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Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

neomindlabs.com

281–290 of 441 posts

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#281
post #3

> never underestimate the amount of money the FAANGs have to poach your talent. I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.

People use the word poach because it supposedly makes 'non-poaching' agreements sound like something positive.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate to hire an employee from a competitor, chances are part of the "value" of that employee is that they will no longer be working for someone else. Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem.…

If Google is willing to pay $200k over your current employer for you, your employer is paying you $200k under your market rate.

Let's say your value to most employers is $100k---this is the amount of money you make for them balanced against the amount you want in order to work for them.

Then the Goog enters the picture and is willing to add another $200k premium to that, in order to prevent you from working for that employer. This isn't sustainable; you're still you and your direct value to Goog is only $100k. The additional amount represents how much damaging a competitor is worth to Goog. As soon as the competitor goes out of business or Goog stops having piles of cash laying around to fight with other companies, that additional value evaporates.

If you decide to leave Goog, you should probably not expect to get $300k or more. In fact you may get less than $100k, if Goog has eliminated the competitors to whom you are valuable.

"Market rate" is extremely unstable.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#283
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But most of the time we're talking about something like $180k to $250k when getting poached to a FAANG In the last couple years we're talking 2-3x from our BigCo's $150-250K. Getting such an increase people do feel like being hit by a bus - at least my friend looked that way for a few days after getting such 3x offer couple years ago from a FAANG style company :) Our managers don't even try to match - during the 201…

Wait, are you saying 150-250k is standard and you can get more at FAANG? Most senior devs I know aren't breaking $130 in a flyover. To be clear, a lot aren't breaking $100,000.

Take a look at levels.fyi (not affiliated).

The base at senior typically varies between 160k to 220k where the majority of compensation comes from stock. Seniors at FB tend to make between $300k to $450k. This also includes generous perks like 401ks, health insurance, etc.

At Netflix it can even be astronomically higher.

Levels is a cool site, had no idea how high some salaries can be. Kinda motivates me to get on the leetcode grind.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#284

Instead of "hit by a bus," I prefer the term "win the lotto." Any member of your team could win a life-changing amount of money in the lottery, inherit it, win a gambling bet, etc. Frame it as a good thing rather than a death or a change of hire - somebody might just flat out retire because they don't financially need your employment anymore.

If I win the lotto, I'll give 4 weeks notice. If I get hit by a bus, not so much...

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communicate a story that benefits the employer. When you hear poached, you think illegal and victims. It makes you think that the employer has been wronged in some way and that the employee was both participatory in something illegal or at least underhanded and at the s…

Oh come on. It's just succinct and communicates what's happening effectively. There's no grand conspiracy to create some underhanded psychological shift in the workforce at large... God, it's so ridiculous. Business slang like this comes from managers bored out of their minds trying to be concise and make corporate interaction marginally interesting. What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as p…

The only sense in which 'hired' is less precise is that it doesn't communicate that the former employer is bitter about the situation.

Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#286
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _was_ standard few years back and is still for anybody who hasn't changed job in the last 2-3 years. In our BigCo we're loosing people fast (only lazy sediment like me - Google gave me only 1x - is still there), and the new people, not much of them around though, are getting $300K+ .

I am lost between not believing you and questioning what I am doing with my life.

It's about 180k for beginner level, 260k for the level above that, and 370k for seniors at G/FB [0]. And if you consider Chicago flyover, then you can get close to those numbers even in flyover as I'm in Chicago and pulling about 5% less than those numbers. Although it definitely is easier to find those jobs in NYC/Seattle/Bay area.

[0]: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#287
post #242
post #3

> never underestimate the amount of money the FAANGs have to poach your talent. I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.

But the FAANGs have a huge unfair advantage over startups - their size gives them monopoly power that disadvantages small companies. That's a failure of American governance. Economists used to all know that markets needed to be regulated to make competition fair --- and efficient. But the American right has pushed for 50 years to deregulate everything, and the FAANGs have benefited from this rollback of anti-trust. I…

Let's go back to the Soviet style communism where a highly skilled engineer and a simple factory worker make the same money. That'll be the triumph for the society and the economics. Except that it wasn't. Know the history lesson.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#288

I agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market. Investment bank and management consulting figure…

The tech companies do invest a certain amount into new-grads. If you are a new grad in Microsoft working on most products you will get a weeklong training on how to build apps on azure (equivilant to azure level 1 certificate). You will also get invited to these pretty cool speaking events where they bring in people who have had TED-talks to discuss your transition.

That's good to hear and MS is doing the right thing, but this is not the case at many other companies.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#289
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that hits me is the "$500k+/year in the valley". Is this really a thing? Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado? Even factoring in my stock grants, I'm nowhere close to that number.

It's really a thing, and it isn't just in the valley. You can find salaries like that in Silicon Forest, too. More than half of it will be stock and bonuses. You're in a lower cost-of-living location, and one where there's less competition; employers don't pay as much there because they don't have to. That said, if you like where you are, you might start by looking for remote work that pays better (from companies tha…

Are there companies paying like this around Portland? Obviously there are in Seattle. I'm in Portland and working remotely, but it would be nice to have more options. I have a friend who was talking to Puppet, and it sounded like their salaries were pretty low (by these standards.)

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#290
This is such a low-effort blog post:

1. It's click-baity. From the headline you'd think it would be a discussion about why engineers hop jobs so frequently, why in particular FAANGs seem to be so attractive, and what we could do to increase retention. Instead, the post just quickly summarises what we've known for ages (turnover is a big problem), very briefly goes off on a completely irrelevant tangent (that it's more likely for an engineer to change the company than to be hit by a bus, which is true, but pointless) and then tops it off by the insane suggestion that "just use Rails" is the answer to all of your turnover woes (more on that below).

2. There is an interesting discussion here to be had: why exactly do companies suck so badly at retaining talent? My take on it is that we all (companies, developers, etc.) routinely emphasise the wrong things (office perks, showing off tech skills, etc., instead of a good understanding of the product) and burn people out, but as said: this is a much larger discussion. More importantly though I disagree with the received wisdom that "developers are developers" and domain knowledge is worth nothing. Of course, you always should be prepared for the worst (i.e. the proverbial bus), but it should still be the companies' priority to retain good people as long as possible because once somebody leaves, so much knowledge just goes to waste and has to be reacquired. At my last company, my whole team was fired because they thought that some other team would be just as good for the product, ignoring the fact that we'd built up the product ourselves and all the knowledge for two years. But to the higher-ups, the view was that developers are exchangeable.

3. The author just really comes across as immature and uniformed with their unilateral praise of Rails. I've worked on Rails apps so messy that they were almost impossible to understand. And, by now, Rails is by far not the only framework with strong conventions and a lot of out-of-the-box support for many common things - Spring Boot for example (whatever its faults) arguably supports even many more requirements. But more importantly, for any kind of non-trivial app, the complexity is not just in the technology: it's in the (often contradictory) requirements, the different architectural tradeoffs, the little gotchas, the personalities in the team, etc. etc.

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