[HN Gopher] Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market ...
___________________________________________________________________
Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-
com era
Author : belter
Score : 258 points
Date : 2021-08-01 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I've really got to focus my efforts in breaking into the US
| market.
|
| Anyone in the ag-tech sector state side?
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Flock Freight. What a joke
| yaitsyaboi wrote:
| What's wrong with them?
|
| > Flock Freight's algorithms help companies move products more
| efficiently, combining small shipments into a shared truckload
| (like a carpool for freight).
|
| This sounds cool to me. Certainly more than all the ad tech and
| blockchain companies out there. A job here could mean
| revolutionizing logistics with AI, slashing greenhouse gas
| emissions, this stuff is core to our economy and modern life.
| gigatexal wrote:
| This sucks. I'm finally at a company that I like with a team that
| I like but I KNOW I am underpaid compared to what the market is
| paying. And yet I know I should be looking elsewhere.
| nickpp wrote:
| Choosing your employer based on only one criteria
| (compensation) is akin to choosing your life partner based also
| on a single criteria (beauty/money/etc).
|
| Look at the whole package.
| dh303 wrote:
| Sometimes it's not worth it, especially if you're with a good
| company/team.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm planning to get back out in the market, but I sure do hate
| the interviewing routine. I'd love to make a bit more money
| (sure, I dream of the 500K just like everyone else, but half that
| would be a pretty serious upgrade, I'm not in SV). I'm solidly
| into middle age, but I did add another credential at least
| (thanks OMSCS), now I just have to convince folks I don't suck. I
| actually don't suck, but whiteboard coding and leetcode questions
| suuuuck.
| y04nn wrote:
| Is this situation specific to the US? Has anyone experiences in
| other countries?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Canada. Am regularly bombarded with recruiters, although mostly
| for the US market.
| abledon wrote:
| are they all wanting your to lift-and-shift your life to US?
| or are they Remote positions
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Half and half. A pile of them are for Kaiser, so I assume
| that is some high turnover pit.
|
| I haven't been actively following up through to figure out
| which ones are permanently remote.
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| Also in Canada as well. I have been regularly courted by
| recruiters from both US (remote) and Canada.
|
| I have started a new job a few months ago. My now former
| manager was trying to come up with a counter offer, but my
| new offer is too far off from my old compensation package.
| tiagod wrote:
| Lisbon, Portugal. Haven't seen anything like this before.
| Anyone going through some frontend bootcamp will be hired
| immediately with much higher salaries than any comparable job
| with the same barrier to entry.
| llimos wrote:
| Israel is pretty hot as well now. Lots of approaches landing in
| my inbox, and they're good ones too. And as in the article -
| some haven't embraced remote, and I feel like they're losing
| out.
| mmarq wrote:
| Same in London, everybody I know got a 20-25KPS rise in the
| past 12 months.
| blacha wrote:
| New Zealand, with our borders closed my company has had
| multiple job ads open for intermediate/senior developers for
| over a year.
|
| Every candidate we do interview, generally also has multiple
| other job offers.
| dpaleka wrote:
| No one is reaching out in Switzerland right now, but I guess
| they should. Let's try my luck again:
| https://danielpaleka.com/docs/cv-daniel-paleka.pdf. (EU
| citizen.)
| dt3ft wrote:
| Switzerland has plenty of code written in vb/c# and tech like
| wpf is sought after. I highly recommend you look into that
| and do a few sideprojects using this "old, uncool" tech, if
| you want a job there. (Source: I lived and worked in CH for 6
| years)
| thr1236 wrote:
| Hard to know what is a good or high total comp in the current
| market.
|
| I'm at $175k in central FL. I see a lot of people posting much
| higher pay on various forums and I often wonder if I'm underpaid.
| Now more than ever.
|
| Outside of FAANG (and similar) I've only found companies paying
| around ~200k total for senior level engineers.
|
| These places still have rigorous interviews but not quite FAANG
| difficulty.
|
| Still, the motivation to even interview for such a small bump is
| not really there for me (wife and 2 kids).
| echelon wrote:
| > I'm at $175k in central FL.
|
| For total comp that's really low. I'd expect that to be paired
| with RSU equity grants of $150 - $200k/yr.
|
| Any publicly listed "tech company" that isn't penny pinching
| like Amazon will probably offer similar rates.
|
| Maybe look for a tech company that is hiring remote? Negotiate
| a good total comp package if it isn't in line with what you see
| on glassdoor, etc.
| stakkur wrote:
| This seems...extremely California-centric. Anecdotally, in the
| Portland area I don't see this at all.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Us in the midwest are told to go back to the office still.
| Management certainly cannot handle change here whatsoever.
| stickyricky wrote:
| Any tips on getting a remote FAANG SWE job? Is it really all
| LinkedIn profile + attracting a recruiter?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Get a referral from someone who works at the companies.
| stickyricky wrote:
| I'm in Miami. Its hard to meet FAANG employees here.
| iamricks wrote:
| Me too, it's hard to meet any SE here.
| lostcolony wrote:
| That might get you a recruiter call, but it's not at all
| helpful in actually getting the job.
|
| Best thing is to build a solid LinkedIn profile. I've had
| multiple FAANG recruiters reach out in the past based on my
| LinkedIn profile, but my own applications have never received
| attention.
| spike021 wrote:
| For the latter question, "maybe"?
|
| I have a LinkedIn but I don't really keep it actively updated.
| But for my current FAANG job I was sourced via LinkedIn.
| Received a random recruiter inbox message there and eventually
| was hired.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I see it more as inflation than anything else.
| okareaman wrote:
| If companies want to tap and underutilized work force, hire older
| workers. Put out job offerings with "30 years C programming
| experience required." Yes I get it that every company wants 10x
| Ninja Rockstar programmers, but those programmers are not going
| to take your sh*y back end Java/PHP jobs.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yup, similar the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest losers of the
| Covid crisis and its recovery are the untalented, whose jobs are
| pay little and are replaceable and interchangeable like cogs. And
| the biggest winners, similar again to the post-2008 recovery, are
| the talented, whose wages exceed inflation and whose
| contributions are valued and are harder to replace.
|
| Some tech jobs may feel like a dead-end, but better than low-
| paying and dead-end retail/service jobs.
| spec-obs wrote:
| This is not happening for me, but then again I am doing zero to
| market myself, so that' not a complaint. I would have thought I
| would have a few headhunters after me , oh well :(
| nemo44x wrote:
| You probably haven't been picked up in the selection algorithm
| for whatever reason. Fatten up your LinkedIn and spam it with
| keywords for the skills part. Make your recent experience
| impressive.
| tcbumperino wrote:
| Once you're coasting in the 400-500k FAANG range, what's the
| optimal move to get 700-800k+? Seems there are too many
| graybeards to get a Principal title. Better to switch to manager
| role? Or VP eng type at some startup and hope your stock hits? Or
| maybe VP at some non tech company?
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| Wish I knew
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| I told myself I'd be fine at 300k. Now I'm there, and I've
| picked up more hobbies. Doesn't stop me from looking for new
| gigs, from time to time. Going super deep into optimizing for
| one thing might be a good short-term, but bad long-term
| proposition. A lot of getting to 700k, I imagine, is luck. So
| long as you're competent, it's right place, right time. You
| can't force that situation to happen, so it's wasted energy to
| invest further.
| gavinray wrote:
| You would abandon your company and current position for a
| slight pay increase?
|
| Do you not actually care about the company you work for and
| you're just there for the pay?
|
| You make so much money already -- what is the thought process
| here
|
| Man imagine trying to hire people and knowing they would all
| leave in a heartbeat for a slight pay increase.
|
| What ever happened to working somewhere because you believe
| in what you're building and the people you're around bring
| you joy?
| zinclozenge wrote:
| Is this a joke? No I don't care about the companies I work
| for in the slightest. A company is only as good to me as
| their last paycheck, to paraphrase from The Sopranos.
| gavinray wrote:
| Why do you work for a company you don't care about,
| instead of one you do?
|
| Don't you feel hypocritical -- you're supposed to treat
| others the way you want to be treated.
|
| I assume if you were hiring people, you wouldn't want
| them to do that to you.
|
| So why do it to others?
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Why do you work for a company you don't care about,
| instead of one you do?
|
| Because they don't exist?
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| I wouldn't leave my job for a "slight" increase in pay,
| though that's subjective and we haven't defined concrete
| amounts, other than 300k and 700k in my previous comment,
| and such a jump (more than double) could not be
| characterized as slight-- it's substantial.
|
| I need to be paid a risk premium for the new gig having
| potentially worse colleagues, poorer WLB, or whatever
| things I find after the interview process. With my current
| job, I know all of these things. So jumping from 300k, to
| say, 325k would be unwise and immaterial (8.3%). I might
| jump for 350, definitely for 400.
| tcbumperino wrote:
| Imagine caring about your employer who employs 100k+ other
| people and who would fire you without hesitation. (Or glee
| even.)
| gavinray wrote:
| 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 years of your life
| working on things you don't give a flying fuck about.
|
| For people who also don't give a flying fuck. There are
| no fucks to be given -- the organization is, for lack of
| a better term, Fuckless.
|
| Working in a Fuckless org does not, as Marie Kondo would
| say, "Spark Joy".
|
| If you have to choose between: - $150k
| Salary @ small startup working on something you're
| passionate about with a close-knit team - $250k
| Salary @ $BIGCO to be COG_IN_WHEEL_#3356
|
| The tradeoff you're making there is pretty clear
|
| I'm not a judgmental person and don't ride moral high-
| horses. Personally, I value happiness, mental wellbeing,
| and have a fulfilling life more than slightly more money.
|
| If you don't and you choose to subject yourself to all
| that awful stuff for the money, that's well and good, but
| you also can't turn around and complain about it or act
| like it's the only/a normal choice.
| MathYouF wrote:
| How many companies are building something worth believing
| in?
|
| The ones who are (few) defintiely don't worry about this
| problem as much. If a company is having problems with it
| it's probably that their estimation of their own moral self
| worth is what's incorrect, not the attitude of their
| employees.
| gavinray wrote:
| So, so many. The world is full of them.
|
| I work at my current job because I used their OSS tool at
| a past position and felt like I had my life changed. Then
| wanted to share it with every other developer.
|
| So I got in contact with them and told them how I felt,
| and now that's what I do.
|
| If I ever feel like the tool doesn't represent the same
| quality as when I started or the company values have
| changed, welp, then it's quittin' time and on to the next
| thing I go I suppose. But I don't see that happening --
| or at least I really hope so.
|
| Nobody's integrity and happiness should be compromised or
| up for sale, unless that's what they want.
|
| I've slept under bridges and I'll go back to it again
| before I sell myself out, tell lies, or pretend to be
| someone I'm not.
|
| Here's some examples of things I think are genuinely
| valuable and jobs I would do:
|
| - Software for addiction treatment centers and
| rehabilitation
|
| - Bioinformatics and genomics for disease, especially
| making information accessible to regular people. Genomics
| for fitness/sports performance.
|
| - Software reform in partnership with state/governmental
| agencies for criminal justice
|
| - Anything to do with LLVM. LLVM is fucking cool.
|
| - GraalVM is fucking cool.
|
| - Music software -- production (DAW's), plugins,
| education software to make music theory accessible
|
| - Software to make learning programming accessible. Stuff
| like repl.it, Codesandbox, Scrimba
|
| I could go on and on. The world has so many serious
| issues, and interesting problems/challenges to work on --
| just pick one you like and relentlessly hunt companies +
| people down + study (if you need to, to learn the domain)
| until you get a job.
|
| If I can claw myself out of poverty, drug-addiction, and
| homelessness as a highschool dropout, into a white-collar
| career then I'm pretty sure most people with less
| disadvantaged life scenarios can too.
|
| ---
|
| Not to pull the cliche, stupid "by-your-bootstraps"
| argument. But look, humans are driven and intelligent
| beings that drive the force of history.
|
| Don't tell me that there's no company in the world doing
| something you believe in, and you can't get a job doing
| what you like, etc.
|
| That's really pessimistic and defeatist.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What ever happened to working somewhere because you
| believe in what you're building and the people you're
| around bring you joy?
|
| Capitalism.
| gavinray wrote:
| What kind of a fairy tale is this -- 400, 500, 800k?
|
| I make ~110k, and I have no hobbies but code + contribute to a
| variety of OSS projects in my freetime.
|
| What sort of software do you have to be writing besides magic
| money printing machines for it to be worth that amount of
| money?
| sparker72678 wrote:
| Not sure what level you're at but 150+ is pretty widely
| available for fully remote SWE positions.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > What sort of software do you have to be writing besides
| magic money printing machines for it to be worth that amount
| of money?
|
| My understanding is that you have to get into FAANG or be in
| certain roles at certain HFT firms. I'm also pretty sure
| these are TC numbers are large chunks of those numbers are
| stock options.
| barrkel wrote:
| RSUs - way more liquid than options, they're practically
| cash in the bank when they vest, but watch out for cliffs
| (i.e. vesting schedule). Amazon is particularly bad (tail
| weighted), Google is particularly generous (every month).
| gavinray wrote:
| Even in FAANG I have a hard time understanding how any
| developer is worth that amount of money though.
|
| I know a solid number of FAANG and ex-FAANG devs -- the
| stuff they work on (from what I've heard) isn't much
| different from the sorts of software I assume most people
| in SaaS startups work on. Outside of scale (which is
| significant). A lot of it is internal tooling though, which
| never hits absurd amounts of scale.
|
| I do know that there are x100 devs at FAANG that put out
| the groundbreaking projects that change landscapes -- but
| that's generally these well-known outlier developers for
| which there are a tiny handful in the world.
|
| HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing
| business, FAANG I don't. But also, I've never worked or
| applied at FAANG, so I can't really form a valid opinion I
| suppose.
| bxji wrote:
| Scale is certainly a part of it.
|
| I work in one of the data platform teams at a social
| media company. Between our 3 HDFS clusters, we're storing
| more than an exabyte of data. At our scale, we have to
| tune our workloads carefully to make sure that problems
| of scale are not noticeable to internal customers (data
| scientists, analysts, etc.).
|
| We basically have an entire org of highly paid engineers
| focused on making sure people can use that data
| efficiently. So we have a team of people working on
| storage, on Spark, on Presto/Trino, on data ingestion,
| and so on.
|
| So my understanding is that we're investing in engineers
| to improve data science productivity, so that they can do
| analysis without having to understand the internals of
| all our systems, so that executives can make informed
| decisions backed by data to continue printing money. Or
| something like that...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >HFT and quants I understand, that's money-printing
| business, FAANG I don't.
|
| According to 10-K reports, they print far more money. The
| net income per employee figures are never before seen for
| organizations of that size, for so many years:
|
| https://seekingalpha.com/comparison/9e-FAANG-Stocks
|
| For Amazon, you have to strip out the non tech employees,
| but similar numbers exist at AWS. That is the beauty of
| near zero marginal costs, winner take all markets, and
| extremely high barriers to entry.
| AQuantized wrote:
| 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 curve.
| chucky_z wrote:
| Currently at a medium-large company. I've saved the
| company 10 years worth of my salary in the first 6 months
| of my position and continue to make decisions to multiply
| spending power on things like research.
|
| I also try to make damn well sure everything we use is
| contributed too financially and we open source as much as
| possible.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I think with FAANG it's mostly just down to them having
| insane valuation and being able to give out those stock
| options. The base salaries don't seem particularly high,
| until maybe the highest levels.
| bredren wrote:
| Yes. When I hear a valley person mention salary, they
| usually bundle in stock compensation.
|
| The cash and other benefits are still ludicrous by any
| normal assessment but stock makes it unreal.
| simpleguitar wrote:
| If you look at FAANG earnings, their annual gross revenue
| (before expenses), is at least $1M _per employee_. Last
| time I looked Apple does $1.5M including all their Apple
| store employees.
|
| It's not just insane valuation. If the employees are
| bringing in $1M per head, you can afford to spend more on
| those who are making stuff.
| baby wrote:
| Personally, I never understood how you could even pay
| someone 100k TC... it's just that some companies make a
| LOT of money, so much that's it's just impossible to
| fathom.
| gavinray wrote:
| > Personally, I never understood how you could even pay
| someone 100k TC
|
| I grew up fairly poor (what Americans consider "poor"),
| home was a double-wide trailer, best my mum could do for
| food was peanut butter and crackers.
|
| Got better in later years towards the end of childhood.
|
| But a combination of: the above, being homeless for a
| while, and working a lot of jobs like manual
| labor/landscaping, dishwashing, food service, retail etc
| for minimum wage gave me perspective.
|
| I honestly don't have any clue why I get as paid as much
| as I do.
|
| I'm not complaining. Employer, if you're reading this,
| don't take my money away lmao. I'm finally not poor
| anymore.
|
| But my life was fucking miserable for $8/hr and in tech
| now I make (what feels like) ludicrous money for work
| that isn't even hard.
|
| World is real backwards in a lot of ways.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Would you rather more money go to management and stock
| holders? Folks doing the work and making the world more
| productive deserve a _larger_ share of the pie, not a
| smaller one.
| gajjanag wrote:
| A developer is worth whatever the local market pays at
| the time to retain them. If you have a look at housing
| costs in the bay area/Seattle (close to work 2000 sq ft ~
| 2 million US dollars), you will understand why anything
| below 200k makes almost no sense in these areas for an
| experienced dev, and why 400k+ is fairly common.
|
| I agree with you - hence why it is very hard for early
| stage startups to give meaningful offers in the bay area.
| abledon wrote:
| you could do performance optimization for a team on already
| established services inside GCP/AWS... you are literally
| saving Millions of $ a year if you optimize the services used
| by tens of thousands of other companies.
| tcbumperino wrote:
| FAANG are magic money printing machines. That's why they can
| afford so many bs side projects that don't make any money.
| And I write software that consumes 50-100x my salary in
| resources, so I'm probably underpaid.
| ketzo wrote:
| If the primary goal is compensation, management is pretty much
| always gonna be the answer; that, or lots of very lucky equity.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you're in that range, VP Eng at a startup is probably a
| lower expected value than staying put, unless you have very
| credible reasons to think that an exit is 9-18 months away.
| derwiki wrote:
| > But now, these technical interviews are often being waived
|
| Huh? First I've heard of that
| dilap wrote:
| Not sure I'd want to work somewhere that didn't do tech
| interviews (or something equivalent, e.g. project).
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Does any site list how various companies interview? I
| personally find take home projects very interesting, as I
| usually get to play with a new technology.
| EastSmith wrote:
| If the company pays well, it seems to me that not asking
| bubble sorting questions during interview does not matter?
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Yes this was not my experience in recent interviews (past few
| weeks). I suspect that maybe this is only the case for the
| select few with "gold-plated" credentials (I.E. FAANG on the
| resume).
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Most companies' hiring processes don't vary on per-candidate
| basis though.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I have FAANG on my resume and this is definitely not the case
| lol. Then again, it's Amazon which most people regard to have
| the dumbest engineers so...
| throwaway_45 wrote:
| It really should be FG. Facebook and google pay way better
| than any of those other companies.
| [deleted]
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I know :( I make around $200k and I feel like dying
| constantly because I'm not a "tech chad" as they say.
| chronic2703 wrote:
| Amazon is absolutely a red flag on the resume.
|
| Many hiring managers (like myself) do not want to import
| the toxic, backstabbing, PIP culture from Amazon into our
| org.
|
| Also I've noticed the quality of Amazon engineers is lower,
| on average, compared to Google, ByteDance, FB, Stripe, etc.
|
| My advice is to work somewhere not-Amazon for a year or
| two. Then you'll get more bites.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > the toxic, backstabbing, PIP culture from Amazon into
| our org
|
| I don't think it's fair to blame this culture on
| individual line engineers.
| walshemj wrote:
| I think that is pretty much all big companies at this
| point
| grp000 wrote:
| I don't think most people at the IC/engineering level
| would choose that culture, but once they're in and
| inundated into that environment, how many are going to
| propagate it out of habit? That's the risk.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I agree, however you do end up participating in it, you
| get used to it, and you bring it with you. That's the
| fear anyways. I think it's a little bit true. Facebook
| has similarly nutty PIP ("PSC") culture, and you see it
| from ex-Facebook folks who run other organizations once
| they leave.
|
| I have seen recruiters red-flag FB/IG managers, depending
| on why they're leaving FB/IG for this reason. Engineers
| less so but it definitely comes up in the interview
| process. It comes up the other way too, when I interview
| - particularly senior - FB engineers, their first
| question is "tell me about your PSC culture."
| momodadragon wrote:
| I've seen recruiters red flag Uber engineers as possibly
| sexist (and to a lesser extent racist).
| dbish wrote:
| This almost seems like a trolling comment but I'll
| respond to add some info from a different POV. FWIW (and
| as an ex Amazon manager) I haven't seen this at all for
| many of the engineers who are my friends and former
| coworkers. Good engineers from Amazon are in high demand
| and are getting offers frequently. If you're an Amazon
| engineer, you can have a lot of experience running live
| services at massive scale and that's invaluable. I also
| haven't seen any recruiters who mark Amazon as a red
| flag, but hey, maybe there are some very particular
| companies I don't know about who have a vendetta
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| What's your company? Just to save time for those who
| might apply if not for this comment?
| dbish wrote:
| Yes, would love to know the company. Happy to help steer
| Amazon engineers away during the current engineer
| shortage so they don't waste your recruiters' time
| neilv wrote:
| Apparently I'm not plugged into _all_ the industry
| chatter.
|
| All of the big, well-known companies have imperfect
| reputations. (And I suspect my own ideas about which
| companies are better wouldn't quite fully agree with an
| HN sentiment index.)
|
| When interviewing someone from a company that you believe
| to be a concern/ambiguous, it might be very valuable to
| ask, "So, why did you first go to ___?" "What do/did you
| like about it?" "Why don't/didn't you like about it?"
| That might answer any concerns pretty quickly.
|
| (But if they give interview-prep-book answers, or seem to
| be trying to tell you an answer that you in particular
| will agree with, that's also valuable information, IMHO.)
| spike021 wrote:
| Is this true?
|
| Since joining Amazon 2 years ago the rate of recruiters
| hitting my inbox has increased around 3x and I regularly
| get contacts from Google, Facebook, and MS recruiters,
| plus recruiters from random small shops in the Bay Area.
|
| I suppose you are exaggerating.
| dbish wrote:
| I've seen phone screens skipped more frequently recently but
| not full loops.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| This used to be fairly common actually. Facebook interns got
| automatic Google onsites for a long time. Not Amazon or
| Microsoft interns though - apparently we aren't worthy.
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| G skipped my phone screen coming from A.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Did you pass hiring committee previously?
| hhjinks wrote:
| A friend of mine had job offer with a 24-hour deadline on hand.
| A past colleague of ours gave him a referral at his company,
| and he received an offer with ~80% higher TC an hour later
| after a quick phone screen. Happened in Norway.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I got a new job about ~5 months ago and this was not my
| experience at all.
|
| It was leetcoding questions for days. If you didn't ace it,
| you'd get ghosted quickly.
|
| One place, I did 3 rounds of interviews, an all day take home
| assignment. I still got ghosted!
|
| So I call BS on this quote as well.
| Salgat wrote:
| I fucking hate leetcode. It takes me about a month or two of
| practicing to get caught up and proficient with leetcode, but
| there's 2 issues with that. The first is that that is a lot
| of personal time and effort to invest to prepare for
| interviews. And second, my professional skill does not
| increase at all from practicing leetcode. Leetcode beyond the
| concepts of easy/medium questions is programming trivia and
| reflects rote memorization more than anything else. And worst
| of all, leetcode distracts from far more valuable skills like
| design patterns and how to properly architect and design
| software.
|
| In the end, the only companies that should be doing leetcode
| beyond the easier level questions are companies with an
| insane number of applicants where they can afford to turn
| away a lot of good talent.
| nicoburns wrote:
| My experience is that this is wildly inconsistent between
| companies. I've worked for crappy companies for low pay that
| had ridiculous long multi-week interview processes, and good
| companies for much better pay where the interview was a
| single 30 minute phone call where they offered me the job.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Was this a FAANG or FAANG-like company where it's likely
| you'd have TC of $350K plus, or a sub-FAANG company where
| your TC would likely be in the $100-200K range?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Lol not at all. It was regular run of the mill startups and
| small companies. TC like ~$150k-180.
| vbtemp wrote:
| It's interesting to me. When the carrot is TC of
| $350K+++, sure, anyone is willing to jump through that
| grinder. But for ordinary run-of-the-mill companies,
| there are so many that _don't_ have a hazing-like hiring
| process, I don't know how the ones that do make it.
| hogFeast wrote:
| They don't. That is what the article is about.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| Same here, applied to a medium sized company and got the
| standard hackerrank garbage test totally unrelated to the
| position right off the bat. At least now I know who I don't
| want to work for.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| A bit of my experience:
|
| I recently switched careers going from teaching to tech and the
| job I now have, during the interview, didn't ask me to do any
| coding tests. They asked me a bunch of questions in zoom about
| my experiences doing certain things relating to the job and I
| was able to answer them with examples of how I did those things
| with a previous project I worked on. Got the offer the next day
| and I'm very grateful it turned out to be such a smooth and
| stress free experience.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| At a certain level of seniority people get the 'white glove'
| treatment where the interview is more about convincing them to
| take the job.
|
| Makes sense to me - if someone already has a reputation and
| track-record, and it's you that reached out to them, then why
| are you asking them to prove themselves to you? Most important
| thing is to prove yourselves to them!
| nemo44x wrote:
| Experience and reputation play a big part in this too. As
| your colleagues branch off to other opportunities they'll
| bring your name up when the new company is looking to fill a
| role. At this point you're being contacted by VP's or
| Directors to gauge your interest.
| ml_giant wrote:
| I recently went through the hiring process for a few companies
| and while most of them required several technical interviews,
| one of them never once had me do a coding test. I essentially
| kept going through the process just to see if they would make
| me an offer after three conversations (They eventually did make
| an offer).
| mahathu wrote:
| So I'm a recent computer science grad from Germany with some side
| projects. Nothing spectacular. I haven't actually graduated yet
| because I fell sick just before my last exam, so I had to
| reschedule it to some time later this month.
|
| It's been a few years since I've been on the "I'm gonna move to
| the US after graduating and become a techbro" train. So I'm not
| up to date on the latest H1-B regulations etc. Does this mean it
| might be easier for foreign workers to find a job as well?
|
| I don't want to stay in the computer science industries and have
| made plans to go to uni again for something entirely different,
| so I'm mostly just looking for a job for a year or two max, until
| then.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Meanwhile we got guys like this defending the leetcode regime
|
| https://twitter.com/polotek/status/1420960218469388290
| dbish wrote:
| Even if you think you're well paid, now is the time to look
| around. I've had a lot of friends, mentees, and coworkers get
| huge bumps on total compensation even as relatively senior
| engineers and managers. Pay is jumping and companies aren't doing
| a great job keeping that up for their people who have been around
| for a few years. As an employer, that should be the top worry,
| keep comp up, don't lose your people because you've become
| complacent on pay and don't understand that the market is
| changing right now
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Exactly this. We just gave all our devs a significant raise -
| way above the norm, and way way earlier than we would. We're
| acknowledging the reality of demand, scarcity and wage
| inflation. My co-founder (also my wife) and I immediately felt
| our blood pressure drop once we did that.
|
| Market conditions are making it hard to retain and very hard to
| hire. We've done a bunch of other stuff to recruit - which I
| described in another comment here - and it's making a huge
| difference. Employers who don't respond to these market
| conditions are in for a rough ride.
| apozem wrote:
| That is very smart.
|
| My old employer gave me a 3% raise in January and tried to
| make it some big gift. I left anyway in April for a 50% bump.
| New company, same level of responsibilities.
|
| The old employer underpays everyone, so that percentage is
| higher than it otherwise would be, but still.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Kudos for doing the right thing. I hope (and expect) that for
| you and your business, it is the right thing. Hopefully those
| devs are quite skilled, and worth keeping around, and will
| stay and help the business grow! I feel like a lot of times
| employers think devs are expendable, and while that's true to
| some extent, devs also can be quite worth paying extra to
| keep around especially if they've accrued quite a lot of
| domain knowledge that pertains to your business.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A past organization of mine just had a big data breach. It
| would not surprise me if the near complete loss of domain
| knowledge and institutional knowledge was a contributing
| factor/cause.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| On the flip side - I tell recruiters immediately they have to
| AT LEAST match my current comp. Every single one of them so far
| has said they can't even get close.
|
| If you work at FAANG - your RSUs (most likely) have doubled in
| about a year. You could easily already be getting paid more
| than the max offer for the level above where you're currently
| at.
| mabbo wrote:
| I've actually seen the opposite. I'm at a FAANG, but based in
| Toronto. For the first time, recruiters are saying to me that
| yeah, they can do better than that total comp. Often much
| better.
|
| I like my boss and team, but if someone offers me enough
| money and a fully remote job, well, it's going to be hard to
| say no.
| varjag wrote:
| FAANG outside of USA/SV is basically any other tech
| company, this is not surprising.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| My understanding is that FAANG pays very well in India
| and Japan and Canada. Is this not true?
| khazhoux wrote:
| Always remember: your manager is right now looking for a
| new job too.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Even leaving aside golden handcuffs the number of companies
| paying top of market seems relatively small. That's
| especially true once you get past entry level positions.
| ditonal wrote:
| I feel the opposite. A decade ago, it was pretty much
| Google, Facebook, and some elite trading firms that could
| pay a ton. Now so many startups have grown up, there's a
| huge list of them on levels.FYI that will pay 400k+ for
| senior and 600k+ for staff. I recently have interviewed for
| a ton and got rejected a bunch, but I joked with my spouse
| that there's so many that by the time you're done
| interviewing at all of them you've "cooled off" at the
| original one and can re-interview, so there's an "infinite
| loop" of 500k opportunities for experienced SWEs. Despite
| 90% interview fail, I just accepted a 500k all-liquid
| offer- despite me not even being at staff level at the
| company. Hard to say that's not top of market, and it's not
| at a FAANG either.
|
| FAANG is also a horrible acronym for the top paying
| companies since two of those companies don't even pay that
| well. Companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, LinkedIn and
| many others will outpay FAANG companies and their equity is
| fully liquid.
| sparker72678 wrote:
| Omg I need to up my reqs in my interviews.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Yes. Ask for 620 though, then they come back at 575 and
| you just minted half of a 150k salary for being shrewd
| hehe
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Bay area?
| noleetcode wrote:
| I'd love to, as I'm really tired of my current employer, and
| they're definitely taking advantage of me, but I resolved to
| never waste my time with leetcode garbage again... which means
| I either stay where I'm at, or exit the industry entirely.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I see a ton of jobs posted for seniors right now but almost
| none for juniors. Are companies being shy about talent risks
| right now?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| For my current job the posting said 4 years of experience. I
| had 1 at the time.
|
| Officially, my company is only hiring seniors, but if a
| decent junior applied (at least a year of experience
| inclusive of internships), I could see us taking them,
| especially with the right tech stack.
|
| So, apply anyway.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My experience is that this is an ongoing problem. For years
| there have been relatively few junior positions. No company
| wants to train people.
| bpicolo wrote:
| You need senior engineers in order to scale training
| people, so it's a catch-22.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people.
| At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and
| midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to
| be cheap by letting other companies do the training and
| then taking them.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having
| junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love
| being able to break down projects in to tasks and not
| have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing
| one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task
| can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will
| jump on them.
| hdhjebebeb wrote:
| Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being
| architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new
| technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the
| stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.
| Macha wrote:
| I work for a company that has been pretty strong on
| pipelining in people as junior engineers and progressing them
| within the company, but even the direction we had while
| working remote from covid is that training in juniors while
| out of office is something that higher ups don't want to deal
| with (even if they would have little involvement in the
| process, such is corporate bureaucracy), so they're reticent
| to open positions to more junior level developers, and grads
| are pretty much right out unless they've interned with us
| previously.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Non-paywall please
| davidw wrote:
| Yep. I got burned out, quit, took some time off and then got an
| offer that's a nice raise.
|
| I think it's healthy for all of us to reflect on how fortunate
| we are in this field, sometimes.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| Got some RSU vesting November. Should I wait?
| dbish wrote:
| Maybe. It might be worth looking, tell any folks with an
| offer how much you'd lose, and either leave early if they add
| to it, or accept an offer with a start date after the vest.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| If that's a 1 year cliff, yes
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| For those of you who have done this, how do you maximise your
| compensation? Tips appreciated.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092246
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > That means doing getting multiple offers within the same
| time period before you accept one.
|
| I need help on getting to the salary negotiation part with
| multiple companies at the same time though.
|
| This is the instruction booklet for landing a lunar lander
| on the Moon. I need the one for the Saturn V.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Accept offer A. Receive offer B. If offer B > offer A,
| let company A know something has come up and you cannot
| continue employment. Accept offer B.
|
| Lather, rinse, repeat for each offer. The better offer
| may be salary, perks, or just better work conditions. I
| once left a company after working there for 9 days
| because I got an offer working with my friend. I didn't
| even get a better salary and my friend ended up leaving
| after 3 months..
| axpy906 wrote:
| That's not how to do it. You get offer A and B then push
| them to bid on you. Having competing offers gives you
| leverage, use that to get the best employment terms.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| A lesson I did not learn: I dedicated each lunch hour
| every day for a couple of months ringing up companies and
| agencies. I moved jobs three times and doubled my salary
| in that year - which seemed good.
|
| Then I attended a seminar - the question was asked who
| used agencies and who used their "network" for new jobs /
| freelance work.
|
| I was the _only_ hand up to go used agencies and the
| traditional job hunt.
|
| So it's the old saw - keep a profile up - blog, project,
| podcast whatever, so you can use that as an excuse to
| stay in touch with ex-colleagues so that they might think
| of you when they are hiring in 3 years.
|
| As I said not a lesson I have learned but people who earn
| more than me recommend it
| nemo44x wrote:
| You can always ask but another way is to come armed with a
| job offer. Considering you aren't classified as "acceptable
| attrition" you'll likely get a match or better from your
| existing employer. Hiring new talent is difficult and
| expensive so your manager has a lot of incentive to keep you
| around if you're good performer.
|
| But be warned that if your current company decides to let you
| go then you probably need to commit to the new company.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Ask for it.
|
| Seriously.
|
| I interviewed with one company, things went well, I was
| interested, but they came out of the gate with total comp
| that was lower than I was looking for. They were looking at a
| stock grant of X over 4 years. That would have worked,
| provided that I was basically guaranteed a refresher each
| year for X (so that by year 4 I'd making X per year in RSUs).
| I found out that refreshers were usually not for that amount,
| and not guaranteed (barring performance issues). I indicated
| I was looking for X per year in RSUs (given the salary and
| bonus they were looking to offer). The recruiter was a bit
| shocked, but went and asked anyway...she came back with an
| offer granting 4X RSUs upfront, meaning, yeah, I'd be getting
| X every year, starting from year 1. And I'd still be eligible
| for refreshers and whatnot each year.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I learned to ask for things just a bit too late. For my
| current role, the job description explicitly noted there
| would be no relocation assistance. I ended up paying for my
| move out of pocket.
|
| They were actually looking for two people for the role I
| was applying to. After starting, I met the other guy that
| was hired a few months before me. He had moved from even
| further than I had. After talking, he mentioned he was
| given relocation assistance. When I asked him about the
| explicit mention that that would not be offered. He simply
| told me he noticed it, but asked anyway and got it.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Expensive lesson, but a useful one. A good candidate who
| is willing to sign is too valuable to pass on just
| because they're asking for 5-20k in one time expenses.
|
| Even if they stuck with no relo, they might have extra
| budget for sign on, which is equivalent. For whatever
| reason, companies tend to be sticklers for budget
| allocation, even if total amount equates, even to their
| bottom line. Relocation assistance might be frowned on as
| an 'unnecessary' overhead cost ("can we not find good
| people already in the area?!"), but a higher sign on
| wouldn't ("it's a competitive market"), despite also
| being overhead.
| zackify wrote:
| I don't even do a call with the recruiter without listing
| the salary range or what I want to make. Saves a lot of
| time.
| jseliger wrote:
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
|
| (I've not done this as such, but I'm a technical writing
| consultant and the way you get more money from clients is
| similar.)
| grepfru_it wrote:
| 1. Look on glassdoor, indeed, whatever site you want to use
| to find out salary expectations in your role/area
|
| 2. When asked, give this number as your desired target, but a
| lot of times they ask about old pay. if the old pay differs
| greatly, avoid the topic by pointing out how 'the old job
| requirements are different, benefits are different, etc. But
| if they press on this number, tell them, don't lie or
| completely avoid it
|
| 3. Assume the hiring manager has 15% over the offer amount.
| this amount may also impact your future raises, so it may be
| better to cap your ask at 10%. but don't be afraid to go ham
| asking more for starting bonus, longer vacation, golden
| parachute, etc
|
| 4. Good luck!
| dbish wrote:
| Don't use Glassdoor for tech. They are almost always
| incorrect since they are salary focused. Use levels.fyi
| which understands total compensation
| chana_masala wrote:
| Blind can be another good resource
| taurath wrote:
| Correct. And assume levels is old data at this point. And
| don't be shocked, people really make that much.
| [deleted]
| gentleman11 wrote:
| That site names salaries almost 50-100k higher than what
| I see on other salary sites in Canada. Does the site only
| aggregate top paying companies, or is the Canadian tech
| sector actually way more robust than I thought?
| surajama wrote:
| The Canadian tech sector has completely changed over the
| past 5 years (which is when I first came to Canada). When
| I first got here, $100k+ salaries were rare unless you
| were very senior or at a select few companies. I am now
| looking for a job in Toronto after working for a FAANG
| for a few years and often see companies offering over
| $200k for mid-level positions. However I will say that
| level.fyi is a little unrepresentative because it's
| mainly people with impressive TCs posting on there.
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| Nice list. Check if asking about salary history is banned.
| It is in 21 states. https://www.hrdive.com/news/salary-
| history-ban-states-list/5...
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Some of these bans only affect state agencies, the city,
| or special cases.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Even if a company asks, you can say no. I've never
| revealed this info and never will. You are giving them a
| free negotiating card. It doesn't serve your interests at
| all.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > a lot of times they ask about old pay
|
| Been in the industry 25 years and never once agreed to
| disclose my previous pay. Don't do it. Ever. It's none of
| their business and will only be used against you.
| handrous wrote:
| They can just get it through a one of the many private
| spy/surveillance agencies (one of the credit bureaus, for
| instance) if they really care.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
| aleksiy wrote:
| Just to add my own data point. I studied leetcode for 6
| months during covid. Sent about 30 applications interviewed
| at 10 companies and received 8 offers.
|
| 2 of these offers where double my current TC through
| negotiation. It's not just FAANG but startups making very
| good offers. I have 3 YOE.
|
| For negotiation:
|
| Always ask for at least 20% more + a signing bonus
|
| Have competing offers
|
| Interview well
|
| Be willing to walk away. If they can't do it there's another
| company that will.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Could you give rough range of these offers? Would be
| interested in understanding absolute numbers
| tibbetts wrote:
| Understand who you are negotiating with. It's not usually the
| hiring manager or recruiter who has final say over pay.
| Figure out who does if you can, and figure out what they care
| about and need to see or hear. Then equip your contact with
| the information they need to advocate for paying you what you
| want. Like if they need a clearer statement about your years
| of experience, or your other offers, or your alignment with
| the role.
| warent wrote:
| This may sound weird but it's easier to do this when you
| don't _need_ it. When we 're negotiating, people can smell
| desperation. If you can easily walk away from a
| negotiation/offer, you're suddenly in a much more powerful
| position.
|
| Once you're there, figure out how much sounds like a lot and
| ask for even more. Either they'll surprise you and accept the
| terms, or you will negotiate "down" to the amount that
| sounded like a lot. Worst case scenario, they don't take the
| deal and you reject them to go find a new negotiation until
| you get what you want
| yosito wrote:
| This negotiation tactic works fine if you don't have to do
| full day coding challenges to get to that phase, while also
| working a full time job.
| warent wrote:
| These days I just immediately turn those down without a
| second thought. It's a joke of an interviewing system and
| your time is way too valuable for that.
|
| Happy to do coding questions, but not 8 hour long take-
| home projects. Those have screwed me too many times
| Rapzid wrote:
| Teleport has a comically large test. Think 20-40 hours.
| sirmike_ wrote:
| This is very, very true. I refuse to do coding based
| interviews. I'm flexible on certain homework. Hell will
| freeze over before I have to sit through a multi-hour
| panel and coding session. Like for free? Hit the bricks.
| Who can just take 4-6 hours out of your normal work day
| to swing into something like that? Not even germane to my
| role.
|
| The fastest way to avoid companies like that is to set
| boundaries on what you will do and will not do. Good
| recruiters LISTEN and respect this. I do not want my time
| wasted and likewise for the recruiters and companies I am
| talking too.
| indymike wrote:
| If that is the process, and you've survived the gauntlet,
| you have the leverage.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think just the opposite: the best time to pounce on
| them with salary expectations is as late as possible,
| after they've already invested the interview time on you
| and seen you excel.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| If they already have their budget in mind before the
| interview process began, it won't buy you any leverage
| waiting until the very end. They won't care that they
| burnt the money/time/energy considering your candidacy,
| even if that costs them more in the long run.
|
| I've ended up wasting a lot of my own time with this
| strategy. I'll get to the point where they want to extend
| an offer, I name my number, and then we have an awkward
| 15 minutes on the phone (e.g., "the VP couldn't ever
| approve that amount") and then I say I'm not interested
| 24 hours later.
| lostcolony wrote:
| "If they already have their budget in mind before the
| interview process began"
|
| This is impossible to know though, as is its breakdown.
| Many places have very fixed limits on salary and bonus,
| for instance, but RSUs and sign on they have a lot of
| freedom.
|
| Even the places that have fixed budgets all around may
| have multiple openings of varying levels; a strong
| interview showing may cause them to bump the level they'd
| look to hire you at, just to meet your comp expectations
| (I've seen this happen numerous times as a manager when a
| candidate came back asking for more).
|
| If they bring it up at the start, great, it saves a lot
| of time for both of you. If -you- bring it up at the
| start, though, you're just closing off opportunities.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you're closing off opportunities that you wouldn't
| take anyway, it's just another form of time savings. I
| make sure we're at least in the same chapter if not the
| exact same page on comp before spending more than a
| 25-minute intro.
| lostcolony wrote:
| As I mentioned elsewhere, I upped my RSU comp 4x what was
| initially offered by bringing it up at the end, for a
| position I -was- interested in. Had I come out of the
| gate saying I expected that, I'm quite certain the
| response would have been "we can't do that" and moved on.
|
| Fair enough if you only want to work for a company that
| offers your target comp -without- negotiation (since even
| if they're open to negotiating at the start, you're doing
| so when your hand is weakest), but otherwise there is
| nothing to be gained by bringing it up at the start.
| [deleted]
| Tade0 wrote:
| A while ago I switched to a role that was interesting, but
| involved a decrease in compensation, but not a month had passed
| and I was included in a company-wide pay increase.
|
| Overall currently I don't hate my job anymore _and_ the salary
| is slightly better. Best decision I made this year.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| How much should one ask for from a contract with Uncle Sam with
| zero benefits? One hundred an hour for senior dev work sounded
| good to me, but maybe that is old-fashioned in an inflationary
| environment. The taxes get nasty at that point, so not certain.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Here are some "dot-com era" flashbacks from a veteran greybeard:
|
| Near the end of 1999, I moved from SV to smaller hot tech market
| with more affordable housing. I moved totally cold with no
| contacts or job lined up. The week after I arrived, I had 3 job
| offers. I picked the smallest web tech startup. After a couple
| months they got acquired by a SV megacorp and I was pissed! I
| wanted nothing to do with being a small fish in a big ocean of a
| company. But I had just bought my first house and my wife was
| pregnant. I planned to stick around long enough to vest some
| options. Then the big crash hit and the majority of web startups
| were gone and my megacorp's stock had cratered. I had the feeling
| of winning at musical chairs - Pyrrhic though that victory was.
|
| Am I predicting some future tech industry crash? No, but maybe it
| is plausible. It does remind a bit of the shoeshine boy stock
| tip. Maybe the world will finally push back against ad-tech
| stalker capitalism? Haha - I wouldn't bet on that...
| nemo44x wrote:
| The thing about the .com crash is all the investors were mainly
| right, besides some ridiculous things. They were just too early
| as the web didn't have critical mass until 10 years later and
| today's web makes the one of 10 years ago appear quaint.
| Because of that critical mass I think a similar crash is
| unlikely across the entire sector.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| I don't know, I thought pets.com was stupid then, and
| chewy.com is stupid now. The main difference is the Chewy
| guys were smart enough to cash out before the bubble burst
| again, rather than spending their cash on stadium naming
| rights.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Pets.com had a lifetime revenue of $6M.
|
| Chewy.com did $7.1B last year.
|
| That's the difference between 1999 and today.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| I have no skin in the game, but I buy things on Chewy
| because I trust them more than Amazon to not surface cheap
| crap, and their reviews are better. I checked and it looks
| like they're revenue positive with >500M cash on hand. They
| may not be worth their current stock price but I imagine
| they're going to survive as a company just fine.
| quesera wrote:
| > The thing about the .com crash is all the investors were
| mainly right ... They were just too early
|
| And that made them _wrong_. :)
|
| No one will argue that holographic display VR is a bad idea.
|
| Some people will try to get you to invest today.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I hate that the market is so great right now because I really
| can't take advantage of it.
|
| I would love to start the process, to try and get a salary
| increase anywhere from 30%-100% but unfortunately I've stagnated
| sharply skills wise. Don't qualify for the jobs I see I think I'd
| enjoy, and don't even qualify for the jobs that meet my salary
| preferences that I'd otherwise dislike. I also would have to be
| looking at immediately remote roles which just makes things
| harder. I also am about 90% I could not perform on interviews at
| most places. Digging myself out of the aforementioned stagnation
| and prepping for interviews is likely to take years at this point
| and who knows what the market will look like at that point.
| caeril wrote:
| > I've stagnated sharply skills wise
|
| I'm sorry, but what does this even mean?
|
| Nothing has changed in a significant way since 1996, other than
| ops per second and memory bandwidth. If you're an old school C
| programmer who knows how pointer arithmetic and memory
| allocation works, you're better than 99% of the total trash
| new-school Node.js/Django/Rails/React developers who think JSX
| is some sort of "innovation".
|
| Having "stagnated" is definitely a hiring plus. It means you're
| less likely to slow down my systems with eight quadrillion
| layers of dynamic dispatch and abstraction, and you're not
| going to agitate for infecting my systems with Kubernetes
| _specifically because_ I now need to orchestrate ten times more
| production machines to run the ensuing inefficient bloatware.
|
| I can't imagine anyone being more highly sought after than a
| "stagnating" programmer.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| While there's truth to this, I'm gonna guess it's a minority
| viewpoint.
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations on how best to sell yourself
| from such a position? I have a significant C99-era/close-to-
| the-assembly fundamentals background, but I see a lot of "if
| you haven't already AWS'd all the AWS at your last company in
| production at scale, then there's someone behind you who
| has", and that kind of thing has both been a notable lacuna
| in my experience and something that's notably less fixable
| independently than e.g. "plow through a React tutorial to
| familiarize yourself with the basics". In particular, it
| seems like in the heavily external-service-integrating style
| of development, a lot of experience comes in along the lines
| of "remembering the pitfalls you ran into with particular
| vendors under particular loads" and the fundamentals don't
| get you as far. But I hear a lot of conflicting things about
| this.
|
| I'm someone who's (supposedly) quite good underneath but has
| stagnated a lot over the last few years (and on and off
| before that, sadly) as other issues drained away my ability
| to work. I'm gradually stabilizing things and trying to find
| the best way to maneuver, and I'm pretty worried that
| everything's going to pass me by because my experience isn't
| of the right kind and I'm not legible enough. The people who
| are getting the jobs with all the traits I want are the ones
| who got a Real (that is, close to culturally archetypical)
| Job in 2018 and did their time in the salt mines with the
| three verifiable contiguous recent years of experience.
|
| If what you say is true, then it's possible what I mostly
| have is a marketing problem, and it may be that e.g. some of
| the "actual demonstration of ability" is more readily
| solvable with "pull some stuff out into public repositories
| and freshen it up" than I've been imagining.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Well, the thing is, the people you described are the ones
| doing the technical interview. They hire people similar to
| them.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Hey, by stagnating I mean I've barely written code in over a
| year, and haven't done any significant greenfield work my
| whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy
| or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old
| version of stuff that's still out there.
|
| So by stagnating I don't only mean not up on all the new hype
| tech, but also the caricature of a "code monkey". Certainly
| on paper at least.
|
| > you're not going to agitate for infecting my systems with
| Kubernetes specifically because I now need to orchestrate ten
| times more production machines to run the ensuing inefficient
| bloatware.
|
| Sadly this seems to be the sort of thing that most employers
| want.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Start a new project on the side, using the skills you'd
| like to develop.
| the_only_law wrote:
| How do you balance this on the resume. I got plenty of
| cool project ideas, but outside of entry level, it just
| seems odd to list them on the resume (which I presume is
| the only way they'll be seen by anyone giving the
| consensus on LinkedIn and personal sites). o feel it'd
| just look weird when you have projects and skills that
| seemingly have no relevance to your work experience
| especially when applying to roles that are mid level or
| senior.
|
| It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to
| learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at
| a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing
| and building systems that need to handle high throughput
| without slowing or failing. I can't afford to have the
| sort of projects that would allow me to learn those
| things.
|
| The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility
| OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be
| a second job.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Too negative an outlook, imho. You do the research and
| add the keywords, maybe project to your resume. If
| grilled you say I have some experience but am not an
| expert.
|
| Also, you'd be surprised how much you can get done on a
| modern PC with vms or containers, it isn't the nineties
| or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company
| on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.
|
| Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small
| investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.
| sirmike_ wrote:
| Why are you saying crazy self-fulfilling prophesies? Do you
| hate money?
|
| Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills! You
| can learn can't you? Life means learning new stuff all the
| time. Learning never takes a time out.
|
| The military was a bastion of learned lessons for me. One key
| takeaway: You are your own best advocate. Everything in an
| interview or negotiation related to you springs from that
| viewpoint. That's one of the most basic you will repeat
| infinitely. Use it boldly, not arrogantly.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Take the leap into something you WANT. Skills, Sschmills!
| You can learn can't you?
|
| It's just about time really. I could skill up but what's the
| market going to look like by the point I'm ready.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Get the job and then learn the skill. The value proposition
| you present is that you can learn stuff.
|
| This is not a flippant reply! I'm totally serious.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| You didn't qualify for the first job you got. The only
| difference now is you have more experience and less hubris.
| What I do is cut my teeth in a few bad interviews, polish off
| the rough edges, and then I do fine. It's all about attitude
| and confidence.
| chana_masala wrote:
| 15 years at Oracle? I doubt it's as bad as you think. Go for
| breadth and see where you're weak. Practice leetcode, system
| design and do mock interviews on pramp
| Redoubts wrote:
| Meh, honestly just shoot for it. The worst they can say is no,
| and a lot of job reqs are just long wishlists anyways.
|
| Hell, pick a dumb company you'll never want to work for, like
| Uber, if you want real-world practice. Then you at least know
| what real-world failure looks like.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I'm back in the job market and it doesn't even seem like HR
| has a clue what programmers do. My favorite was: "Must be
| fluent in: C#, .NET, and .NET Framework..."
| ddek wrote:
| You stagnated because you don't have a job that stretches you.
|
| Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you have
| right now, but in a different place, you'll see a significant
| bump. But it's highly likely you can do better than that.
|
| Why not try?
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Even if you think the best you can do is the same job you
| have right now, but in a different place, you'll see a
| significant bump.
|
| Because I doubt I could get the bump I'm looking for doing
| the same thing I do now with current restraints
|
| > Why not try?
|
| Time sink, especially with people talking about 4-5 stage
| interviews. Without some level of confidence I'd rather not
| use all my PTO or try to schedule hack at the moment.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > I've stagnated sharply skills wise
|
| I felt the same way over the past few years and decided to
| switch to a Technical Product Owner role at the beginning of
| this year. I used to be your typical HN user who was extremely
| passionate about programming, learning new frameworks,
| functional programming, etc, but at some point over my 10 year
| career I kinda stopped caring about tech entirely. Switching to
| a product owner role was great for me. I still get to leverage
| my technical knowledge without having to worry about the actual
| implementation too much. I also get to develop my soft skills
| like planning, communication, and conflict resolution, which is
| frankly a lot more interesting and satisfying than programming
| ever was.
| quickpost wrote:
| Could you talk more about how you made this pivot? Was the
| transition to product owner a step down initially?
| hnuser847 wrote:
| It was a lateral move within the same company, so my
| compensation is identical to what it was before. Honestly I
| credit my manager and the company in general for allowing
| me to make the move. My manager was extremely supportive
| when I expressed interest in product management and was
| quick to throw my name into the hat when an internal job
| opening popped up. I think it helps that I work for an
| extremely large company. I doubt I would have been able to
| make the switch if I was still working at a startup.
| jvilalta wrote:
| What about the CTO/VP/Sr. leadership roles? Is anyone
| seeing/experiencing something similar?
| miketery wrote:
| Is there a good open source data on this? I know companies use
| things like Redford, but I believe they're incentivized to under
| estimate the averages.
| vbtemp wrote:
| Besides personal networks, are there any particular services
| where anyone is finding good leads?
|
| I found my current job through Stack Overflow, which was great
| (I'd prefer to avoid LinkedIn and the spammy ones). However,
| there aren't as many hits on Stack Overflow as there used to be.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| LinkedIn
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit
| burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All
| remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for.
| (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively).
|
| I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen.
|
| Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover
| letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That,
| or remote jobs are far more competitive.
| paxys wrote:
| No one cares about cover letters, but you do have to put in
| some effort towards marketing yourself. Have an up to date
| LinkedIn profile. Reach out to the company's recruiters and ask
| to schedule a call (instead of just applying online). Try and
| get an internal referral through friends (or friends of
| friends, friends of friends of friends).
| lumost wrote:
| There could be a couple factors here. The first is that
| recruiting at most companies prefers to reach out to candidates
| then the other way around. My suspicion has been that they get
| inundated with unqualified resumes via direct applications and
| just don't want to spend the time looking through it. You
| should try going back through linkedin over the last 6 months
| and messaging recruiters who did cold outreach or directly ping
| a recruiter at a company you want to work for.
|
| The other area is that DS means something a bit different at
| each company you could work for. Some may want SQL experts,
| others want SWE's with some ML and still others expect 100%
| modeling all the time. You may get filtered out if you don't
| have the appropriate buzzwords/skills listed on your resume
| e.g. AWS, BigQuery, Java, python, Tensorflow etc.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| As someone that was educated in computer science and moved
| from software engineering to working in the data science
| world, I find applying to DS positions to be much harder and
| more painful than CS jobs.
|
| CS is easy: Do you know the languages they want, know some
| algorithms, are you familiar with the same tools and
| libraries, how's your experience working with people on big
| projects?
|
| DS: The field is so broad and so deep, you need know
| everything and if you don't, be prepared to be shredded. Your
| interviewer may have a PhD in physics, or a master's in
| economics, or maybe they're just a math major that did a
| bootcamp course. Do you know NLP and how to build a pipeline?
| I feel like I get whiplash when I look at DS job postings
| they're so all over the place.
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| I can't capitalize on my interviews but I get a few through
| recruiters. Just get into one system - like CyberCoders or
| teksystems and you will get bombarded as resume gets passed
| around. They have a relationship w the companies so they
| forward you directly
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| Easiest way would be to just find a recruiter on LinkedIn and
| message them
| vmception wrote:
| nah don't do cover letters, but let a recruiter shop you
| around, they have backchannels into a lot of companies that
| otherwise don't really check their inbox
|
| consider setting your linked in to "looking", which might cost
| money, but this gets the attention of even internal recruiters
| akamaka wrote:
| Reaching out to 10 companies is not enough for remote
| positions. They might be flooded with hundreds of resumes from
| around the world.
|
| Check out what people in other industries go through, for
| context:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5sfbh/my_...
| yosito wrote:
| Consider the fact that many desirable jobs get hundreds of
| applicants. It's entirely possible that even if your resume is
| top notch it got lost in a huge pool of candidates. You need to
| send your resume to hundreds of companies. I have a top-tier
| resume, and when I job search, I aim to send my resume (and
| cover letter/email) to 10+ companies per day.
|
| On the other side, last time I was hiring, I was shocked at the
| low quality of a lot of applications. Applications that weren't
| complete, didn't have a resume, cover letter and work samples
| of some kind got immediately sent to the trash.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Why do you care about cover letters? I haven't written one of
| those in probably 20 years. If I'm hiring and a candidate
| includes one, I usually ignore it (when hiring for an
| individual contributor, engineering role).
| sparker72678 wrote:
| I trash every application that doesn't include one. Because
| most likely they're just spamming openings, and didn't read
| anything about the position.
|
| Every applicant that included a cover letter was way above
| median quality, and worth interviewing.
|
| I might miss some decent people this way, but it's been a
| very helpful first-level filter of applicants.
| caoilte wrote:
| I suspect most of us have had semi-competent recruitment
| agents doing the first stage filter for us.
|
| When I look at a CV ahead of a 2nd or 3rd stage interview
| I take it for granted that they are serious about the
| role and qualified for it.
| naasking wrote:
| I've only paid attention to cover letters for junior
| positions, mainly to evaluate communication skills.
| the_only_law wrote:
| This is kinda of discouraging. I want to bring my income up
| soon and was wondering since people say the markets so good if
| I could spend some months skilling up and then trying to send
| out some resumes. Also I don't really have the resources to
| move and was mainly going to target remote roles.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I think data science roles are not nearly as in-demand as
| software roles are. Remote positions for software seem to me
| at least to be pretty easy to come by. If you are in the data
| side of things but really need a new job, adding software
| skills would be a relatively easy lateral move (at least
| compared to switching to a non-technical role or field
| anyway).
| throwanem wrote:
| Find a good recruiter and put a solid profile on LinkedIn. The
| difference is night and day.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Seconding linkedin, got my current job passively through
| recruiters reaching out to me and taking interviews with ones
| that sounded interesting.
| throwanem wrote:
| Same, for both my current and previous. The two before that
| were via a recruiter relationship. Before that was through
| a friend who works there, and before _that_ was a de facto
| apprenticeship, also via a friend already there. I have
| never gotten a job in this industry by submitting a resume
| cold. From this I conclude that the point is not to need
| to.
|
| You need the LinkedIn profile to look good both to humans
| and to robots, and a worthwhile recruiter will give you
| substantial help tuning both that and your resume because
| these will both help them place you, which is how they get
| paid. Make sure a new recruiter clearly understands this
| and is happy that _you_ clearly understand it, too. Those
| who fail this test are not the ones you want to work with.
|
| It will be harder to work with top-tier recruiters if
| you're working your way up and not yet established. That's
| not fair, but it's the way of the world, and as always you
| mistake the ought for the is at your peril. If you're smart
| and capable, just not yet tested and proven, the ideal is
| to find a recruiter who will invest in helping you develop.
| This is tricky and I lucked into it. The best advice I can
| offer there is, bigger firms with deeper pockets are more
| likely able to support that.
|
| The unequivocally good news is that there is a _lot_ of
| interest, money, and good roles sloshing around the market
| right now. While that 's less good for a newer junior than
| for a proven senior, it is still good for us all.
|
| Don't wait. The article compares the tech industry labor
| market to the housing market, which I think is accurate. It
| also compares now with the boom before the 2000-2001 crash,
| and I think that is accurate too. We can reasonably predict
| another crash. We cannot reasonably predict _when_. So get
| while the getting is good.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Find a good recruiter
|
| I'm going to throw my voice into the ring on this specific
| line; recruiters get a bad name (often deservedly), but I
| found my current job (coming up on 3 years) through a local
| recruiter that contacted me. The whole job search once they
| got involved turned into an incredibly fast, easy process;
| they were great about finding companies that matched up with
| my skills/conditions, they even did some salary negotiation
| (which I am terrible at).
|
| It was a really positive experience. I'm not going to say
| every recruiter would be like that, I'm sure many (even the
| majority) are not. But if you're looking for a job and having
| a lot of difficulty just finding places to apply, think about
| finding a recruiting firm to help.
|
| Do make sure:
|
| - A) that you aren't required to apply through them for every
| job. My recruiter let me keep applying for my own jobs on the
| side while they scouted out.
|
| - B) that they actually have some domain knowledge about the
| industries you're applying to.
|
| - C) that they're actually meeting with you and putting in
| some effort to understand what your goals are, not just
| trying to pressure you into taking every job offer that pops
| up.
|
| I think if you're already a qualified programmer, recruiters
| can fill in a lot of the groundwork of finding out who's
| hiring and getting your resume in front of companies, and
| that just increases the number of options you have. I
| expected to completely hate the process and instead I came
| away feeling like it had made my life a lot easier and a lot
| less stressful.
| verhaust wrote:
| do you have any tips for finding a good recruiter? I've never
| actually searched for one. I get recruiters contacting me on
| LinkedIn and they are pretty bad in my opinion. The ones I've
| followed up with know very little about the job they are
| hiring for and trying to get useful answers back from them is
| a giant pain.
| caoilte wrote:
| Keep searching and hang on to the ones who are funny and
| genuine. I've failed to get a job with an awesome recruiter
| and ended up getting placed with them for a different role
| 12 years later.
|
| None of them know tech but a few of them are smart enough
| to understand that they don't know tech and to focus on
| mastering the social market.
| throwanem wrote:
| Select the best-looking roles from the contacts you get,
| then audition the recruiters. Depending on your experience,
| this may mean relying on your gut. It also means meeting in
| person if possible, or at least on the phone. You want
| synchronous communications and the highest semantic
| bandwidth you can get. If they won't give you half an hour,
| that alone is a huge red flag. There's some other pointers
| in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029857
| rito_ wrote:
| Will you please DM your LinkedIn URL to @AllesistKode on
| Twitter?
|
| That is, if you don't want to post it here.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Maybe not all tech is benefiting as evenly? My company is
| mostly data science. We don't seen to have an issue filling
| those spots. Software engineering job postings have been open
| for months and as far as I know, nobody has been interviewed.
| ianai wrote:
| If someone's going to hire you remote shouldn't you demonstrate
| your ability to communicate well in text and elaborate on what
| makes you a good choice in a well written, directed cover
| letter?
| jka wrote:
| What makes you assume that they didn't, out of interest?
| ianai wrote:
| GP: "Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write
| cover letters or anything"
| novok wrote:
| In my entire decade+ career in bigtech, I've never used or
| looked at a single cover letter.
|
| Cover letters are a waste, and rightfully ignored.
| phenkdo wrote:
| yeah the cookie-cutter cover letters are useless, but i've
| hired people who write: _" i love you are working in
| machine vision, i've worked with x,y and z tech to build _.
| I could augment your efforts in these fields..."_.
|
| Call it what you will a cover message or note perhaps.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Now if you want a job outside of FAANGM (bigtech), a well
| written cover letter will make you the shoe-in candidate.
|
| YMMV
| autotune wrote:
| I've literally never had to write a cover letter in my 6+
| year career in tech outside of FAANGM. Complete waste of
| time imho.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| And i'm explaining from my 22 year career, my best
| positions came with a cover letter
| catillac wrote:
| I hire and pay top of market and I definitely look at
| cover letters, at least scan them (some are huge tells
| that they don't even know what we do, so it weeds out the
| candidate), and often they're the thing that
| differentiates the various candidates who have similar
| backgrounds. I've also hired lots of people without cover
| letters. I don't think spending a few minutes writing a
| paragraph like another poster stated above is a waste of
| time.
| Macha wrote:
| HR strip cover letters before they get to the engineers
| where I work.
| EGreg wrote:
| Alright I'll bite, and ask the obvious question:
|
| Can anyone here share the links to where we would start to apply
| for such jobs? StackOverflow Jobs? Indeed? FlexJobs? Or some
| smarter approach, like putting google keywords when they search
| themselves or something?
|
| Last time I worked doing FTE in the industry I was making
| $175,000 a year in NYC, and due to the pandemic, working from
| home. Say I wanted to do better salary-wise, where would I look
| for such jobs?
|
| I have a distaste for full-time employee setups, btw, I much
| rather prefer to work on projects for businesses, bring my own
| team and solve their business problems directly. But the steady
| paycheck does attract a lot of people.
|
| PS: At our company we experimented with alternatives to full-time
| compensation: https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-
| contributi...
| monkeybutton wrote:
| There's definitely some ripple effects happening, even in Canada
| there's a shortage of software engineers in my province*. I just
| accepted an offer that the HR minion described as "competitive"
| that is a 20% bump in salary. Many large companies here have tons
| of openings. I feel like the market here has detached itself from
| reality.
|
| * https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/the-good-the-bad...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Maybe for some, but I doubt I'll see anything. In fact, I think
| my merit increase will be less than inflation.
| homie wrote:
| Interesting. Lately it feels like I might as well have thrown my
| applications into a black hole.
| cxx wrote:
| 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. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions
| between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the
| zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or
| would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first
| day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing
| the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme
| were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in
| 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more
| difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know
| about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing
| jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an
| interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky
| mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code
| because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was
| a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's
| asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that
| you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a
| team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my
| experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know
| if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a
| pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't
| know how to program.
|
| I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change
| the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I
| conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find
| and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked
| or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except
| when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if
| they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good
| talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so
| hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to
| change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been
| finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I
| applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just
| idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's
| finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of
| "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an
| interview".
| ahmadss wrote:
| Im curious to hear what types of companies an L6 / E6 at FB is
| applying to. Without mentioning company names, what types of
| opportunities are out there that convince you to leave this
| type of comp [1]
|
| [1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-
| En...
| cxx wrote:
| To put it simply, I used to have hobbies before working at
| FB. Now I don't have time for anything besides work. While
| the pay is really good the job is a non-stop, grueling grind
| with no downtime allowed. I enjoyed my time but I'm done with
| it. Also I can't say I'm proud of working there. There's
| people inside that are really great to work with and the job
| was challenging and interesting, but I don't care for FB the
| company and what it's doing in general.
|
| With that said, and I know it's a first world problem, I'm
| looking for a place that aligns with my views and in some
| specific fields that I find interesting. I'm fine taking a
| pay cut depending on the company and the position, I don't
| care so much about money anymore as an employee.
| pega3902 wrote:
| Have the exact same experience at another FAANG company in
| a security org. Endless grind, incredible politics,
| employees endlessly backstab each other. Great salary, but
| really nothing else as a positive. Depressing.
|
| Going to be hard going from 500+ back down to 150-200, but
| I imagine doing something I'm actually passionate about
| will be worth it.
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| > My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so
| hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to
| change it.
|
| Hmm. I agree 100% on the intersection of practiced and asked as
| a key indicator for modern tech interviews.
|
| Have you done any estimates of how long it is going to take
| Facebook to notice your efforts? I looked and they hired 15k
| people since 2019. Even if you block three a week, you're only
| a couple percentage points of drag.
|
| Maybe you need to consider collective action?
| cxx wrote:
| Yeah I know it's a drop in the bucket but for now it's all I
| can afford to do. I've talked to my SWE friends (inside &
| outside FB) and have convinced a few to do the same. Others
| simply don't care or feel it's disloyal to the company, which
| is fair enough.
| bredren wrote:
| How does performing this effort make you feel?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Just say no to those kinds of interviews. Of course you'll need
| to be senior with a small nest egg first.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I am baffled by your approach toward "improving" coding
| interviews at FB.
|
| If you want them to change, you should be taking positive steps
| towards that change, by getting involved with things like
| debrief/candidate review, mentoring new interviewers, or making
| a proposal for a new interview type that could be A/B tested.
| Large changes to things like interviewing practice do happen,
| but they don't come from out of nowhere, and they certainly
| don't come from a single engineer passive-aggressively tanking
| all their interviews.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| You could change the process by being the person who rubber-
| stamps everyone, regardless of how silly the "process" is. If
| the person didn't get the PhD algorithm perfect, yet still did
| a good job, let them in. Anyone who is good enough to be
| considered for an interview at FB or G is good enough to do the
| job. That's the truth of the matter. Be the change you want to
| see-- this somewhat reads as a 'stick-in-mud' approach which
| may not get your desired outcome.
| nostromo wrote:
| Most companies track how many people you green light and if
| you do it too often you may not be given any more interviews.
| neilv wrote:
| If an applicant gets an interviewer who _doesn 't_ do the
| current frat pledge rituals that some CS students (with
| little/no industry experience) 20 years ago thought would be a
| good way to gatekeep who could work in industry...
|
| I'd say that the interviewer seeing past that is a very good
| sign you might want to work with that person. And that person's
| implicit endorsement of the company is also a good sign for the
| company.
|
| Separately, responding to something else in the comment... if
| an interviewer is actively sabotaging their own company's
| process.. Is the company very broken in this and possibly other
| regards? Is the company not able to fix itself, to the point of
| guerilla insurgencies, rather than constructive dialog and
| processes? Why is this person still there? Why do they think
| that sabotaging an applicant's individual aspirations is a good
| idea? Is the company so bad that discouraging the applicant is
| deemed almost certainly in that person's interests? Or does the
| person not care how this affects the individual applicant?
| baby wrote:
| The programming interviews are getting ridiculous. It is really
| an immense pain to go through an interview for a senior
| developer role nowadays, and it is super arbitrary. I did like
| 5 at the end of last year and I was just sooo tired. Got mixed
| results as well even when I felt like I understood the problem
| better than some interviewers. On the other hand, I got two
| companies that gave me take home assignments which both took me
| an entire day to complete, but it was fun as hell at least!
|
| BTW I also did a developer interview at FB to transition role
| (after writing code for two years at FB) and failed. It's just
| really random.
| cxx wrote:
| Yeah I agree, also with the home assignments. Personally I
| prefer home assignments infinitely more than leetcode
| interviews and they are much more realistic to what you do on
| the job. The problem is that some companies are doing both,
| first the assignment and if they like it the standard 4-8
| interviews.
| version_five wrote:
| An interesting corollary is that certain types of business are no
| longer economically viable. If I have a business that competes
| with advertising companies for niche talent, my business model
| has to be able to generate the same outsized returns on that
| talent if I want to be able to afford them, so this limits the
| work I can do.
|
| I don't think people should work for below market wages, only
| observing how it can change what kinds of products and services
| are available. And in the case of tech talent, salaries are being
| driven up by a few key industries that arguably are not where
| society would like to see tech product and r&d investment
| concentrated.
| lima wrote:
| Many people are indeed willing to work below market wages in
| exchange for working on something meaningful to them.
| echelon wrote:
| Game developers are a classic example. They're paid trash
| salaries and treated like vermin.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Those would be viable if done by an organization outside the
| US. Comp is still quite low in many countries, including in the
| "first" world (like western Europe).
| walshemj wrote:
| Old school "media" agencies (all the big names) just don't get
| this this isnt the "mad men" days of the 1960's
| tikhonj wrote:
| There are a lot of ways to compete _besides_ salary, but my
| experience is that companies paying below-market-rate salaries
| tend to be _less_ competitive on other axes too--with the
| exception of fields like research that have no trouble
| attracting far more superb candidates than the field can take.
|
| In my experience, autonomy, impact, psychological safety,
| remote work and flexible hours can all make up for
| _substantial_ differences in pay, and would make the team more
| productive to boot. These are all aspects of the job a company
| can directly control; I 'm not even talking about things like
| prestige, "mission" or super-deep technical problems. And yet,
| it seems like these aspects are all positively correlated with
| pay: higher-paid positions also come with more respect and a
| better work experience.
|
| What's keeping companies from changing this? Trust and respect
| go a long way. Of course, everyone and their dog claims they
| have a great culture, so a team would need a way to _show_
| rather than _tell_ , but that's an eminently solvable problem.
|
| I've seen this work first-hand. For the same level of pay,
| hiring people on a Haskell project was markedly easier than
| other projects at the same company: people actively want to use
| Haskell and it also acts as a real signal that the team is
| willing to do things differently. The latter might actually be
| more important!
| throwaway1556 wrote:
| I've been talking to a few companies about VP Eng roles -- as got
| nowhere getting VC interest in a new project I've been kicking
| around
|
| 3 companies I've had detailed discussions with so far all want
| someone to hire 200-400 new devs in UK/DE this year -- and I've
| seen several other posts with similar aspirations in diff sectors
|
| So that's 1K-2K devs needed that I know (from management/investor
| 'needs', I'm not convinced the engineering requirement really
| needs anywhere near that) ... all in same space ... all same job
| spec ... some willing to pay whatever is required
|
| Much of that in the new fast groceries sector -- I don't think
| people understand how disruptive that is going to be (in more
| ways than just wrecking current physical grocery sector)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I have personally experienced this (with two job changes in the
| pandemic) however I am noticing new career switchers devs are
| still struggling as always.
|
| I've run a mid level successful coding Instagram account for 10
| months now and still hear the same problems from many new devs or
| just getting noticed.
|
| I think this is reflected in my book addressing the problem
| hitting number 7 on product hunt last week.
|
| Moral of the story, still give genuine advice to newbies as they
| aren't always feeling the same love from the market.
| adithyasrin wrote:
| I see the number of daily job postings increasing almost every
| day on my job board. It's mostly dull in Germany because of the
| summer holidays but still, it was a surprise to see a lot of job
| postings.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| If companies (specifically management) were actually competent,
| they would know that it takes $20k-$40k to fill one position,
| $80k-$100k for that individual to optimistically ramp up to an
| existing employees productivity. All this takes at least 1 year.
|
| Instead of the time and money spent, they could easily boost the
| compensation of an existing employee by $25k and not lose money
| or time.
|
| But of course, nobody ever claimed that management is competent.
| yaitsyaboi wrote:
| I've always assumed a bean counter somewhere crunched the
| numbers and when you adjust for people who don't leave because
| of the stress of interviewing + friction of switching +
| uncertainty of new manager, it works out better for them to not
| do this.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| It only works out because existing employees are squeezed of
| every drop of productivity, leading to them to quit.
| Ultimately, the end game for the hiring manager herself is to
| get poor ratings and quitting.
|
| There's a reason why FIRE is so popular in tech industry. It
| is led by incompetent fools in positions of making arbitrary
| decisions without consequences, until it's too late to
| salvage anything.
| dbish wrote:
| Yes, companies need to be way more aggressive in keeping
| current folks and changing their pay bands quickly in these
| situations. The problem for much of big tech is that the
| managers hiring have no real control over the pay bands so it's
| left to folks who tend to not be in the software engineering
| group and do pay 'studies' that take a long time to show they
| are competitive in calculating their pay bands. This works
| until it doesn't, then by the time you realize you lost people
| and can't hire fast to replace them, you've fallen behind your
| competitors
| kyledrake wrote:
| I can't help but feel I know a lot of people this article refers
| to.
|
| I've worked at some great companies with some great people and I
| certainly will again in the future. But my experience also
| contains burnout amounts of internal politics, radioactive code,
| Kylo Rens, "I'm just the ideas guy", et cetera. People love to
| glamorize it with foozeball tables and free pop machines, but in
| the end it's pretty stressful work for a lot of people and comes
| with few guarantees of employment stability or sanity. I'm not
| even going to get into what's happening at Blizzard right now,
| why would I want to work there? Do I want to listen to my friends
| yell at me because I work for the social network turning their
| grandparents into anti-science zealots? Do I want to be forced to
| live in a city I don't want to live in? These aren't salary
| problems for me.
|
| A perfectly reasonable person may take their chances on a
| different profession, or downsizing their life, moving to a less
| expensive place and requiring less income, working on a small
| startup with their friend. Or living in a van and hiking a lot,
| which is a lot cheaper and probably also a lot more gratifying
| than an expensive apartment in a suburb of Expensive Tech Town.
| Perhaps the chaos, uncertainty, and mortality of the last year
| has simply made people re-consider their lives and professions.
| It's what a large percentage of my tech heroes ended up doing (I
| miss you all, but I understand).
|
| From my experience, I would recommend these companies focus on
| creating environments that work for and reward sane people on a
| long term basis, rather than just try to coat over their problems
| with money. It's a far more better strategy for the people one
| would actually want to hire than trying to dump raw salary on
| people for six months until they're too broken to show up to
| work, then hiring new people that don't understand the code to
| clean up the mess. When I do startups, being a place people want
| to work is the only choice we can provide because we just can't
| out-compete most groups on salary anyways.
| hereforphone wrote:
| As someone who's been shot at and had people try to blow him
| up, I question how frequently the PTSD label is given out by
| therapists these days.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Do you think I was being literal about the radioactive code
| too?
| hereforphone wrote:
| I don't understand, so you didn't literally get diagnosed
| with ptsd? Edit: I see you edited your post.
| kyledrake wrote:
| I was not literally diagnosed with PTSD and I apologize
| if usage of the word was offensive. A better, more
| literal description is probably "burned out" and I'll
| change it now.
| pshc wrote:
| It isn't helpful to engage in one-upmanship when it comes to
| people's individual trauma. It's alright for people to share
| their suffering and receive compassion without having
| experienced the absolute worst possible torture.
| [deleted]
| hereforphone wrote:
| "People often tried to kill me." vs. "I worked at a job
| that paid a wage of 98% above the global mean but had a lot
| of stress." There's a difference I think, and if it's a
| matter of one-upsmanship, then we all have PTSD (btw, I
| don't).
|
| Also he edited his post later so I'm guessing you didn't
| see the original context.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I'm guessing the GP meant something closer to burnout and was
| being a little hyperbolic.
|
| Although I think there's something to be said for very long
| term (years to decades) of high stress possibly qualifying
| for something similar to PTSD, but of course I'm not an
| expert on this.
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| Well I guess I really suck a lot
| zz865 wrote:
| I'm really not sure should I be looking now, in the Fall or early
| next year? It feels like salaries will go up from here so is
| better to wait, but I guess you can switch again.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why not look now and just set your threshold for "I'm excited
| by this new place" slightly higher than normal?
| mmaunder wrote:
| This is very real. I run Defiant Inc (at defiant.com) which makes
| Wordfence (at wordfence.com) - a popular firewall and malware
| scanner for WordPress. We're hiring PHP devs that are senior
| level only. The job demands it because we deploy code weekly to
| over 4 million sites on a wide range of environments and configs,
| many of which are mission critical.
|
| We started hiring in 2015 and have always been 100% remote. We
| have a team of 38 now with around 25 full time US based
| employees. Hiring has always been a breeze for us because we've
| always been 100% remote. Until Covid hit and the word 'remote'
| started being used by basically everyone, even companies that are
| hybrid or are going to go back to in-office at some point.
|
| There's another factor, and that is growth in the tech sector.
| There is just a shortage of great engineers right now and very
| high demand.
|
| In response, we raised the salaries of our developers that are
| already part of the team significantly. Then we raised the
| advertised pay range for our PHP devs to $120K to 150K, we added
| a $20K signing bonus to all developer roles, and we started using
| recruiters for the first time. These changes have made a huge
| improvement to the candidates we're seeing. Keep in mind that
| these are 100% remote roles and always will be, with candidates
| based anywhere in the world - not confined to large tech hubs.
| Our benefits are incredible and we have 21 days PTO - just for
| additional context.
|
| I think the only viable solution for employers is to respond to
| changes in market conditions, and do what we've done. Pay your
| people more, increase your hiring salary range, consider a
| signing bonus that isn't bullshit, but actually is a huge
| additional tangible benefit for talented engineers joining your
| company.
|
| I don't think the kind of pressure tactics described in the
| article, like "exploding job offers" are the answer. You're just
| playing silly games and wasting a candidate's time and your own,
| plus potentially trashing your company's brand in the hiring
| market.
|
| I've have worked as an ops engineer and dev for a long time
| before building a successful tech business, and I've lived
| through a hot hiring market several times, as a talented engineer
| working to maximize my earnings potential. I'd strongly encourage
| you to look around and get a sense of what the market can offer
| you. Have conversations with a few recruiters. Don't let your
| company use meaningless enticements to make you stay. And don't
| get enticed by pressure tactics or things that don't actually
| help you earn more and have a better quality of life. Focus on
| the fundamentals when evaluating options - base salary, actual
| starting days of PTO, medical, 401K if you're USA based. And take
| action now, because this probably won't last.
|
| It's a great time to be a talented engineer, pretty much
| globally.
| throwanem wrote:
| > He likened it to what's happening in the real estate market.
|
| In other words, make your moves now, and with an eye toward the
| crash that's coming.
| Macha wrote:
| Alternatively, being the most expensive and newest might be a
| poor position to be in when the crash comes?
| throwanem wrote:
| You always want to pick your risks with care, sure. I didn't
| say that earlier in so many words because I assume it doesn't
| need saying, but if it does, now it has been.
|
| If where you are is stable, you can expect it to stay that
| way through a crash, and you're at least confident of being
| able to come out of it when things settle down again not
| looking like you've been standing still, maybe don't make a
| move at all.
|
| But if you're already thinking of doing that, it's not wise
| to assume you have unbounded time in which to act, or that
| said bounds are as broad as they ordinarily would be.
| [deleted]
| kaczordon wrote:
| We're technically in a new bull market now.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm an engineer, not an economist. So the best I guess I can
| say to that is, I hope it's true, and that it means what it
| sounds like it does.
| autotune wrote:
| Can't it be argued that the crash came and went with the
| pandemic already?
| throwanem wrote:
| Maybe. Would you like to give it a try?
| [deleted]
| robryan wrote:
| There won't be a crash. Possibly a period of stagnant wages
| because the market got ahead of itself, but I don't think any
| of the underlying demand is going away.
| [deleted]
| throwaway321654 wrote:
| Does anyone have any info/data/anecdotes for the UK job market.
| (or infact any non-US market)
|
| My story (hence the throwaway account)... Last year we got no pay
| rises and were told "no increases this year because covid
| uncertainty". This year it's a rather megre 2% percent that
| doesn't even beat inflation, even more so when viewed over two
| flat years.
|
| I'm obviously looking around and can likely get some small
| increase, but I'm not seeing the crazy increases or behaviour
| this article talks about.
|
| The whole remote work move also seems like it would apply
| downward pressure to some of the top locations. For example I can
| now compete for remote jobs based in London and would be quite
| happy being paid a lot less than a typical local London salary
| given I live significantly further north where salaries are much
| lower. And potentially if any US tech firms are open to remote
| workers from the UK they'll find they can get top quality devs at
| a fraction of the price. So why is remote work being blamed for
| driving salaries up, shouldn't it have opened up the talent pool
| for hiring companies just as much as it's opened up the potential
| choice for applicants.
|
| It feels like the US job market is so hugely skewed in comparison
| to the rest of the world that it's slightly insane.
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