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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
>... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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?
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.
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.
> 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
[+] [-] claudiulodro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoyohello13|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] everdrive|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AsusToss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treyfitty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 88913527|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clpm4j|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeFlatXIII|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caffeine|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevekemp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ngokevin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nluken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuikAccount|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teknoman117|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] groby_b|4 years ago|reply
You're only approaching it the wrong way if money is your highest value too and you don't act on that.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
Saving the world is not something you do as an employee of a corporation. That's more suited to a government or NGO position.
And if you care about saving the world, you can do it better in your free time.
There's no reason business should be impacted by ideology. And before having duties to others, you have duties to yourself and your family.
[+] [-] jjulius|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mibollma|4 years ago|reply
- distance from home
- work-life balance
- tech stack
- smaller project size <50 ppl
- smaller office rooms <5 ppl
In the end I picked the highest paying that fit all the criteria above and so far I'm happy with my choice.
[+] [-] nly|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tejtm|4 years ago|reply
I can't imagine eliminating how I feel about what I do from the equation.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kache_|4 years ago|reply
I'll retire at 35 and then do what I want. But for now, optimizing.
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
It is hard for a financially poor company to have good products/impact.
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FerociousTimes|4 years ago|reply
You optimize your job hunting for these criteria and he did his chiefly for $$$, as you put it.
[+] [-] djcapelis|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hintymad|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cebert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|4 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] maxfurman|4 years ago|reply
I suppose it's appropriate that after all that work, the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless company on the list.
[+] [-] notafraudster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelanthran|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] lokimedes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glouwbug|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/FSycYs8RpsA
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prh8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] destitude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackMorgan|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] acconrad|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
Because referrals arent relevant at these companies! lol
man so out of touch, attributing way too much to the ways they acted
this is otherwise a good, no, amazing, blogpost!
[+] [-] kache_|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sarchertech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|4 years ago|reply