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Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

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Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just gave our devs relatively modest increases, and only one raised any objections and ended up with a more than a 15% increase. I worry about all those devs who won't say anything (why should they have to?) and will just go somewhere else for a 20% bump.

You can get good raises by changing jobs. You can also get good raises by talking to your manager. Don't be passive about the income that you get.

It's really better to push yourself to know the changes in hiring and be getting job offers every 2 years, taking one most of the time. The things you do internal to a company are mostly risks for eventually dropping out. I.e. you end up in a position you have never seen a cold interview for.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#522
post #115

Not my experience at all. For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. I…

Wow, I've never seen someone admit to being that much of an asshole on HN in all my years. People are literally spending months studying for interviews hoping they can get hired at FB and you are sabotaging their chances. You're admitting you aren't even trying to evaluate if they would be someone you want on your team or an asset to the company, and instead just wasting people's time and hurting careers as a protest…

Do you realize that when seen from the outside there's literally no difference between what I'm doing and me being a "bar raiser" or "preventing false positives"? I'm simply using the system against itself within its own rules.

When someone comes in and is able to solve the 2 hardest problems I have cold there's no way I can reject this candidate in a debrief. There's people out there who are able to do this, either through practice or raw intelligence, it's just that they're very rare. If I said I'm filtering for top talent nobody would bat an eye. If you think I'm being unfair you can simply become more skilled at these problems so that I have absolutely no reason to say no, or to not interview in these places (the better approach).

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#523
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries in Japan are 65-70% of SF Bay Area (for FAANG, local is much worse) London, U.K. is about the same as Japan. I don’t have experience with India, and my knowledge of Canada is too far out of date to be useful. All those salaries are very good for the local market, but are also much lower than SF.

In India, at a FAANG, it’s usually 40-50% of Bay Area salaries.

We should bear in mind that salaries are only a part of total compensation in U.S. mothership locations.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Facebook are making hundreds of thousands of (almost endirely advertising derived) dollars per employee. They have functional monopolies on search and social media advertising respectively, so every company in the world looking to use those advertising vectors is at their mercy. Maintaining that extremely lucrative position is worth paying an excess to achieve even small advantages in staying ahead of the…

Years ago, I heard that Google made $800,000 per employee, I wonder what its at now? This is why Amazon is as big as it is, because the vast majority of their employees are warehouse and delivery workers at low wages - so the margins they make per employee are insanely higher than Goog...

From their latest earnings release [0], they had 61.880 billion dollars in revenue for the second quarter and 144,056 employees so a simple annualization of that quarter would put them at 1.718 million dollars in revenue per employee.

[0]: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#525
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India, at a FAANG, it’s usually 40-50% of Bay Area salaries.

We should bear in mind that salaries are only a part of total compensation in U.S. mothership locations.

Actually I meant TC is 40-50% of Bay Area TC. Thanks for pointing out TC vs salary. I can’t edit my original comment.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever work for a company that employs that many people and would treat you like shit? For the (slightly more) money? Well then that's your own doing, innit? The great thing about having any sort of skills is that you can pick and choose what you want to do with them. If you choose to work for someone like that, you're willingly subjecting yourself to misery, and to (probably) wasting some of the best yea…

Been in both roles before at Small Fun Startup and BigCo and I'll take BigCo every time now because that extra $100K/yr (and its usually way way way more than that compared to the startup) get me closer to my life goals of total fiscal independence and retirement quicker. So yea, I'll sell my soul and eat shit for enough $$$.

> fiscal independence

Probably not since your government will most likely always require you to pay taxes, but you may be able to achieve financial independence for some definition of the expression.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#528
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be easy for a senior to provide $40k more value than a junior employee, especially considering that a lot of the value a junior employee creates can be due to mentorship and working with senior employees.

But how do you evaluate value on a multi person and even multi team project? Is the tester or security person valued as much as the senior dev? Without them the devs work might do more harm than good, right? How do we put value on those intangibles?

I wanted to add to this. How do we evaluate value for managers? They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead.

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#529
I don't know who to believe. Compensation has indeed skyrocketed for remote positions, I can see as much from job ads.

At the same time, I'm participating in hiring for a UK company (for remote or onsite positions that pay nowhere close to Bay Area rates), and we're fighting off people applying, to the point where we can be very picky. These people are very qualified, and still trying to get into positions where you would assume the compensation to be under 70k £ / 100k $ based on public data.

From looking for a remote, well-paying role, I couldn't get a lot of interest despite having an okay resume, in roles where the tech stack is the exact one that I've been using for a while.

So, what is going on?

Re: Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Do you have former co-workers who have moved on who'd love to have you at their new place? If so, I bet they can help you get past the coding tests.

Unfortunately the people I have (had?) a good enough relationship with where I feel like I could ask for favors like that just moved on to other big tech companies that all do the same leetcode hazing. Definitely would have been something I'd have tried otherwise though.

Well, these folks may know folks at places that don't do the hazing. I'd reach out if I were you and "just have a coffee" and explain you're looking but want to avoid the leetcode grind. They may have some advice or connections.

An alternative is to grow your connections by going to meetups or something similar (I know, more unpaid labor! But it will pay off.) After 2-3 months, you should know the regulars and can have the same conversation with them. For bonus points, offer to help out--meetups I've encountered are usually looking for some kind of help, whether that be running a meeting, finding sponsors, helping speakers or something else (even, in the before times, setup and teardown of chairs/meeting space).

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