It seems standard way to get a great compensation is to sit down and exercise all the run-of-the-mill algorithmic questions because that will matter the most in the end. Further optimisation could be made by being less fearful about negotiating the offer. Asking for 10% more would never hurt [1].<p>I am not a fierce critic of BigCo. interviewing practises but it seems a little disappointing that coding side-projects, contributing to open source, and writing mean so little in getting hired.<p>[1]: <a href="https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/how-i-negotiated-for-an-additional-15-000-at-yammer-2d3c137623ec" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/how-i-negotiated-for-an-add...</a>
I guess I need to move to Silicon Valley. These numbers are insane for two years and an undergrad degree. I have 32 years experience and I don't get these kinds of offers. This is either complete BS or the guy is a savant. Something smells fishy here.
> 2. What's your background?<p>> Male. Two years of professional experience. Bachelors. Non-ivy league school. <i>Previously from a unicorn startup</i>. I'm mentioning these because people ask, not that I think they matter.<p>Being an alumni from unicorn startup is my guess on why he got these offers.<p>People are obsessed with salaries and positions which I think is unhealthy. But what I find ironic is that I have always heard the rich talk about how money can't buy happiness or how you should take risks from people who have some kind of backing - monetary/family or like here how background doesn't matter, even with evidence like unicorn or referrals.<p>Edited for some clarity.
It always strikes me as odd at how much HN complanies about hiring practices in tech. Spend a few weeks with Leetcode and CTCI and you have a decent shot at salaries in this range at the BigCo's (depends on location of course).<p>What other industry has it's interview process so transparent with such high rewards?
I'm in the southeast. 24, self-taught, no degree (I was able to make it through Triplebyte, though I'm not persuaded that actually means anything). 2009-2015 IT/helpdesk/sysadmin, and 2015-2017 more dev/devops, all with a local medium (~350 employee) retail-ish business that grosses about $30m annually if I had to guess. I quit this year for a number of reasons (depression), but I mainly worked on automation. A collection of scripts I wrote (and documented!) saves about 30 days' worth of the team's time annually. I made $22.50/hour. The numbers in this post are unfathomable to me.
I live in the UK, to me these numbers are insane. How are these salaries at that work experience possible? Is the pay increase from then on slow? Are these salaries sustainable for the industry long term? I know experienced professionals who would be considered successful in the UK who finish their careers nowhere near this level of salary (not programmers but certainly engineers). I’m astounded.
True, if big.<p>Anyone could write up such a Blind post. And when it comes to anonymously bragging via lies on the internet, there is no shortage of prior art.<p>To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if the growth rate of engineering applications to these bigcos has declined over the past few years. A decline in the supply of candidates relative to demand, among other factors, could lead to an increase in compensation per offer.<p>That being said, I'm still leaning towards this post being BS.
If you are making $100K in Albany, GA then to have same standard of living in SFO you need to make $201K: <a href="http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html</a><p>So SFO/Bay area is <i>that</i> expensive. Most people don't think of that and assume that SFO requires modest 20% increase in cost of living. Absolutely not true. So before you get floored with these numbers you need to divide them by almost a factor of 2 for the corresponding standard of living.
10 years ago I was working for VMware in Palo Alto as an intern and my salary was $5.5k per month. They offered me a permanent position for $75k per year, but I decided to move back to Finland. I would say that those numbers in the article sound believable. Housing costs in the bay area are crazy.
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I live in Zurich, Switzerland and I have a similar salary (~200K) but the high cost of living (which, I assume, is similar if not lower than the Bay Area) make my salary comparable to an "ok" salary in other European countries. Just to give you an idea: the overall cost of school + a nanny for 2 kids under 6 is around 70K year in Zurich.<p>As other have mentioned, the sign up bonus is quite awesome, but I assume is not the standard in the US either.<p>edited: nannies -> nanny
<a href="https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=$140k+salary+san+francisco+vs+dallas" rel="nofollow">https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=$140k+salary+...</a><p>For anyone else that was confused
There was a question on gender and race in the article comments. I am wondering how much <i>does</i> this play in the numbers game? Do tech companies ask this in their application process (in SF, USA anyway)? Are they even allowed to? Can they find out? Do they have recruitment teams sniffing out applicant's social media to find out?<p>Sidenote: One of my favourite replies on the article comments:<p>> Can you share your gender and race?<p>>> OP is a female dwarf paladin
These seem in line with what I've seen from friends and acquaintances. I've also heard 100K signing bonuses to new grads at FB. <a href="https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-rationale-behind-Facebooks-100K-signing-bonuses-for-engineers-and-why-havent-other-top-software-companies-followed-suit" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-rationale-behind-Facebooks-1...</a>
Well this makes me feel terrible... Your sign on was probably for more than I've made in my professional career.<p>My first job after graduating 10 years ago was for 45k per year.<p>I have had an awful lot of bad luck since graduating and have yet to be paid more than that since.<p>Every job I've had paid progressively less, always took them cause I needed the job.<p>My last programming job paid $14 an hour.<p>Can anyone offer advice on breaking out of the cycle of terribleness?<p>I'm a US citizen, bachelors in CS, live in Tx.
I just get a 403 page instead of an article, probably because I browse via a DigitalOcean IP address.<p>If this is enough to get me blocked, that's hilarious given that this company's product is supposed to be "anonymous work talk" - if they like anonymity so much why am I not allowed to browse from whatever IP address I like?<p>EDIT: And furthermore, all it takes to find out if a company uses Blind is to type in the company name and see what it says. That's a pretty blatant privacy leak right on the company's home page.
I just left a company that got aquired by a big US security company, I was offered a 140k bonus (50/50 cash/stock, under the condition of staying min. 2 y) if I stay (because they knew I was probably leaving). The Bonus was several times more than my annual salary (Eastern Europe). Despite all the day dreaming about the numbers I declined and left. Why? Because after 2 years there I was already burned out, had no time, was getting calls at 5am, had to be available 24/7. I was miserable and had no life and for what? “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Thoreau. Now I only work 10h a week and am so happy and relaxed, I earn enough to cover my living costs and can use the rest of my LIFE to do whatever I want.
Just wanted to share that because I often see people here obsessing about money, but what's the point of it if you can't live?
Recruiters who was interviewing this guy must have been all believing he is worth it. Well done.<p>Have been interviewing people, many with 5+ years of experience and in my opinion it is not too difficult to spot somebody who is not fit for the job.<p>So well done again.
These are insane compared to the UK.<p>17 years ago I started out on £21k, which was considered pretty reasonable. Two years later I switched job and got £35k and over the next few years until I hit the 10 year mark I pushed it up to almost £50k. At that point AFAICT I was actually doing better than average.<p>I'm now contracting in the financial world, earning well over twice that figure, but while I can match the salary the various otions, bonuses etc put a guy two years out of college in SV well ahead of the game.<p>I like the bay area, too...
Given with multiple offers, he didn't drive hard negotiation like this guy. <a href="http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii/" rel="nofollow">http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...</a> HN discussion <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780</a>
Wow. These are high. Anyone know what the numbers are for data scientists nowadays? Also, how hard would it be for a senior data scientist working at a large (non-tech) company on the east coast to get an interview at one of these places?
Top notch devs earn less than the quarter of that money around here (I know about the cost of living, but still). No wonder the US is outsourcing all its dreams here, from faceplus to instasnap, from payeasy to dollarpal.
How do these numbers carry over to non bay area places like Austin? I've got an offer for 86k base, 4000 RSU, no sign on here in Austin for an L2 at one of those companies in the top 5 and it seems like a joke.
Can someone explain what RSU's are? I'm assuming its something specific to being American and since i'm not i'm afraid i'm not familiar with the term.<p>Thanks
These numbers seem high in absolute value but one must compare Cost of Living (insane in the Bay Area I guess) and insurance costs and other living expenses as well
I'm guessing he was working at Uber before. Would explain why Lyft wanted him so badly and why Uber is missing from the list of companies he talked to.
In every single thread where someone publicly discloses rates like this the comments are flooded with people who use all kinds of FUD to explain why what they've just read must be untrue.<p>It's strange.<p>> Are these numbers real?<p>Yes. I'm not the author, but they don't appear at all unusual to me. SF's developer market is nearly as screwed up as it's housing market (except not really, the housing market is truly something else).<p>> Is this "normal"?<p>No. Well… yes and no. These numbers are real and you can get offers like that too. But this type of pay isn't "normal" in the sense of historical norms. Tech isn't normal right now. We have a shortage on one side of the market. It will be relatively short lived. That doesn't mean you should ignore you're ability to make unreasonably amounts of money for the next 10 years. If you're qualified to fill the positions that people are over-paying for, you should totally take that money.<p>> But this person had "special" access because of ${referral/previous company/magic}!<p>Yes. This person did have "special" access. But being granted that access is literally as easy as talking to someone who works for the company that you'd like to work for. Are they attending a conference? Walk up to them. It's really that easy. I know. I've done it.<p>> No really, this person got lucky because they worked for a unicorn before applying to these companies. They got lucky by picking a place that happened to turn into a rocket ship.<p>Little secret, you don't have to work at a unicorn _before_ applying to a unicorn. There's a phase after everyone knows it's a rocket ship where the company is still hiring like a madhouse. You can join during that phase and still get credit for "picking" a unicorn. You'll likely get a very small piece of an over-saturated employee pool so the equity won't make you rich, but it does allow you the pick of the litter amongst other top tier firms, App/Goo/Ama/book/Soft, which all pay along the lines of what the author posted.<p>> I have no desire to live in SF.<p>Yeah, SF is awful, don't move there. You can get close to these numbers in some cities that have a much better standard of living. NY, LA, Austin (the numbers are close but come down in that order).<p>Feel free to ask any questions about getting a job in a company like this if you'd like. I find it mystifying that people consider it some kind of secret so I'm down for sharing w/e people want to know (within some personal boundaries). I wouldn't say that it's easy to get a job like this, but the information isn't hidden. In my experience it's right in front of people and they either ignore it or choose different paths because they prefer the lifestyle that they have outside of these major US hubs.
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/VpCJT" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/VpCJT</a><p>Is this for real? This is Ministry of Truth levels of double-speak.
Here in Australia there is no point even being a software engineer. 2 years experience will be 90k base, I don't even know what a sign on or bonus is because we don't even have them, and your wage will rise with inflation. Inflation seems to be a fairly garbage number so I would say your wage goes down each year.<p>There are plenty of other jobs that are much easier that pay the same. Australia is not an innovative or technology-oriented or entrepreneurial country. Some multinationals mine our land, that is it. It is a bit of a joke country compared to China or the USA.
Why are people so surprised ? US and especially US's tech sector is known for trowing money at people. They are doing it in a hope to get those sweet Rob Pikes of our time by sheer brute force.