strong competing offers? From the discussions on Blind most folks get strong offers from Google only if they have another really strong offer. Keep in mind most of our data presented right now is Bay Area-centric. We're working on filtering all views of data by location still.

What's "Blind"?

https://www.teamblind.com. An anonymous cross industry social network with per company discussion boards. People share interview advice, salary information, (TC or GTFO is a blind meme...), "dissenting" political thoughts and bad dating advice mostly. It can be good and terrible like most anonymous platforms. It's pretty shallow compared to HN (almost no technical discussion, business discussion, shallow poltical discussion).

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#284

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:44 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #275

Zaheer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have strong competing offers? From the discussions on Blind most folks get strong offers from Google only if they have another really strong offer. Keep in mind most of our data presented right now is Bay Area-centric. We're working on filtering all views of data by location still.

What's "Blind"?

[deleted]

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#285

Post by shostack » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:51 AM UTC

brilee wrote: post #144

Benjammer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a project an L9 engineer would work on?

Invent TensorFlow. Design a new language (Go). Invent new storage formats (Capacitor)

Interesting. Any insight into what comparable projects might be in other roles at that level? Is that more like "launch a new product globally" territory?

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#286

Post by nouseforaname » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 6:58 AM UTC

Nashooo wrote: post #281

nouseforaname wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a huge fan. When I got my first full time engineering job at $50k I thought that was amazing. It literally allowed me to leapfrog my entire family and secured what I thought of as a middle class existence. Then I got a salary adjustment to $70k because my new manager knew (although I didn't) that they'd lose me quickly. And then I picked up the phone and talked to a recruiter and all the sudden I had a counterof…

How did you make the switch to working remotely for a big company in combination with a salary increase? Somehow it seems that remote jobs offer less compensation here in Europe.

I was directly recruited, for 2 remote jobs at once. The first one was because I hung out in an IRC channel for an open source project. The CTO of that company just offered me a job.

At the same time a recruiter from a fortune 500 just directly reached out to me and it was a great fit. I ended up going with the big established company because:

1. Better offer 2. Long term product area I was more interested in.

This was about 4 years ago and it turns out that although I'm no household name in the community, I am one of the relatively few people who's been doing Go in production since pre-go1.0.

Company 1 was in New York, Company 2 was multi-national but main engineering offices are in the Bay Area.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#287

Post by badminton1 » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

Some companies have a higher technical level. Do you think a principal engineer at a non-descript company can find a job as a principal engineer at Google for example? I highly doubt so.

Do you think an engineer at working in v8, Blink, Skia, Chromium are at the same level as an engineer indirectly using those technologies?

Do you think an engineer working on internet-scale APIs is at the same level of a user of such APIs?

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#288

Post by akhilcacharya » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #247

amazon_tossaway wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been here 4 years. I'm sorry, I'd rather not divulge much more than that. Stock growth did result in a higher than expected TC, but the number of shares I have vesting will drop substantially over the next 2-3 years. If you're curious, every year I've been here my manager has given me great annual reviews. My base pay is substantially lower than the others on the list. What are refreshers? Perhaps it's something…

Location matters a lot, for all tech companies. Cost of living in Bay Area for example is really high, and salaries reflect that. The exact same position in two different cities can vary by 20% or more depending on location, and that's true for any company.

At Amazon in particular it is standardized such that there are only 2 different regions, 1 for SFBA/NYC and 1 for everywhere else in the US.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#289

Post by freyir » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

mav3rick wrote: post #153

JimboOmega wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems with these: 1) If you aren't at one of these companies, it's not a fair comparison. It's really difficult to find a pre-IPO company who is going to compensate you like these, if for no other reason than that options are just not something you can easily stick a dollar value on. 2) It's kind of depressing. It's very easy to find people at similar experience levels as you making FAR more money (p…

So what you're saying is that this tool is bad because it makes you sad ?. Information is empowering use it to make informed choices about your career. If you're taking less money, make sure there is some trade off you're happy with. Also, most Google jobs are language agnostic. You can code in pretty much one of C/C++, Java, Python, Google hires for generalists. Your Ruby experience is not what's holding you back, s…

Ouch, Go not included in languages Google commonly uses.

Re: Compare career levels across companies

#290

Post by domlebo70 » Thu, Nov 01, 2018, 7:02 AM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #232

domlebo70 wrote: post #140

What is it like working at Google? I work at a startup, and these numbers are insanity to me. I have 10 years experience in mostly Haskell & FP (and that's what I enjoy doing). What would I do with my skills at one of the bigger tech companies?

With ten years under your belt, if you've been spending the time learning and growing your skills, you can do almost anything you want at Google. Except if you insist on doing it in Haskell. There are probably a handful of teams across the company that are using that language, but they might not have headcount to hire you at any given point in time. Google is most definitely not a polyglot programming environment. Th…

Thanks, this is some useful insight.

Can you perhaps talk a little about what your team and the teams around you are working on? What are the problems you are trying to solve? Happy to take this to another forum, if you don't want to talk publicly.