It's wild to me that his way of figuring out what companies to apply for was to make a list of the top-paying ones and just pick the top 10 highest-paying. Is that a common strategy? No thought about product, industry, impact on the world, just $$$. It looks like it worked out for them though, since I guess they got like a million dollar offer, so maybe I'm the one approaching this the wrong way?
Reading these responses is pretty upsetting. No wonder big tech is so evil. So many talented developers willing to sell their soul for more money. No thought to whether what they’re doing is causing harm to the world.
Reading judgmental comments like this also upsets me.
It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable.
I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations.
So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass.
I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?
Because not everyone is a twenty year old second generation immigrant with no family wealth who needs a lifeboat.
Are you under the impression the blog post author is?
Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too.
(If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)
I didn’t try to assume anything about the blog post author. But it’s irrelevant — I was commenting on the comment calling people in general soulless for maximizing compensation.
I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to.
I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”.
But I live in a VHCOL city. I would love to move and work remote, but my partner has a career that’s in tech, but much less remote friendly.
I’m into personal finance, so here’s my projection. Assuming I want to own a home and have kids in this VHCOL region, I will need to work about 20-30 years to achieve this goal. And it’s 1 poorly timed recession from derailing. You know what I really wanted to do in life? Teach high school chemistry and own a cafe.
Am I better off than many many people? Yes. Do I have enough to take 30% pay cut to work at <arbitrary good place>? Are we saying I don’t deserve to live in the region I grew up in, and I should have to move to the Midwest, for the good of society? Force my partner to give up their dream career? Should I give up my dreams of an early retirement from tech into a field that “does good”?
My parents have nothing saved up. 2008 made sure of that. Should I sacrifice the planned war chest I want to build for my parents’ eventual long term care?
And finally, if I do all of this, how much does the world improve by me doing this? Will <evil corp> collapse because I’m not there? Will my wage be distributed to the service workers or Will they go to the next eager applicant? Will my CEO pay more taxes or lose money because I’m not there?
I get VHCOL cities, I live in one and bought a home here in 2020. You may not be at the point where you don’t have to optimize for comp yet, and that’s okay. But when you are, I hope you take the opportunity to do so.
And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in comp increases faster than working on something you care less about. :)
> It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling.
Not even this, it's just seeing a job exactly and only for what it is. As opposed to having some pompous judgemental false self-image of "helping the world" when in reality you are way too lazy and selfish to actually do that, like most other people.
It's a common leftist agenda to push and impose this culture of covering up mediocracy with virtue signalling pretending that it's actually a conscious choice and really better to make less money, not just being mediocre. The fight against rationalism and meritocracy, lazy intellectual leftists grasping at straws now starting to sound religious about how your soul will go to hell if you work for google. Give me a break
I don’t see the link between thinking it’s a bit sad that money seems to be the only driver of a growing part of the population and the left-right political divide. I don’t personally think it’s a very new phenomena however. My main takeaway from it is that in the USA software jobs have started replacing or at least being seen as as attractive as finance and consulting as a career of choice for people who are mostly interested in money which to me partially explain why we now see so little valuable and interesting innovation and new products coming out of the big tech companies.
> I don’t see the link between thinking it’s a bit sad that money seems to be the only driver of a growing part of the population
Because it's not the only driver, it's the most important driver of the money making part of your life. Which is turn is just a means to another end, and that end is your family, hobbies, self actualisation, experiencing the world etc.
Let's ignore there is not much value coming out of education and that people mostly succeed despite having to go through the grind of an antiquated education methodology (which is the only way to certain professions).
Let's ignore that better teachers can actually go to private education and get a higher salary.
Software developers can create software solutions that automatically do the work of tons of people (think about how much time is saved by an online checkout vs maintaining a physical store with employees).
It's obvious that software is a great way for companies that want to multiply their revenue and that's the most efficient way to generate value for society at scale.
It's therefore obvious that people capable of delivering that solution have more value compared to a teacher.
You may not like Amazon, but people derive benefits from Amazon all the time. They can get stuff directly at home in a day. They can pay online without even seeing a store.
That's a lot of units of small value for the general public being created by the Amazon employees and Amazon itself.
You may not like where society is going, but people choose with their own wallets what they want or not. This is pure democracy.
IMO like the OP choosing jobs on compensation, you were going for them on morality and winding up dissapointed. Best to forget about high compensation or high morals or whatever other metric the faceless company should have, and more about the faces and whether or not you actually click with the people you would be working with day to day. Looking back on it, the best jobs I've ever had always were the ones where I really liked working with my coworkers; to a point it made me not even care what exactly I did since I got to work with such decent people.
I also did this, but it's so hard to find lasting stable relationships, within 6-12 months it's always a different team somehow. In that case you feel double screwed if you compromised on salary and then the awesome team disbanded and you're left with a shitty team and a low salary.
Better to go for the high salary which you know will be stable, and will always "work" in the sense of giving benefit to your life. And take any awesome colleagues as a random happy accident and a pure bonus.
It seems in my experience smaller companies can avoid these issues. No chance of your team being shuffled around because there's just one team. Usually you will find some employees at smaller orgs have been there working with the boss, who is probably the sole founder/owner of this tiny shop, for like a decade or more, you watch peoples kids grow up and such, etc. Sometimes people leave just to become freelancers, but because of how tight the relationship is sometimes almost nothing changes day to day and they are still very involved with certain projects. I wouldn't feel that comfortable at a big org where labor is just a unit to be moved around either. You won't be maximizing your compensation working like this, but I find maybe the reduction in stress hormones might be its own sort of compensation. Find a family, basically.
> think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational wealth
If anyone wonders where the stereotype of the soulless immigrant IT drone comes from, it's from places like this board perpetuating it.
You do not need 'generational wealth' to live a decent life: nobody is forcing you to help Facebook earn ad revenue on genocide[0] - you are making that choice yourself.
A distinction needs to be drawn between understanding an action and consequences/blame.
You can understand why someone does something but still blame them for making the choice. Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility.
This is true, but the fact here is that you do not have any responsibility of choosing your employer according to some moral standard of "making the world a better place". This is just your random opinion, in the same way as I can believe that it's everyone's moral responsibility to only buy local produce. It's objectively a "good thing" to do, and you are free to make that choice if you want. But you can't just decide that it's "everyone's" responsibility to suddenly follow your arbitrary moral code. That is the definition of being arrogant and judgemental.
This idea of only working for companies that can be proven to not have any negative side effects of their business, is nothing but a virtue signalling trend, that is randomly and unfairly only applied to the tech industry, for some reason. You can choose to live your life according to maximising the virtue signalling points you can score on this trend, if you want, but this is not any responsibility, to act martyr for saving the world.
It’s sad, but I don’t see the world getting better anytime soon. I am trying to earn and invest as much as I can for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel like they will be financially devastated otherwise.
Big businesses have no ideology, even if some people would like to think otherwise. They will do everything they can to get more money. Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money.
Corporations aren't good or evil. They do good or evil (whatever someone might deem like so) as a side effect.
Some corporations are evil: selling wapons to dictators, lying to your own employees (enron), deliberately making your product more addictive to sell more even if you know it destroys the health of your customers (sigarette companies).
Corporations are just a group of people. Corporations do evil because some of the people in them are evil (and the rest are ambivalent).
The problem is we, as a society, tend to hand-wave away corporate malfeasance as some sort of unsolvable problem. It’s not - when a company does evil, we need to hold the leaders responsible. Yes, proving those individual actions/decisions is hard work, but it’s work that needs to be done.
The irony of the article is that Meta isn’t even that hard to get into because so many candidates hard no on them because they know Facebook is evil. I read an article that said how Meta has to pay well above market rates to acquire talent due to their negative perception.
It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.
Facebook has been paying well since the start, to be able to poach from the "illegally reduced salary cartel members" (Apple, Google, Adobe, etc), 10-15 years ago.
And maybe some people say no, but they still get hundreds of people applying. There is an entire cottage industry built around preparing for their interviews.
I certainly understand how my comment was a bit of an exaggeration. Lots of people say they don’t like Facebook but continue to use the product, especially Instagram.
Absolutely, I mean, I certainly don’t feel bad for them.
Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is. It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision.
No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform.
They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. It’s not feasible for them to start their own phone OS or web browser.
Apple, for example, made privacy policy changes that have cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue, and there nothing Facebook can do about it.
Facebook’s only chance is to hope VR is the next big social tool after text (blogs, Facebook), images (instagram), and video (TikTok, YouTube, Reels).
In my opinion, this won’t really work, unless they truly have some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve. VR will probably forever be a niche: as it stands it’s a sweaty motion sickness-inducing experience.
They just don’t have another avenue to explore to try and have a platform where they have full control over data collection. They’re out of options.
I give the idea of the metaverse a very slim chance of convincing potential customers that it’s better than hanging out with friends
On Discord to play some “pancake games.”
I got a lot of these opinions from this video, which really changed my perspective on Meta’s vision for their future:
> It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.
This is not the first time I've heard this at all and each time it is equally relevant. Unless meta gets everyone goggled up fast I think that there will be so much negative stigma nobody will want to be part of it.
I think you are misjudging the speed it will happen. I think the Metaverse will be a slow death march, eventually ending up teaching others what not to do.
Unless the VR experience is flawless, and I mean better than reality, people can't get hooked.
If the hardware lags even a bit, the headaches and dizziness become unbearable. Depth-of-field is another disorienting factor, and field-of-view yet another.
I believe we do not yet have the technology to offer such an experience, let alone cheaply. As such, Facebook is prematurely investing in it.
I agree. If you check out my comment elsewhere on this thread I explain what I think about it.
VR is Meta’s only chance to control a hardware platform. It’s really as simple as that. As long as they don’t control iOS or Android they’re at the mercy of Google and Apple, who have no interest in making life easy for Meta.
For Meta, VR has to work to stave off their decline. But unless they’ve got some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve, they’re working with a sweat and nausea-inducing niche.
I am a wage slave. I look at every corporation as being negative, as they exploit the wage slaves who work there. One way being how much surplus value they expropriate from workers.
If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once.
A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave.
The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find.
Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.
I have to agree. I do understand human desire to put themselves and their families first, and that it's a job at corporations, and that some people view themselves as cogs in capitalism no matter what
However when one the pick of the litter, there's a spectrum between getting $1M for a company responsible for polarization, breeding hate, and damaging democracy...to living well comfortably on $200k+ (or even $300k+) to at least try to do something meaningful. It's 8 hours a day of your time, you vote with how you want it to affect the world
Some people the money is necessary for survival. Those salaries are not easy to replicate outside of big tech. Making six figures is difficult in a lot of places. When I interviewed for Meta I knew I would accept what they gave me as they were offering remote at the time. I did not get the job, but I do actually need to support a family. Heck, where I live in the US, I would jump for less than $200k right now.
You do realize that $200k is a massive salary damn near anywhere in the world, right? That’s nearly double the median household in San Jose CA. And 40% above the median household in Sunnyvale. Somewhere near the top-5% nationally.
Edit for sensitivities: then (choose) not to say it (because you identified that you may be causing harm to someone for no more benefit than an ounce of mirth)?
Invariably big companies are causing some harm as a side-effect of their business. They’d usually be better off if their business didn’t cause this harm. This means they employ people whose entire job is to reduce the harm. If your goal is to make the world a better place, these roles can be a good opportunity to do that given the scale involved. From a utilitarian perspective, it’s easy to argue that a person in that position is doing more good than most people in the world.
On the other hand, if someone is just trying to make the most money, they may end up causing harm. There are many jobs like that - but the scale is more at bigger companies.
I don’t think it makes sense to judge someone based on the company they work for if you don’t actually know whether that individual’s actions are making the world a better place or a worse place.
Why would you judge someone purely for their individual actions and not for the action of the group they are actively contributing and thereby enabling?
If you are, let’s say the boat mechanic of someone making a business of dumping toxic chemicals in the sea, then you are clearly doing evil.
Similarly, if you are doing “harm reduction” at Facebook, you are still enabling them to exist, thereby enabling them to get away with doing more harm overall.
I don't think there's anything noble about throwing away millions of dollars (compounding interest when you invest the extra salary) because you're on a single-minded pursuit of a political cult in the name of a company.
You tipped your hand with the 'damaging democracy' phrase, which boils down to "my political opponents are allowed to speak on the platform". In pursuit of your quest to destroy the freedom of expression for your political opponents, you severely damage your retirement (in my opinion, deservedly).
On the other hand, isn't it evil too to ask people to sell time of their life for less than they could have? Nobody has unlimited time on this planet. At some point you have to sell hours of your life.
99% of people in tech aren't changing the world. They are building accounting and metrics and shopping and add platforms to get marginal increases to marginal revenue so some business can make a bit more money than they were making before.
I'm honest that I trade my time for money. There are many times when I'll prioritize other things like working with people I like or not working with people I dislike, the same thing for processes or schedules or whatever.
But I'm not going to sit around and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can go play with the latest JS framework instead of the one that was cool 6 years ago or so I can be in a sexier sounding industry. I'm going to trade my time for money and work towards financial freedom so hopefully I can go work on stuff that's interesting to me on my terms at some point.
On that note, is anyone else getting a little tired of all the pretentiousness going about in tech? Suddenly, every tech company is claiming to "change the world" and "not like the others". You know, hyping these adds, metrics, platforms, etc. up as if they're going to really change life in a noteworthy way for Average Joe. Whatever happened to just putting in a good day's effort and admitting we're doing it for the money so we can pay the bills and a nice dinner?
"Suddenly"? It's been going on for at least a decade, decade and a half, nearly two decades now, whenever Web 2.0 was getting off the ground and startups started booming again post-Dot Com bubble.
I think it taps into peoples' inherent religious desires and motivates them to put in more work and possibly do things they wouldn't otherwise. There's a reason it's called drinking the kool aid.
See I do agree on surface level it makes sense to decorate things. But I have yet to see any empirical evidence of this, let alone weighted against the long term costs of burnout, disillusion, embitterment, increasing costs using third parties to fix the problems, and more.
Anecdotally, the far majority of "we really love to work here!" people I met seemed to either stop caring very soon, were clearly faking it or were barely distinguishable from their more skeptical co-workers performance-wise, bar a few individuals with a savior complex.
That's a fair point - I've never really been in a position to measure the performance of such people. It's entirely possible that performance isn't actually all that relevant. It might just be that leaders prefer followers who "worship" them as leaders of the shared religion of work. I don't think this is all some sort of Machiavellian scheme either - I think a lot of it is unconscious on both ends of the deal.
I think it would be correct to say 99% of people. Only tech is suddenly under this type of scrutiny, and if you generalise like this over whole companies and whole fields of work, you can pretty quickly come to the conclusion that everything is evil.
I just don't think many or most tech companies have anything positive to offer the world. All these companies simply exist to make money. Generally speaking, most companies just exist to make money. To the extent that they improve anyone's lives, is that they support the economy and allow citizens to pay taxes.
There are certainly some minority of tech companies which do good in the world, but actually getting hired at them is not necessarily likely. They have limited roles available, and need specific skillsets. A large generic tech company needs just about any skillset, and so practically speaking you're likely to find a job there.
> I just don't think many or most tech companies have anything positive to offer the world. All these companies simply exist to make money.
IMHO, making money IS providing something positive to the world. A lot of people are employed, and those people get to buy art or cookies or college for their kids or whatever.
A lot of customers are served, and presumably got something they wanted.
> A lot of customers are served, and presumably got something they wanted.
The question is how often you run into the broken window fallacy there. An arsonist makes money burning down houses. A real estate developer makes money since they can now get the land for cheaper. The arsonist also supports local restaurants and gives to charity. But the total economy is still down one house.
>IMHO, making money IS providing something positive to the world. A lot of people are employed, and those people get to buy art or cookies or college for their kids or whatever.
Yep, I think that's fair. I just mean that this is generally the good that a company does: not its stated "mission."
I agree. Just be careful not to call it "trickle down" because it's a trigger word for people. For example, who cares if a billionaire buys a yacht--the building of said yacht employed dozens of craftsmen, caused thousands of supply chain orders, and will support hundreds more in maintenance over time. Also, for luxury goods you can be sure that the margins at each step are quite healthy.
The real problem would be if the people making all this money just hoard it which often happens. The only way that gives back is by providing bigger balance sheets for banks to lend out more money which has a miniscule effect.
> The real problem would be if the people making all this money just hoard it
It’s not actually really possible to hoard money. A dollar is meaningless until you use it to convince someone to give you something.
If you just accumulated $1T in cash and hid it under your mattress, all those people wouldn’t just do $1T less stuff. They would just do a little more for $1 than they would’ve before. That adjustment might take a little while so the fed might (did) print $1T to speed things along.
Also, when some one like Jeff or Elon is worth $300b - it doesn’t mean he has $300b. It just means that other people are willing to purchase their shares in eg Amazon such that if were to sell all of them at that price, it would add up to $300b.
But that money didn’t change hands, it’s just indicative. And of course if Jeff were to say “I’m selling all my shares right now who wants em” the price would change dramatically because nobody actually wants to buy all that. So really he would get about half of the money or something.
Billions of people use facebook to connect with their friends. Billions use google to find information they need.
Hundreds of millions use Amazon to get affordable stuff quickly. 10s of millions of people use Dropbox to store and sync their files.
Seems like this is a lot more than most companies have to offer, no?
That...isn't what happened. He has his routine. That routine includes some amount of "family time", whatever that means. It is probably one they have discussed before, in ensuring that their mutual needs for companionship/childcare vs alone time are being met. The plan he came up with would cut into that time. Rather than just make that change on his own, he talked to her about it, ensuring that she was also on board with the tradeoff. That's called "a healthy relationship".
Having someone agree with you about something does not mean you asked for, nor required, their permission. It -does- mean you went and spoke to them first so they knew what to expect, that you gave them room to give their opinion on the decision, and that you went into it with the desire to find a mutually beneficial arrangement in the event they disagreed with it rather than just "Wife! I have decided!"
If his wife doesn't work then the 30m of me time becomes even more costly and even more important to clear. Work is often the only reprieve from a very young child. The first year of our child, my favorite thing in the world was to go to work, no matter how shitty the task. The thirty minute commute alone was orgasmic, without the sound of a screaming colicky child unrelenting during day and night alike.
Your wife not working doesn't change that you're the dad when you're off work and would typically (I hope?) be involved in your children's education as well.
Parenting is not the kind of thing where you exchange your labor for money. It's not work in the sense that the parent comment meant it and you know that full well.
> Parenting is not the kind of thing where you exchange your labor for money.
Historically, that really is a big component of parenting. More children meant more money through additional hands being available to work the farm, etc.
What's wild to me is that he had to ask his wife for permission to get more personal time in exchange for getting a much higher paying job. I've been married over 10 years and have two kids, and I don't need permission from anyone to do something that I think is going to improve the life of my loved ones; I just do it. And anyway, 30 min/day x three months seems to be a really small ask considering the dramatic improvement in financial status his wife and family will benefit from. Essentially that extra 30 minutes a day counts as work he's doing to bring home the bacon.
Hell, I’d talk to my wife about any job change, regardless of the implications on our free time together. Do I need her explicit permission? No. Do I value her input? Yes.
My guess is that some of the people crititicizing here are either macho bragging about stuff they don't actually do, have dysfunctional relationships but don't realize it, or much more likely just aren't or haven't been in long term relationships. Some probably misread or are taking a very negative interpretation to what they're reading.
Exactly! It’s wild to me that so many people here seem to think of it as a permission grant, like they’re upset their wife hasn’t added them to sudoers or something. “How dare I not have admin rights to our life” feels like the tone of the majority of comments in this subtree.
The whole thing read like a humble brag... "As a powerlifter, I workout 4-6 days per week", " I would have the third-highest new offer on Levels out of over 200 offers on their site" .. .etc.
The blog said he needed an additional 30 minutes of time each day, not just 30 minutes period. Presumably they already have a system worked out where they each get some personal time during the day and the job quest shifted this balance.
...it's totally healthy. He had developed a routine and set of expectations with his wife, that ensured their mutual needs for time together, and the needs of the kid, were being met. As he looked into how much time he'd need to take to adequately prepare, he first looked to cut down on something important to him without losing progress in it, which gave him most of the time he felt he needed, but still felt short. He then engaged with his wife to discuss his plan, and what he felt would be necessary for it, ensuring she was in agreement that reducing 30 minutes per day of "family time" was an acceptable decision. She was, so that's what they did.
No, it’s weird and I suspect there’s more to the story on how they arrived at this kind of system. It sounds mechanical and low-trust. Granted, I am not as ambitious as the author, but my wife and I do not ask each other for permission to do things. What we do do is let the other know that we’re taking on an extra responsibility, and specific help needed. We both work in tech and are raising two toddlers.
Does it though? "we both agreed it would be perfectly reasonable for me to ask for 30 minutes of additional “me time”"
So..."Hey, I wanna do this thing. It'll mean cutting down on our time together/require more help from you in watching the kid(s), but it has the potential of increasing how much I bring home by (X)" "Huh, yeah, that makes sense. Okay"
Not really. Let's say you're sharing chores. It would make sense to ask if your partner is okay with doing a bit more chores while you prepare for a better paying job.
I do something like this as a first pass, but prune based on Values. I wouldn’t ever consider Amazon… but at $1MM… that’s kinda “change your values” type money.
At a certain point, I guess you'd have to say to yourself (or I'd have to say to myself, would be a better way to say it), "I'll whore myself out for X amount of time for X amount of money, then I can do whatever I want or work for whomever I want for X amount of time, after."
There are different degrees of flexibility. Perhaps some people are utterly inflexible, but I wouldn't much want to know them! As for this specific case, it's not like you're going to be breaking legs for the mob. A person might believe that Facebook or Amazon are a net negative for the world, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is bad or that one's individual contribution can't be good, or at least neutral.
There are certain lines people won't cross, of course. Too much rigidity, on the other hand, is a disorder. If there's no traffic at 4 a.m. and I jaywalk, does that mean I have flexible ethics because the cost to benefit ratio is right for me... I guess. Would I murder a child for a billion dollars? No. That's over a line for me.
I guess then, yes. My ethics are flexible, depending. I have also followed the two second rule, even though I find eating food off of the floor abhorrent =(
I'm not sure there's "change your values" type money for everyone. Though for me, $1MM is enough to consider working for Amazon to attempt to change it from the inside. Perhaps we're saying the same things with different words.
Amazon is not going to change from the inside for anyone making $1M. If you go in thinking it is, you're deluding yourself and will be much less effective than if you just accept that Amazon is what Amazon is and you're whoring yourself out to them for $1M/year.
Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.
I know a guy in there (who most likely isn't making anywhere near 100M), who transferred into the HR org to try to make a dent into the problem of employee turnover, PIP BS, etc.
Last I heard, he was giving middle managers a hard time for perpetuating the sorts of bad behaviors that give Amazon its bad reputation as an employer.
Maybe Amazon is a lost cause, maybe it isn't, but you won't know if you can fix it unless you try. </two-cents>
PIP culture at Amazon comes from the very top. Bezos was a huge fan of it and so is the new CEO. There's no way your friend is going to be able to fight institutional power like that.
Too high. A small handful of CEOs have started making >100M in annual comp recently[1], but outside of the very highest paid CEOs, even top executives don't make that kind of money. (Although they certainly might see a capital gain in excess of that amount on their stock and options when the share price goes up.)
Yeah, I assumed that was TC (in which case for a CEO the majority of that will be shares not the base salary) - but of course most CEOs don't run Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc.
I interviewed there (with about a half dozen people). Interviews were a joke, it was all whiteboard leetcode with no real insight into technical thought process or real world work talk.
I did ask every person I met "How many hours, on average, do you work in a week?"
Ever single person gave me a non-answer that tried to change the topic. My favorite response to the question was "We are super flexible on where you work, like sometimes I like to work from a cafe". If that had been the only person I asked, I might have thought he misheard me. Since a pattern had been established at this point, I just moved on.
I know every team in a big company is going to be different, but my experience is that they churn and burn fresh coders and let the more ruthless, politic-y type rise up.
Let’s put it this way: if a company tries to brainwash you with 14 “core” principles, those cogs aren’t principled at all.
I went through the loop and made it to final round, despite my reservations just to see what it would be like. Of the 6 people I spoke to, I only had 1 positive experience. Everyone else was either being aggressive for no reason, or they were regurgitating words and had no value in the org. Hell, the “bar raiser” was the worst and asked follow up questions that were answered in the questions prior. On the design interview, another interviewer bragged about winning some AI award and was adamant that Kafka was the optimal solution for real-time doc editing- not my proposed web sockets… he was just downright rude about it.
Anyway, Amazon sucks for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they are so successful brainwashing people inside and outside. You can see their success in all this by observing how quick we forget that their policies force employees to piss in bottles, die working in a tornado, and unethically hold a beauty contest to siphon tax payer dollars from the lowest bidder
Websockets at scale are a special problem and he was probably right.
Asking questions for follow up meant you were missing some core piece of the ‘Amazonian’ way of tackling the problem.
Not being able to take the hints or criticism and thinking about it for years is probably evidence that Amazon would not have been a good place for you. That’s not always a bad thing.
I think you’ve just made my point clearer that Amazon is good at brainwashing. You’re basing peoples capabilities to fit in so rigidly, and worse yet, in such an uncouth way.
Being super conscientious isn’t useful. That’s not an Amazonism, it’s from living in South Africa.
The ability to fit in isn’t rigid. Many people don’t examine data, the impact to their customers, or actually explore a problem. Hearing people’s work history is often a series of assumptions made with little to no care for alternatives.
Most of the feedback I’ve read about working at Amazon seems to be negative. It’s hard for me to reconcile though. As a user of AWS, I love many of their services and the possibilities AWS opens. Most of the negative feedback I’ve read centers around: PIPs, management, work/life balance, on-call, and frugality. If Amazon wants more folks to consider working there, I think they really need to get in front of this from a PR perspective and address these concerns.
Lol when I said that at an org-level all-hands everyone laughed, but the need for improved PR is very real.
But it’s important to remember that there are a ton of extremely happy people at Amazon (or at least AWS, where I worked) they just aren’t as vocal online - management, scope and culture were incredible in my experience (it’s a huge company where managers have a lot of flexibility, YMMV). And some of the biggest day-to-day issues you hear about like crappy offices or excessive frugality were a thing of the past when I was there. And in terms of PIP, I only had one experience with it - having a mechanism for identifying and getting rid of the people who are a drain on everyone else was very nice.
Thanks for commenting here with more context. I’ve considered apply to AWS in the past, but was hesitant to due to the mostly negative online feedback about working there. However, as you suggested, there has to be folks who love working there. I read the reviews for my current employer and there are some negative reviews that don’t seem accurate of my experience there. I think my employer is a generally good place to work. I typically work 50-60 hours a week consistently, so I wonder if the work/life complaints regarding AWS would be that different from the demands of my current position.
Not the OP. But I interviewed once got a contract to hire position. The recruiter said after about six months I could apply for full time. If I got accepted then immediately the expectation is to put in 60 hours a week or more.
If you view a job as just a job, and find meaning in other things in life, optimizing for TC seems incredibly rational. The problem is some people doing that don't actually find meaning in anything but money.
While I agree you have to also consider WLB and not TC alone. Your actual pay rate for how much you have to actually work are very important. $1 million/yr sounds nice but if you need to put in 100 or 110 hours a week to do it, it may not be as alluring. So TC is important in terms of magnitude and what that alots you but the actual pay rate and total magnitude of work are critical in this perspective.
This is basically my perspective, although I factor in the value of my time doing the actual work as well. Even with great WLB and very high TC, if you're working 25 hours a week doing miserable stuff... thats 25 hours of your life spent in misery. Would rather that be enjoyable if possible if all other things can be kept constant.
Yeah and this is a perfectly healthy and normal view to have, which really should be the default considering that it really is what the definition of a job is. What is strange is to actually assign other vague emotional needs to a job which doesn't say anything about that in the definition. Which choice will be the more successful here is pretty obvious to me. Any time you start by re-defining something according to your own fantasies, you will probably be disappointed.
I think the fact that he's a power lifter is an important factor to consider in your impression. Power lifters are generally obsessed with their physical metrics and numbers, so this just seems like an optimization exercise in a similar vein. Clearly not a "fulfill the purpose of my life" exercise.
If the primary purpose of your job is to raise funds for the things that actually matter, what other method would you use? Take the biggest bag that leaves you with enough time to enjoy what you worked so hard to spend that money on.
Experienced engineers will have plenty of time and plenty of cheese to do whatever they want, up to them whether they choose to go to somewhere like Meta. The only thing I can imagine that $300k can't do that $750k-$1m can is buy up a bunch of property and price people out
There’s also retire early as an option. I’m not good enough or willing to put in the effort to get good enough to get into meta, but if I was presented the option of working somewhere kinda shitty but I could retire in 5 years vs working somewhere that was decent but I won’t retire for 30 years, it’s an easy pick.
I can’t really find somewhere where I can work on somewhere I love because the Vern diagrams of jobs I would love to do, and jobs where I am an employee, are completely separate circles
Sports, hobbies, reading, writing, side projects, volunteer work, travelling, friends/family, culture, music etc. The same things that a rich person would do? Do whatever you want and/or find stimulating and worthwhile. Being free.
> If the primary purpose of your job is to raise funds for the things that actually matter, what other method would you use?
Primary isn’t sole, and even if it was, all jobs aren’t equal in other ways, so the tradeoff varies by more than just compensation. Particularly, for someone without a myopic view but whose sole concern is providing money is sustainability of working conditions, because burnout is a thing.
Yeah but why entangle your need of helping others, with your employment? That just seems like making your life unnecessarily complex, especially when altruism is fundamentally opposing the goals of your organisation.
Yes. And it’s a good one. Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time.
Also, it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.
> some childish, naive crusade to change the world
I went into a shoe store recently and the salesman showed me a shoe that had Bluetooth which I could hook into my phone. I guess this is the kind of innovation being spun out nowadays.
One sign someone is naive is if their crusade to change the world depends on what corporation they choose to work at.
As someone who recently left a very well compensated position at a hedge fund, I disagree with all of this.
>Even from the point of view of job satisfaction. The more $ you are paid, the more expensive it is for the company to waste your time.
Having the company not waste your time is not in the top 10 most important factors for job satisfaction. And anyway, that just means you have less down time and less personal time. It's not a good thing.
>it means you are working with other high-paid people, which means they are results-oriented - not there for some childish, naive crusade to change the world.
Yes, they have optimized for income (not "results", in any meaningful sense!) over other considerations. At the extreme you will be surrounded by talented psychopaths. That is not the path to a happy life.
Comp is king, everything else is window dressing; only the comp pays the bills and gets you closer to financial independence (wealth is options, options are freedom).
What are you planning to do with all that financial independence?
If the answer is, "Live a meaningful and satisfying life." then... some people seek out work that gives them some of that while they are earning money.
Obviously, the idea that work can provide all of the meaning in your life is a toxic meme that leads to people being exploited. But the idea that work should provide no meaning is equally toxic. You're going to spend most of your waking hours during the healthiest stretch of your life at work. That is way too much to sacrifice for a job that is soulless surrounded by people you care nothing for.
Meaning is king, everything else is window dressing; only meaning gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The sooner you start finding avenues for that in your life, the sooner you'll realize you don't need to focus completely on some distant exit strategy like financial independence.
> What are you planning to do with all that financial independence?
Read more, improve my cooking skills, learn how to play chess, try out a month-long vacation, play video games, learn some art skills, exercise... I'm sure I'm missing some things. I can do a little bit of these a small amount of the time but it's not enough to enjoy, as long as I'm working.
Maybe there are jobs I'd enjoy but I kind of doubt it. I haven't found a job that I'd say I want to do until I'm in my 60s, that's for sure.
If you’re in the us, make sure your pile is big enough to cover health care 55-65, kid college expenses and parental care. These are big bucks. Get as much as possible paid off before you pull the plug.
> only meaning gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. The sooner you start finding avenues for that in your life, the sooner you'll realize you don't need to focus completely on some distant exit strategy like financial independence.
The problem is that meaning is undefined and this leads you down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is the meaning of life, which will make you very disappointed and lead to constructing a psychological bubble of "beliefs" that you appoint as facts to find a way out of this burdensome brooding.
Not everyone wants to live a lie like that, and have that sort of pseudo religious lifestyle. It's much easier to just go for the highest paying job, then making sure to also do some good (if you feel like it's too "evil"), by for example donating some of your salary, or doing some volunteer work. Why is this better? Because it's clear practical actionable goals that you can rely on, and that you know will have the desired outcome.
But it's more work to do this, assigning some superficial "meaning" to your job that you demand of all people around to validate and support, it's a way to be more lazy, to turn your social circle into a mini-cult where you all tell each other that you really can have the cake and eat it too.
> The problem is that meaning is undefined and this leads you down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what is the meaning of life, which will make you very disappointed and lead to constructing a psychological bubble of "beliefs" that you appoint as facts to find a way out of this burdensome brooding.
To be honest, this reads to me like "I haven't found meaning in life, therefore people who say they have are lying to themselves." You're free to believe what you want, and if that's what makes you happy more power to you, but don't assume your experience is universal. I assure you it isn't.
> It's much easier to just go for the highest paying job
Only a few people can win that lottery. Then again, I suppose finding work that is personally satisfying and pays well enough is also like winning a lottery.
>some people seek out work that gives them some of that while they are earning money.
But do they find it in tech? I could understand if we were talking about doctors, firemen, artists, etc. But tech work is mostly just companies trying to push products. This isn't really evil or good, it's just economics. A lot of tech companies seem to attempt to adopt language which suggests they're doing good, but I couldn't name very many which do something other than push products. I can't remember what language they used years ago when I worked at the apple store, but it was something like "enriching lives." And a lot of the employees seemed to really believe it. Yes, if you just buy a mac rather than some other computer, your life will be "enriched."
I'm not trying to be cynical; I definitely think there are some tech companies which do objective good, but these companies are in the vast minority of the tech field. If most people in tech sought "meaning" then the field would suddenly become extremely crowded around the few companies which actually produce good for the world.
I definitely get being cynical about software, and a lot of it is either disposable trash or actively harmful. But I think we working in tech massively overlook the many many positive benefits of software and how much it improves the lives of people on a daily basis.
I've learned how to fix my own appliances from online videos, stayed connected with friends through email, found stuff to do and avoided getting lost in unfamiliar cities through navigation, unwound with games, discovered new music and shared my music with others. All of that was because of or mediated by software. Could I have done it without, maybe. But I did use software for it, and tech deserves credit for that.
Orthogonal to your point perhaps, but the problem with tech is that monopolistic megacorps are the ones who are both delivering that helpful content to you, and the surveillance technologies, dark-pattern Skinner box digital addiction devices/platforms, and whatever other negative things associated with tech.
Maybe we need antitrust action just so we can better separate the “good” software companies from the “bad” ones.
But I think that the problem is mostly orthogonal to technology. Monopolistic megacorporations in any area are rife with problems. Look at Walmart, Nestlé, Shell, Comcast, etc.
Tech companies are particularly prone to this because information naturally lends itself to economies of scale, and economies of scale are fundamentally anti-competitive.
But it's the consolidation that's the problem, not the tech itself.
What are you planning to do with all that financial independence?
This question is a pet pieve of mine. The number of good answers is endless, and its sad that you would even ask it. Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.
So why wait until retirement to start seeking them?
> Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. Slavery is slavery. Working is an arrangement you enter into voluntarily with a series of pros and cons for all participants. Is the CEO if a company a slave? The researcher who finds a cure for a disease a family member died from? A musician in a touring band? An author with a book deal?
It's your life and I respect your choice to live it how you want, but if you have an idea that work is a thing to be suffered for as little as possible until you reach payday and then you retire and your real life starts... you are almost certainly on track for a completely miserable life both before and after your retirement.
Take a look at the kind of people who have the greatest life satisfaction. How many of them went down the FIRE path versus building their entire life in a meaningful way?
What you’re saying is undeniably true. At the same time when one considers high-tech as practiced by Silicon Valley and Seattle big tech companies and startups, it’s easy to see how people could become cynical towards work. Cultish company cultures, dishonest pontificating business leaders, market forces that incentivize disloyalty, undergirded by some truly unaffordable housing costs- it’s easy to see how people can get burned out by false promises of work, at least in this industry. It doesn’t help that tech is particularly preachy in its delusions of morality, unlike say, the financial industry.
And as with such industries or industry scenes where big amounts of money involved, as in Wall Street or Hollywood, people who get into Silicon Valley tend to view things through a purely transactional lens after a while. After all, that’s how these workplaces view them- not as repositories of higher meaning, but as interchange economic producers. Such is the nature of dumb money.
Seeking financial independence is more about having the freedom to choose whether to keep working or not. Many pursue the FI over the RE and find great joy and meaning in their work. If you'd be in deep trouble if you suddenly lost your job because you're not financially independent, then yes I think you're a slave to your job. People in FIRE communities constantly say to build the life you want to live and then save for it. Not enjoying the journey is a FIRE failure.
Until you have the option to not work at all, working might not be slavery but it’s definitely farther down the spectrum towards it than say, a retirees choices for their life. Getting financially independent removes the coercion that comes with all wage based work
> Meaning is king, everything else is window dressing; only meaning gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Time is king, and the closest thing we have right now (until a time machine is invented if ever) to banking time is money. More money equates to more time to do whatever it is you want.
Yeah, but if the way you acquire that money is by burning time at a job you hate to earn it... all you're really doing is transferring time from your younger self to your older self.
Personally, I'd rather find a job I don't hate and interleave enjoyable use of my time throughout my life.
Reminds me of the old story of the King's servant saying to the monk, "If only you'd learn to pander to the King, you wouldn't have to live like a monk." To which the monk replied, "If only you'd learn to live like a monk, you wouldn't have to pander to the King!"
There are plenty of people on the way to financial independence who don't have that attitude. Who turn down job offers that pay more regularly for various reasons. Not even just morally/ethical, because they actually care about what they are doing day in/day out, even if they could soon or even now just stop working. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there actually is a correlation between rise in compensation and not having that attitude, since passionate employees tend to have more impact.
Just look at how many older, senior employees you find at established, larger companies where the stock has risen so much in the past that you just know they are in all likelihood millionaires (and not "just" single digit ones). And even in the (rather rare, I guess) cases that they mismanaged their finances so badly that they are not, those people are prominent and established enough that another company would take them for more comp in a heartbeat. And yet they stay.
Your opinion is not universal. Don't pretend that it is in order to justify yourself.
In fact, it's doubly effective. If you can learn to reduce your expenses by $10k and live happily, not only do you have an additional $10k to save/invest, but you need less each year to live independently.
I "retired" at 33 (still doing other things, but without steady cash paycheck). Lived cheaply, worked hard, saved up a ton of money. I went back to work in 2020, right after interest rates were dropped to zero and the pandemic stimulus went out, because I figured that every single retiree, no matter how old, was about to get reamed by inflation. Have been right so far, and IMHO it's only going to get worse. Living cheaply works when the basic necessities of life are cheap. The basic necessities of life are about to get very expensive, if they haven't already.
Can you give a broad outline of your investment strategy in a high inflation environment?
I am older than you, but one issue that I need to contend with is being in a demographic that will contain a lot of other retirees, so I believe I need to financially be better off than other retirees of my age to have a reasonable lifestyle (and I am unsure how to avoid thundering crowd effects for my generation). Reasonable = comfortable (e.g. could choose to have a small fizzboat, but not a megayacht).
For steady inflation that's not already priced into rates/prices/etc, the solution is pretty simple. Borrow a lot of money at low, fixed rates. Invest in hard assets like real estate. To the extent that you invest in equities, invest in businesses with a lot of pricing power and little competition. Their profits will tend to go up more than the rate of inflation, and then stock prices tend to track profits.
Problem is that inflation is rarely steady. Typically you get stops and starts. Inflation will rise, and the Fed will try to contain it by raising rates. Then the raised rates create a recession, all asset prices fall, the Fed flinches and drops rates. Inflation takes off again. Repeat for a decade or more.
In an environment like this, you can't lever up too heavily, and you need to actively manage. Otherwise you'll get reamed by the busts. Optimal strategy is to buy surviving high-growth stocks right as the recession gets to its peak, as everyone feels like everything's going bankrupt, and then hold them as rates drop and the economy recovers. Then sell right as the Fed signals it's going to get tough on inflation again.
Optimal strategy is pretty hard to execute. Failing that, it's often best just to buy & hold profitable, low-competition businesses.
The demographic time-bomb of everybody retiring at once and trying to cash out of the market at the same time is another issue. There's no real fix for this: living standards are going to have to drop, for retirees or workers or both (and more likely retirees). The way to profit from it is to look for companies that are successfully automating parts of elder care, and then invest hard in them.
Some expenses you have no control over (alimony, child support, chronic healthcare costs, elder care come to mind from my circle of associates). Yes, don’t spend frivolously (luxury vehicles, eating out all of the time), but sometimes (at least in tech), you have far more control over the income side of the equation. If you can switch jobs and make $100k/more a year, that’s easier than trying to cut all of your expenses to the bone, or expenses that are non-discretionary and simply can’t be cut.
Run hard, every hour you work is an hour you’ll never get back, so max the comp for each of those hours. Your future self will thank you.
Yeah the other issue is if you increase income, your imputed income for child support is now effectively permanently higher. Child support imputed incomes ratchet up with raises, generally not back down. You will never be able to 'relax' back at a slower/less lucrative job because now the judge says pay the higher rate or go to jail.
Another way to view it: say you get a pay boost 90k -> 190k. The custodial parent will request the imputed income to be recalculated. You now owe an extra 20k PER YEAR. That's your new imputed income, even if you don't get a job like this again and it only lasts a year. Eventually you lose that job and can't find one like it again -- fast forward 10 years. You've paid an extra $200k, just to make an extra 50 or 60k net in one year. You lost $200k by working a higher paid job for a year.
One year of raise followed by 17 years of a slightly more relaxed job at your original income means you LOSE money. In this example, falling from 190k back to your 90k income means child support went from 1/3 of your net check to 2/3 of your net check. A brutal risk to take if you don't think you'll be making the high wage for life.
Please don’t forget about social security, that one year would make up the largest contribution of your social security benefits, and if you worked at least 10 more years after that, the AWI-adjusted Gross Income would drastically increase your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings (AIME). Anyway I don’t see why you wouldn’t use your savings from that first year to lawyer up a case for child support modification, there is no law that promises past earnings indicate future earnings.
>there is no law that promises past earnings indicate future earnings.
Strictly no, but this is basically what imputed income does. It's saying you have the capability to earn it. If you actually HAVE earned that amount, it can be extremely difficult to convince a judge that the certainty that you HAVE earned that amount is countered by some vague uncertainty you may not be able to again. Fighting against a known factual salary history with some hand waving about not being able to do it anymore is a hell of a hill to climb. Plenty of anecdotes show people having extreme difficulties lowering child support.
Of course colleges are admission free, insurance prices are fairly reasonable, property taxes are nonexistent, public infrastructure is top notch, car dependence is cool (and to own/pay for more than one car).
Non problems really
> If you can learn to reduce your expenses by $10k
1. This is crazy to me. I could maybe cut $3K by taking a huge hit to quality of life (that would probably not be sustainable with a full time job anyways). Getting the other $7K would involve either homelessness or cutting back on eating and visiting family. How do salary earners manage to rack up $10K per year of purely unnecessary expenses?
2. That number is still way too small to be a better strategy than income maximization in tech. Of course "and" is always better, but given the choice between an extra >$100K/yr in savings or $10K less in life expenses the choice is pretty obvious.
Yeah...a lot of financial advice assumes you already make 6-figures when they talk about cutting expenses.
12 years ago, my food budget was $3/day, and the only reason it wasn't less than even that was because I worked at a Subway and could get 1, sometimes 2 meals a day free if I was working a long shift. Going to Taco Bell was considered splurging.
I caught Mono and had to miss 3 days of work. I had to get an advance on my paycheck to pay the rent. At least my boss was cool about it.
> The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be
subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.’
> Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
> 1. This is crazy to me. I could maybe cut $3K by taking a huge hit to quality of life (that would probably not be sustainable with a full time job anyways). Getting the other $7K would involve either homelessness or cutting back on eating and visiting family. How do salary earners manage to rack up $10K per year of purely unnecessary expenses?
Cleaning services, vacations, picking the fancy and nice daycare using some trendy educational system (Montessori, unschooling, whatever) instead of the one run out of someone's house in a scary part of town, ordering food delivery, monthly subscription services for all kinds of crap, new car every 2 years instead of a used one every 5 years... the list goes on and on.
Having multiple late model cars in the household, often via leases (meaning expensive comprehensive insurance is also required). Buying a $15 lunch and three $5 coffees per day is probably an extra $20/workday ($4800/yr) more than a viable alternative. Two extra nights of eating out rather than cooking food at home might add another $100/week. Paying someone $100/wk to come clean your house is more than half of that “impossible” $10K/yr (and $100/wk is cheap for a cleaner in many cities).
No one’s saying it’s completely free from trade-offs , but a lot of people have leaks in their bucket that they mindlessly assume are “required” when, in fact, they’re small luxuries and should be considered that way. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but rather just means you should consciously determine if they’re actually worth the tradeoff to you.
$10k / yes is less than $30 a day. Not too hard to do with coffee shops, restaurants, and drinks. Add in fun stuff for two or three kids and it can add up quick.
I mean, that’s not wrong, but TFA involves getting an offer with a total comp we can safely assume is over 500k/annum. Do that and don’t increase you expenses and you end up in a good place fast.
Increasing comp can be much more than "doubly effective." It's unlikely to triple, quadruple, ten-times, etc, your comp, but in the industry talked about here it's far from impossible and if you only ever focus on your expenses you might blind yourself entirely to those opportunities.
I'm a sysadmin (or these days "cloud engineer"/"devops person"), and to a large extent I've never cared what the company I work for does.
I like networks, multiple servers, interesting deployments. The actual stuff that is being executed upon those systems is a little interesting, but also a little irrelevant.
There are fields I'd never touch, and technologies which are more interesting to me, but when it comes to looking for a job I'll just google "sysadmin helsinki" and apply to those companies that come top - or to places that friends have recommended.
So honestly? Ordering companies by salary seems like a reasonable enough approach to me.
I wonder if this would become a problem for Facebook. They might end up with a monoculture that doesn't really accord with the outside world. Mind you I suppose all technology companies are at risk of that.
Just a case of different priorities for different people. Some people are just in it for the cash and in that case applying to the top-paying companies would be optimal.
I find it weird that you find this weird. Most people I know and know of optimize like this. They are in it for the cash and trying to make as much as possible and then get out as soon as possible. Doesn't matter what the impact is, doesn't matter how unsavory the work is.
Most people I know don't, and a lot of them still do pretty well for themselves, so... to those wo do: Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better I guess, but don't pretend that it's universal for justification.
I believe it's extremely common? I don't really have any data though. Everyone I know changes jobs whenever someone comes along offering more.
I'm the odd one out having been with my current employer for >5 years. I've been getting healthy raises every year, but many of my friends have averaged a 40% pay increase every hop...
I guess it depends on what you want. Do you want your job to be something you're excited about doing every weekday? Or is it a means to provide for the things you'd rather be doing?
Well obviously, and then it would come down to who treats you better or lets you work on more interesting things. But the ceiling is typically way higher than what the people who don't hop around get.
>... so maybe I'm the one approaching this the wrong way?
I wouldn't say that. Everyone views things differently. You may place more value on product/industry/global impact, whereas others don't care, they just want the cash.
10% more money might be sort of in the noise of a bunch of other factors.
In the unlikely event it's 10x for whatever oddball reason, assuming it's nothing illegal/dangerous/etc., that would be hard not to give it a shot for a couple years and see how it goes.
Strategy for me has just been to contact a 2 or 3 good recruiters and let them find me the best opportunities. Often a recruiter can get you in the door at big companies quicker than you can applying directly. I just never let a recruiter interfere with my instincts, since even the good ones can get pushy when they sense that they're close to a big pay-off.
I felt bad for a really nice, hard working recruiter last year because, although i had 2 offers on the table through opportunities found through him, the companies just felt wrong. I ended up going with a company who head-hunted me directly on LinkedIn.
I don't understand people who don't minmax effort to income. That's why we work, for money. I re-evaluate my employer every 2 years or at the end of a project, because I will always just go to the highest bidder.
I'll retire at 35 and then do what I want. But for now, optimizing.
Money is a decent proxy for those things. You'll notice that his list scores pretty well on all those measures for someone with a typical set of moral standards.
It is hard for a financially poor company to have good products/impact.
You’re not wrong at all. A lot of us agree with this but the type of people who write blog posts about their process as if searching for a job is a totally generic thing wholly untethered to someone’s goals in their own life outside of pure capital motives don’t cover the interesting bits.
If you want to be a mercenary, read these blog posts.
If you want a job you like working on stuff you care about, avoid this stuff like the plague.
Will you make more in the end? Unclear, but I like to assume that people who work on stuff they care about eventually win under capitalism too. But even if not, I feel like I do fine.
This is me. I derive great satisfaction simply being around tech. Maybe it is from watching my father take apart and work with the family PC at age 4 or 5. Now I'm in a rat race against Adderall addicts on hedonic treadmills.
I feel that, but remain indecisive if the best way to enjoy tech. Is it to just find the closest approximation of a fit in a job at a reasonable wage, or to crank compensation to generate better options? As I get older, the latter seems more sustainable.
I don't quite get the study plan, as it sounds more like cramming. Nothing wrong with cramming per se except that what you learn does not stick, and you will have to repeat the process when you need to switch jobs again.
I think a better system is to regularly study fundamentals and always deep dive in your work. Case in point, I've never had problems passing interviews by FAANG or other hot startups, I always got title bump when switching jobs, and I never spent extra time prepping for interviews. Say you're an ML engineer who builds an image recognition pipeline using Spark and PyTorch. Do not just be content with assembling a number of open-source solutions to make your pipeline work. Instead, study the internals of Spark, understand the math and algorithms behind your image recognition models, read survey papers to understand the landscape of data processing and image recognition or further, machine learning, and implement a few models and try to optimize them. Similarly, if you work on database systems, do not just stop at being familiar with MySQL or Postgres or whatever. Instead, understand how transactions work, what consistency means, how principles of distributed systems play out. Study Jim Gray, Gottfried Vossen, Maurice Herlihy, Leslie Lamport, the database red book and its references... You get the idea.
As for leetcoding, replace it with study of algorithm designs. Study Jon Kleinberg's book or Knuth's writings (no, you don't have to read through his books, but his writings are incredibly insightful even for mortals like us), for instance. Instead of working out hundreds of back-tracing problems, study backtracking's general forms.
People tend to underestimate the effect of regular study for years. You'll find that in a few years your knowledge will converge and you will be able to spend less time to incrementally improve your skills, and you will have so many concepts to connect to greatly benefit your projects.
Despite your name referencing insanity I love your comment and it's a beacon of rationality in the current tech interview bubble. So generally I agree, but unfortunately sometimes the format and expectations of the coding interviews really demand prior grinding. I don't like it but it's the reality.
IE let's say you have a graph question that requires either BFS and DFS. You're a competent engineer who both recognizes the applicable algorithm and could reasonably implement it from scratch.
Some problems then have additional constraints such as adding bounds-checking (if searching inside some sort of "map") and checking visited nodes. The engineers who've grinded leetcode have muscle memory ready to regurgitate code for those conditions.
Competent engineers are able recognize these and implement them, but that lack of muscle memory wastes vital time for the interview. (Yes, those seconds are never a real constraint in the day-to-day).
I can only speak for myself, but I assume a lot of us don’t have the luxury of spending time on deep diving, because they are drowned with ever changing unrealistic deadlines from upper management.
I do. People underestimate the effect of continuous learning for years. Think about this: a semester of college CS course has 2 hours of lecture and one hour of tutorial per week, plus on average 15 hours of homework. That’s 18 hours a week. Now go check how much time you spent on your phone. Let me guess, 4 hours, at least? Cut it in half, and you get your 2 hours back. Besides, deep dive in work is part of the job, so you can usually have some additional time. More importantly, we are not in college pursuing perfect GPA any more. Instead, we can follow 80-20 rule. All-in-all, if we can spend 6 hours a week, that’s 1/3 of a course’s load, more than enough to cover a single course. In 10 years, you would cover at least the content of 20 courses. Trust me, you would cover way more because knowledge converges and you will learn faster as you will be able to connect more dots.
10 years look long, but pass quickly. That’s why my approach is a system: it does not guarantee success, but it maximizes then chance of success and happiness.
Non scholae, sed vitae discimus. It is not for school, but for life we learn.
It's a great approach as long as you remember that you're reading for the benefit of your own knowledge rather than the benefit of an interviewer. One of the supposed benefits of a degree (leave aside grade inflation etc. that undermine the benefit in the real world) is that you can put a degree on your resume but not all the books you've read for personal and professional enrichment.
Is something wrong with software engineering interviews that one could reasonably need to spend months prepping for interviews? Leetcode problems can be fun and interesting, but seldom represent problems and skills I employ daily as a more senior software engineer. Studying these problems won’t help me much at my current employer and likely wouldn’t after I passed the interview gauntlet at another firm.
The very last bit of the article interestingly stated that they author wouldn't spend time doing prep again, they would only make sure they applied with a referral. I definitely agree, it's kind of a blight on our industry that the interview process is so contorted compared to the actual work we're supposed to do.
Generally, once you've practiced enough to clear most tech rounds once - it's not too difficult to do it again. If I'm going in for an interview then I might still need to spend ~1-2 weeks practicing again to do well. Earlier in my career I spent months practicing LC.
Eh, I'm 8 years into the same company now, have been shipping the entire time across multiple teams, wearing multiple hats, etc., and am 15 years into my career. I'd have to put some non-trivial effort into refreshing my memory of a great deal of the sorts of things that are (anecdotally) commonplace in interview settings today. And with a full-time job and 3 young kids, time is hard to come by.
8 years ago, I spent time with CtcI, etc., and was immensely prepared to interview but, for me, that's all largely lost to the ages now.
Until the recent two years, no referral means no response whatsoever, for me anyway... referral usually guarantees I will hear back, even if it is rejection, all else equal, including the exact same resume of mine.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, I work for a bigg-ish Tech, and the bulk of the new hires are referrals. Very very few candidates get hired without referral. The referral fee is so high, the hiring manager is usually inundated with candidates the moment a role is available. Very seldom do we need to seriously consider non-referred candidates.
Some companies never respond so it could help get the first call. Maybe if two candidates are otherwise equal but one has a great referral it might help. At smaller companies it definitely helps, I definitely remember calling referrals to get eh scoop on people but that might not be as true at the mega corps.
At the very least referrals almost always bump you up the list. At best they can put you on the fast track for a position. IMO they are worth more than anything else you can do to get a job, so long as they are genuine.
It's because of the time constraints required in an interview. At my job, the assumption is that you won't have enough context and experience to be effective in the job until you've been there for 6 months. You can't fit 6 months of prep into an interview.
Good interview questions are ones that boil that 6mo+ of experience down to something that can be explained in 5 minutes and solved in 45. Ideally you'd just work for the company for a few months and then they have their signal, and that's how internships and contractor conversions work. Most people with experience are unwilling to quit a job for a 3-month trial period though.
I've long thought that it might be interesting for an interview model to emerge where a trial period of weeks/months is the expectation. I think this might resolve much of the current frustration with programming inteviews. But I also recognize that doing so would be significantly different from how essentially all other companies operate, and if it weren't communicated clearly enough, could result in negative PR for a firm trying such an approach.
He interviewed as an engineering manager, his job will be probably people management, hiring and moving tickets around. Do engineering managers in meta do any technical work in order to require lc mindset? What 6 month experience do you expect from an new joiner engineering manager other that attending meetings and get to know the projects in high level and what do you expect to see in these interviews through lc questions?
This. Also, 3 month trial periods instead of interviews are not going to happen for two reasons: a) there are still many people out there applying for jobs that couldn't code an append operation for a linked list, b) the cost that such trials would put on companies - if you ever mentored a junior you know the cost. It's worth it, but only because >90% of the recruits are valuable afterwards.
And most licensing and accreditation is a joke. It's never firm enough. These certs can be gamed. Colleges are grade inflated and too many idiots are passed.
The median software engineer salary isn't anywhere near the median doctor's salary. I don't know that most engineers could make it through FAANG interviews even with months of prep.
I was going off more of FAANG salaries, comparing the work you put in to get a FAANG job vs the work you put in to get a doctor job.
Huh, i guess it probably is true that "most" engineers couldn't make it, but i guess my viewpoint is skewed because "most" of my engineer friends could and do make it, with "months" of prep being an upper bound, more closer to "weeks". So, it is a bit selective, but i don't know how selective it is relative to people who are able to get into medical school.
There are plenty of passionate software engineers who think those problems are actually fun. Independently of that (I don't think it's an immediate red flag if those problems are not fun for you, or not fun for you in that specific setting etc.), a lot of it is actually a glimpse into how working with that person might be. I.e. what ideas do they form, how do they communicate them, how do they respond to feedback, how do discussions about alternatives, problems etc. go, do they seek help when they need it and how... I don't think it's deniable that those are valuable qualities to test.
> There are plenty of passionate software engineers who think those problems are actually fun.
There are plenty of passionate software engineers who don’t. Competitive programmers maybe. I like writing naive code that does something useful, where useful sometimes mean performance. When you revisit or just step away from the problem, you’ll have an aha moment of how to solve it more efficiently, or more elegantly. The Leetcode style interview expects finding that insight in the first 5-10 minutes of the interview. Here, more grinding increases the probability you arrive that rote insight. Rote memorization is not very fun, especially for software engineers who like assembling complex things from simple primitives and first principles.
So? I did write that not having fun with that is not a red flag for me, and listed qualities that can be assessed from such an interview independently of whether someone has fun with it or not.
I do have fun with computer science problems, and it translates into an appetite to solving tricky technical problems in my job. I have peers that are similar, given that pre-COVID I remember us discussing other people's interview questions purely for the fun of discussing them.
If the job specifically calls for tricky problem solving on a regular basis then, yes, I think a certain passion and appetite visible in the interview helps, but I'm well aware that that's not universal. For example, I assume (not that I know, feel free to correct me) that in frontend development of websites, something I can see is a lot of work and which I respect, other qualities are more important than a passion for intricate technical and/or computer science puzzles.
(In fact, I think you are right that there certainly are subfields where trying to come up with an intricate solution, instead of a known and proven one, can be rather detrimental.)
I personally do find those problems fun, or some of them. They rarely crop up in a professional capacity.
I've mostly seen them in my hobby gamedev work where things like concurrency and graphs and dynamism are endemic.
That's why leetcode filters really miss the mark because they usually don't fit the job description. They're just a lazy way to test searchable knowledge in an arbitrarily constrained setting.
What we really should be evaluating, as a profession, is reasoning and software design, scoped to the desired competency of the role.
Honestly I do interviews at FAANG, and all those qualities mean nothing. At the end of the day, if they solve the questions they will probably get an offer, and if they dont, they probably wont.
There's this class of engineer. They're remarkably successful. Essentially, they mechanize the process of the job hunt:
- Optimize for comp at all costs
- Work at full professional capacity for the 9-5
- Excel at interviewing, often also fairly competent at their jobs
- See the job as "just a job"
Personally, I think that if you're a startup you shouldn't hire any of these people. But at big companies they will probably do really well. Essentially, just perfectly professional individuals, but I think I'd want people who care about the thing you're building a lot more so they can influence its direction as well.
But that's okay for both parties in the FAANG world. The guaranteed high comp is a FAANG thing in general. For a while, in the Bay Area, we were easily the highest comp shop and that led to us encountering these people a lot and it was never a satisfactory outcome. One even signed and then reneged 2 w before starting when Amazon matched.
Presumably in a year or so he will repeat the process and pump up his comp even more. I expect this guy to be quite wealthy in the next few years.
Whenever there is a lot of money on the table, these types of individuals will definitely show up in droves. Hell, do you think CS is fast becoming one of the most popular majors because most people love computers? For 60-70% of software engineers, it is all about making money and retiring.
I'll take it one step further. Most people doing CS don't have a love for generic crud apps pipelining information over the web, but that's the far majority of safe jobs paying well as a software dev.
There are plenty of people who go into CS for more passionate fields such as game development. They often end up taking one of these safe jobs anyway.
This whole process seems a bit psychotic. Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer? Is "has memorized some number of coding problems" really a test of engineering knowledge?
I suppose it's appropriate that after all that work, the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless company on the list.
> Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer?
Frankly, yes. Just as the SATs and ACTs are IQ tests with a shitty veil on top, FAANG interviews are meant to be the same. Everyone knows interview prep has basically zero correlation to job duties in software engineering, but you have to play the game.
> the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless company on the list.
Who cares? Searching for meaning through work is fruitless, unless you're at a company that actually really aligns with your values and what you hope to see in the world.
Huge comp packages allow people to pursue meaning in life outside of their 9-5. It pays the bills, and allows for hobbies. I'd attempt to be a MotoGP racer if I had unlimited free time, but I don't - what I DO have, is a pretty nice white collar job that pays well and is somewhat mentally stimulating. The paycheck allows me to do things I'm actually passionate about otherwise.
> Searching for meaning through work is fruitless, unless you're at a company that actually really aligns with your values and what you hope to see in the world.
IMO there's a difference between finding meaning for yourself and actively making the world a worse place. You can very well ignore the former while still making sure to not do the latter.
Patterns is a good way to put it. I can pretty much guarantee that if you stuck a SAT test in front of me today (or one in front of much younger me prior to doing any preliminary tests or test prep), I would not be getting into my undergraduate school of choice.
> Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer
He is explicitly optimizing for compensation so yes, he needs to nail the interviews. It's a bit of a "don't hate the player hate the game" situation. He
does what is needed to achieve the objective.
> Is "has memorized some number of coding problems" really a test of engineering knowledge?
Absolutely not, but the blog post is not titled "On becoming a better software engineer".
Eh. That might be true in the abstract, but I am not even 30, I want to buy a house, live my life, etc... Sure I could just shun any place that requires me to do leetcode style coding interviews for the greater good, but at the end of the day the global impact will be minuscule, while the personal impact would be significant.
It's interesting that this read to you as cramming. To me, the mention of the use of Anki (spaced repetition) as well as his approach to revisiting past questions he had trouble with suggested the opposite.
The proposed "blind referral" system, where people refer people they don't even know for jobs, seems like it should be a completely worthless signal on the hiring side. On the referrer side the benefit is obvious, if the person gets the job you get cash. But on the company side, what is the value of a referral that's predicated specifically on a shallow social interaction?
It’s better for small companies it’s since it incentivizes employees to advertise their company to other professionals. For a large company that has many applicants it’s less valuable but it could also be an indicator that applicant at least hangs out in the same networking circles.
Even at large companies, I have seen instances (not common but instances) if candidate playing one group against the other so I guess you are incentivized to pull them in your group.
For now Blind might have a sufficiently high quality network to make this worthwhile even on hiring. You wouldn't find it unless you were serious "enough" about your career, even if there is a ton centered around LC grinding and TC chasing.
The incentives are aligned. You only get paid for referring (presumably) _good_ candidates that get hired, and the company saves a huge amount of money and hassle on not having to deal with and pay an external recruiter (which can cost something like 25% of a new hires first year base salary).
"Once I showed the potential salaries to my wife, we both agreed it would be perfectly reasonable for me to ask for 30 minutes of additional “me time” per day to prepare for my next job,"
What the hell? If he wants 30m to himself each day he needs to clear with his wife?
Don't most people get more than 30m free time each day away from their partner? Just what kind of unhealthy relationship is this dude in?
The article says that he already spend about 1h to 1h30 for lifting (gym). Probably needed to ask to get even more time just to be polite. Always a balance when you live with someone and that you have children.
Yeah 30m of extra 'me' time could easily mean the wife loses half her free time. That breeds a TON of marital problems and issues if you don't clear it. A 1 y/o is basically a time vacuum.
Apparently I'm the only one who enjoyed my time with baby and didn't find it to be work at all. If you aren't equipped to live for and love your child you should wait until you are in a better place to do so. It isn't some airborne illness, and babies aren't all universally a ball and shackle.
You can both enjoy being with your child while also recognizing that it takes up a large amount of time and that there's other things in life that need to be done as well, such as getting a job to pay for that child's upbringing, education, etc.
This is incredibly judgmental, especially in a society that doesn’t enable people to “live for” their children. Kids are easy to love; the logistics of parenting are super challenging. Kudos to anyone who goes down this path and keeps finding their balance, whatever that may look like.
it's 30 min additional time. when you have a small kid someone is always oncall. This phrase does not seem odd at all to me (and is a very good way of separating people that have a kid from people that don't have a kid)
Man the 22 year olds in this thread are hilarious.
Yes. With a one year old, esp during COVID, childcare time is time you can’t leave the house, can’t relax, can’t do anything productive. So yes, you make a schedule - you pick them up from daycare, watch them for an hour while I study, then I’ll come make dinner and do bedtime.
This is blatantly ageist and misses the point completely. The point I was making is that it is absurd to need to ask your partner to schedule you 30 minutes of "me time." If I asked that of my partner I'm confident she would think I lost my mind. Why would one need permission for 30 minutes of time at all. Truly bizarre.
Do you have young kids? No clue if Adam's wife works/is in school/whatever but an additional 30 minutes of focus time is definitely an ask for busy parents of young children.
I'd like to respond to all the replies saying "But they have a one year old":
TLDR: If baby needs $X hours of baby-sitting per day, and mum and dad do baby-sitting together at the same time, they both need $X hours per day to do it. If mum and dad switch roles every 90m-120m, then each parent gets $X/2 free hours per day.
I have a two year old at the moment. Last year he was one. Shortly after he was born (around month 2) my wife and I split the baby-sitting schedule as evenly as possible.
We have very little "together time" with the child (all three of us together) unless we are going out with him. What I insist on is that only a single person is responsible for baby-sitting at any given moment (and the moments are all well-defined).
In practice, this means that if my wife is baby-sitting, I will not be there at all (doing chores, focusing on something else, just relaxing, whatever).
It works the same in reverse: when I am baby-sitting, she is not there at all.
This gives both of us a lot more free time than if we both sit there baby-sitting. There's literally no reason for both parents to wake up when baby needs a 2AM feeding, or when baby needs entertainment (playing peekabo, or whatever), or even when baby is just napping.
My observation of couples with a newborn is that almost always both parents are baby-sitting the child together. In that case, sure, you are going to have a lot less free time. If you split the time equally, both parties get a lot more time.
Personally, due to how our childcare worked, even with a one year old toddler in the house, my wife and I were averaging around four hours of awake me-time per weekday.
If the poster is getting too little free-time each day to find 30m, then redundant baby-sitting is happening.
we all like to believe that we are somehow better than this and that there is meaning in the work we do, but at the end of the day if you were to disappear tomorrow things will go on without you. you might as well optimize for personal gain from being a tool
I feel like I'm the only person left who actually likes working and being productive with other people. I actually like programming and solving problems with other people.
There's been a huge shift since COVID to embrace not working hard, but to me life isn't as interesting when you're spending 40 hours a week just kinda wasting your time, trying to get away with putting in the least amount of effort possible. Having a little pride in your work can be very healthy.
"Retire" doesn't need to mean "sit on your ass all day"; it can also mean "freedom to do whatever work I want, no matter the pay", "start my own business", "take a year off to be a stay-at-home parent", and things like that.
Yes, you like it when you are lucky to end up with people you work well with, but it only lasts until that one guy leaves and that other guy starts. Now you don't like it anymore. Wouldn't it be kind of the same thing but just more flexible, if you could do the same group work programming for open source for example? It would be very similar work but now on your own terms.
That's them! Specifically part I (the three layers of hierarchy) and part V (how the top layer manipulates the middle layer, leaving them with all the blame and none of the credit).
Article links to a video by Engineering with Utsav, which is a very good channel in my opinion. This is probably one of the best algorithm solving videos I’ve ever seen, since it does not rely on knowing any solutions beforehand but actually goes through the process of evaluating different techniques:
This sounds so dystopian. The sector is really sick if what you need to increase your salary by 100% is not doing your job correctly for years, but 3 months of focused study of popular question.
He spends a good chunk talking about figuring out how to get prep work without negatively impacting his life, but it's interesting that there was no mention of how the actual new job would impact his life. Especially since he literally just picked the highest paying ones.
Also interesting there was no concern about the "evilness" of Facebook. I could never work at Facebook no matter how much they offered. You could say they are "in the business of making money" but their actions (or lack thereof) has direct impacts on entire countries usually for the worse.
Meta offering the highest salary could be because people actually do care about this, and so Meta needs to pay more for people to think it’s worthwhile working there.
Why do you think Facebook are so evil? I understand that their main product has negative effects on society, but so does every social media platform (including LinkedIn and Twitter).
More than the other platforms, Facebook has tried to moderate and reduce harmful content. They have much larger teams working on this both algorithmically and with human moderators.
If your issue is with their tracking and data privacy issues, what are the harms caused by that?
I’m asking just as much out of ignorance as I am asking to challenge you. There’s a strong narrative that Facebook and Zuckerberg are evil and it looks like dogma to me at this point. Why is TikTok not receiving the same level of scrutiny?
If someone were to give Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that Facebook has brought huge positives to this world. They established social media. They created a tool that lets you up to date with friends and stay more connected with these people than was ever possible before. Perhaps any tool like that was inevitably going to come with negative effects.
There's a lot of negative comments on here, but considering we often make more per hour than lawyers or doctors, and we don't have bar exams or a medical license, I don't see what else could be done. If we have to retake a mini bar exam targeted to the new role every time we want a higher paying job, that seems like a more efficient "just in time" method.
We could go towards licensure, but I've seen even less interest in that, and frankly for how fast tech changes I'm not sure it's even feasible.
Author here - did not expect this post to blow up. Figured it might be helpful to provide some context on points of confusion:
1. Money > everything: an alternative way to look at this is that if you sort by offers, you notice there are a lot of neat companies in that list. I didn't just sort and then blindly apply. I sorted, and noticed that they all had something I was really interested in. I use Amazon weekly. My side projects use Stripe. I have side projects in fintech, and Brex is in fintech. Facebook is the home of React, which I've built most of my career on. In seeking high comp, my goal is to be able to self-fund the earliest stages of a startup, as right now I just don't have the idea that is compelling me to start something. I also want to help family, some of whom are in a financial rut. So it wasn't like I only looked at money. I started with money as the way to narrow down the list, and it turned out that list had a lot of interesting companies on it.
2. Making time for studying: as some folks pointed out, I have young children and with both of us parents working, I wanted to just make sure I wasn't encroaching on precious family time - and I think it's important to run things by your family if you think a routine might change. Turns out that extra study time infringed on none of it. I mostly studied on nights and weekends, during the baby's naps or after they went to bed. All I really wanted to say here was "if I can make time with a family, I believe you can find the time to study, too"
3. Do you really have to do this to land a good job? Heck no. My take on this was "leave nothing to chance." You'd be surprised how many startups are leveraging the FAANG interview process. It takes work to prepare for interviews at quality companies. I didn't want to spend the time interviewing with a company only to think "why didn't I prepare for this?" It's a waste of their time and mine if I don't come in fully prepared.
Lastly, someone pointed this out, but I just have changed my value system on work. I do care about what I do, but it is just a job. Family and life are so much more.
I think I have burnout from startups as an employee. I've worked on everything from sports to climate change, and it's been difficult to put so much heart and soul into something that statistically hasn't had much of a payout, in either literal dollars or impact on the world.
So in seeking my next role, I figured that if I have to work hard anyway, I might as well get myself closer to goals external to work, such as retirement, college funds for my kids, and helping my family out of debt. Or even, possibly, starting my own company.
And in the end, I have fantastic work/life balance. I spend less time working and more time with my family, all while making more. And I am very grateful that I have this time to focus more on family. While my initial list started with high-paying companies, by the time I had offers in, I very much wanted to ensure all of my needs were met, including time with my growing family.
I enjoyed the post much more than expected after reading all of these comments. While this style isn't for everyone, I appreciate the structured approach and tips.
The study plan mentioned is roughly equivalent to taking one upper level college course while working full-time.
Given the importance of starting salaries, this could have an incredible ROI even if the end result of studying is as small as "I now feel more confident in my interviews".
This post isn't about "everybody should do this" or "I care about money and you should to". It's an anecdote from a high-performance job hunt.
Some people like to chill and some like to drive in the fast lane.
Could you elaborate on your conclusion.
The entire post is about prep but you said next time you won't spend so much time prepping and use standard questions.
> Running engineering teams at Indigo Agriculture. We're an agtech company helping feed the world and we need help from fellow developers like those reading this bio. If you're looking for a job, send me your resume at ...
> referrals are the most important part of getting your foot in the door. …. Even still, I had referrals at both Google and Salesforce, both of which went nowhere after the initial submission phase.
Because referrals arent relevant at these companies! lol
man so out of touch, attributing way too much to the ways they acted
I went through a very similar process and my study plan was similar, though compressed into about a month and a half (no kid, younger). It was for an IC position. I wrote a blog post about it also (which I won't share).
These interviews aren't very inclusive of parents since they can't sacrifice as much time. However, I interviewed at [redacted], and their interview required no prep (though it probably helped) yet was very difficult. Meanwhile, other places threw leetcode hards at me like dude... if I didn't study every day there's no way I would have been able to write a trie and backtrack and write unit tests in ~50 minutes (https://leetcode.com/problems/palindrome-pairs/)
I think [redacted]'s a lot closer to the ideal interview process than most other places. The sweet spot is "be difficult, yet do not require a bunch of prep and keep it immune from gaming"
FWIW after you do this prep grind like two times, it kinda sticks. Like, I don't think I'll ever have to study for more than a week again to grind back up
A key take-away from this blog post is that you should really be lining up your offers. I got a bunch of offers and was able to get an uplevel out of it I would have otherwise not gotten. Don't be a schmuck, folks. Know your worth and always re-evaluate
N=1 from West EU: things are slowly changing in the entirety of the West. Demands are increasing and compensations aren't matching up remotely. We're very much adopting the mentality of SV without the big paychecks.
And we're still making the same crud apps as before. Just now they look a little fancier and we don't manually deploy. Maybe.
I recently went through this process with a lot of the same companies on this guy's list although I limited mine to 100% remote roles. I do agree that some interview and coding prep is beneficial although not nearly as much as he suggests. I limited my prep to a round of "practice" interviews with 2 or 3 companies that I wasn't really interested in. I then applied to the companies I was interested in and ended up with a 60% pay raise in a 100% remote role. I'd encourage anyone who can tolerate the interview process to go out and see what's available these days. And I highly recommend the levels.fyi site for comp info. Based on my recent experience, their comp numbers are slightly on the low side, probably lagging slightly behind the recent rapidly-increasing comps for developers.
This sounds like a game for younger people. But then again, do FAANGs even hire middle aged developers? I ask because of genuine curiosity -- I have a decent network and could probably land another job pretty easily, but only one of my closer contacts works for a FAANG. So the only way I could even try would be through the front door, as it were.
Yea, they all do. That’s who mentors all the juniors they hire. It can be harder coming from non-FAANG, but plenty of people do it every year, esp as all those companies are expanding. Gotta put in the LeetCode grind though, bc other than Netflix, they all do those interviews.
I’m at about 15 yoe, got interviews at 3/5 of the FAANGs with only startup experience on my resume.
As others said in thread, get those Blind referrals.
Can you explain how Blind referrals work? I think I know, but I'm not entirely clear on the details since they're nothing on the landing page of the site about it (at least if you don't have an account yet).
I did the opposite, collected a bunch of salaries for my experience level on levels.fyi, showed them to my boss, and asked for a raise. Got a 50K bump without having to do much. I'm only in the mid 200s TC mind you, but not bad for just looking up what I could be worth.
A lot of focus here on the salary aspect. But he also emphasizes referrals, albeit not necessarily in a personal connection sort of way. When I last changed jobs, a dozen or so years ago, my strategy was basically to put together a short list of companies that I was interested in and had connections at. I started at the top of that list, it worked out, and here I am.
>>>> Get a referral for all of the jobs you apply for, study a standard list of questions, stack your interviews, and negotiate like a champ. Success is all but guaranteed.
ELI5 what getting a referral for a job means. I've been out of the market for a long time.
Having someone that already works in the company add you to the applicant pool. Most companies have differing level of referrals, including "network" which just means it's someone that you vaguely know but never worked with (or a friend of a friend).
Sometimes there's a bonus attached if the person is hired and stays for some period, though those are somewhat falling out of favor due to the perverse incentive.
The main benefit is just ensuring that a recruiter / hiring manager actually looks at the candidate, so it's really just a portal to ensuring a real recruiter screen.
Either find someone who you know IRL who works at your target company to refer you internally, or post on a Blind thread to solicit referrals from randos:
I'm making twice as much I was making before the Great Resignation and it will be somewhere between 3x and 4x by the end of the year. Behind some job hopper there's usually a bad CFO.
This is roughly similar to my experience changing jobs recently. Adam was definitely more organized than I was. In any event congratulations on the strong offer @acconrad!
So weird - I switched jobs recently and it was with zero interview preparation and I had competing offers from fang. I feel quality of engineers hired there is dropping.
For years I have run in terror at the leetcodes I might be thrown by a tech company that thinks it is a FANG.
Looking at the "Blind 75 Must Do Leetcode" problems, I must say, I am disappoint.
I just spent four hours on a Friday evening going through each of the problems, and have so far solved 40+ of them, in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases. Some of them were so dazzling easy (Coins, Sum2, Robber, Robber II, Word Search II), that I sat there for a good few seconds and thought "That cannot be it, surely?!?"
> in a less than optimal fashion for the most part, but solved and "correct" to pass the test cases
You wouldn’t get through the interview. Most questions have a very easy brute force solution, but the answer they’re looking for is the optimal one. There’s also time constraints. Figure out the runtime complexity of your answer and compare it to the solutions.
Understood. So what I should be doing is trying create optimal solutions. Obviously completely optimal solutions on some of them could take hours, if not years to come up with. Those would be "you either know it or you don't" or you're the equivalent of Mozart when it comes to code. I am thinking I will work on some of those solutions today.
> Obviously completely optimal solutions on some of them could take hours, if not years to come up with.
Yep. Once you know the common patterns then most of the easy questions are pretty easy to solve optimally in 10-15 minutes. A lot of the hard questions seem impossible unless you’ve seen the problem before and I’m not sure what an effective strategy for those is.
Please stop lying, you absolutely did not solve 40 leetcode problems in 4 hours. That’s 6 minutes per question, most competitive programmers can’t even do that.
I have nothing to gain by lying. You're logic is flawed because you're assuming all questions took six minutes. Rotate Image, Robber II were all under two minutes, many others too. Coin Change and Robber and Merge Two Sorted Lists were under a minute. That leaves plenty of time to solve slightly more difficult problems. A half-dozen or so lines of C, C# or Python solves most of the problems in the set of problems that I tackled.
Have you looked at these problems? They're trivial.
Rotate Image (medium) https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-image/) is 7 lines of code, because I have to use a temporary variable to do the swap. It is a simple matrix transpose. 5 lines if I could allocate more memory.
I did not provide optimal solutions, which may be why competitive programmers take more time to solve the problems. I will see how I do when I start hitting on some of the hards.
Lines of code has nothing to do with the difficulty of the question, especially for recursion/backtracking types. "Invert a binary tree" is an example of an infamous question [1] that a lot of people stumble on and it's only 3 lines of code.
I shouldn't have called you a liar though, just saying those are very impressive results for someone who has never done these questions before if true.
You are correct, lines of code is nothing to do with the difficlty of the problem. I spent close to three weeks writing 12 lines of Python. Two of which consisted of print statements. A "clean-up" pass removed three more lines. I consider that to be some of the hardest code I've written in recent memory.
If I was asked to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard I would stumble too. Inverting a binary tree, I can walk through the algorithm, or I can bang out the code. And yes, it's three lines of code, but I had to look up what "invert a binary tree" means. Put a pen in my hand and I'd freeze up. It is trivial to solve through either recursion or iteration. I understand how to, but if I was asked to solve it in an interview, I'd definitely question why. I cannot think of a single instance whereby I'd want to legitimately flip a free left to right in its entirety. I can think of dozens of esoteric tree operations that I would need, and have used, but inverting/flipping left-to-right completely is not one of them.
I consider the person in that tweet far smarter than me.
