d4rkph1b3r's comments

writing cloud based services, some low level network code and some higher level FP style code. I have a lot of github contributions to notable projects (took a lot of time to build that up).

I have a few close friends who make a fair bit more working at big 4 tech companies who don't any sort of online presence. They just did well in interviews, were persistent and not afraid to flunk some interviews, then worked hard to get promoted.

35 Los Angeles (working for a BaY Area company remotely).

175k total cash comp (part of it is bonus).

>Ok in this case would be ~4000-4500k€/month for a relatively experienced software engineer

Wow that's insane. Experienced, talented Americans are making 4x or more than experienced Swedish SEs. I wouldn't be surprised if the Bay Area, NY, or LA was a bit more expensive but none the less that salary difference!

>For that kind of money, you typically need to be a manager (team lead at least).

False. You have to be very senior, but you do not need to 'typically' be a manager. There was a spreadsheet a few months ago on HN showing that with RSUs, most of the top tech companies pay above this for their higher level (non manager) engineers.

>It's less than $300k, but contracting taxes in UK are about 20%

Wow, contracting taxes are higher in the US, maybe it is a comparable if you can make 150k+ doing consulting work in the UK!

This guy should be fired both for harassment and incompetence. First of all, this guy is supposed to be biz dev. We are not talking about a rude comment by an engineer, people skills and sensitivity/understanding of business etiquette is part of his job. Two, this is not a "faux pas". He did not say "your dress looks hot" or "will you go out with me" or any number of less than polite come ons that people use outside of a work context. Instead he made an explicit comment to someone he barely knows. This shows clear lack of judgement.

Trick question, nobody fucking knows without knowing their entire history.

The vast majority of people making money from stock compensation are at big companies that give generous RSU grants, so I'm not really sure how much of what you say is applicable.

I think people absolutely consider RSUs as a factor in compensation, albeit a slightly more complicated, less predictable amount of pay. But given that it can be over 100% of your total cash compensation... it seems crazy to say people don't 'count' it.

Tripled salary? I suppose if you're awful. I think you have no idea what US devs make compared to their european counterparts if they're worth their salt.

The whole point of abstractions is that you don't have to worry about as much. Generics take away complexity, that's the whole point.

Ah, so you can't argue with me, so you're going to try the ol' appeal to authority ("i've worked on such big code bases that you'll never see").

You seem to assume I'm some naive recent grad. I've worked on more than a few 500k LOC applications. I'm a lead at a very large tech company (Fortune 50). The idea that '"clever"' programmers is a thing is incorrect.

There are good programmers and bad programmers. It doesn't matter if the lack of abstraction used by one type creates a monolithic mess of spaghetti code or if they use overly obscure attempts at abstraction. Bad code causes technical debt either way, and I've seen both done quite often.

can you articulate the exact cost of adding generics? The benefits are profound, and the PL community has been doing research on it for the last forty some odd years.

Some of the benefits are opportunities for

* specialization

* reduction in boilerplate

* parametricity

* free theorems

* type classes

Objectively, a collections library written with generics and no subtyping will be much better and cleaner than a subtype based one.

The problem is, I've never heard generics argued against by someone who really understands generics. It's usually folks who got confused by them in java or really didn't dig into the theory behind them. An argument from ignorance isn't much of an argument.

>Do we have 67 implementations of sort.Interface?

Hahaha. This has to be satire right?

>Generics would not make our codebase significantly better, more maintainable, or easier to understand.

Generics are literally a form of abstraction. You might as well be arguing that abstraction doesn't help. Why do you even have subtype polymorphism then? Why not just reimplement everything? That's not a significantly difficult part of your job as you said.

One of the best things about Go is it seems to be a strong signaler of the type of engineering team I avoided.

As others have said, the problem is getting the interview, not getting hired.

You'll have to get a recommendation from someone to get an interview, either by doing Open Source or Stack Overflow or attending conferences or something. Once you're in an interview, most companies in the Bay aren't going to care about a degree if you can pass the interview.

The problem is making it through the HR/resume hurdle. (And passing the interview).

You don't really need to make any more then that if you're front running your own trades!

If this is true, why did the salary spreadsheet on HN last month show that some programmers are earning 3x, 4x, or even 5x others?

Non managers are pulling over 400k at companies just as engineers. Do you think this is untrue?

> but then I see the 90+ hour weeks that are expected

I have never ever heard of this in a SV job unless it's a startup and they have ownership. I see folks working 50 hours a week max.

I was in the industry for 12 years struggling until I made a good salary. Before then I was making 90k or less some years. Sometimes it takes a while.

The awesome thing about the tech industry... what you did or make this year doesn't affect what you can make two years from now all that much.

>What did you do to keep head high and still achieve something great in life

Be confident you can eventually get where you want, but realistic about how many weaknesses you have and how long it will take to get there. This might be a two year path for you to get that dream job.

In the mean time, you can't spend 100% of your time stressing about how you aren't growing/progressing fast enough. Partition your free time into both 'learn/grow' and 'goof off/relax' time. You absolutely need the latter too. Study your tech books, practice coding etc.

For me, no matter how crappy or great my week is, friday night I have a couple drinks with friends or my GF and don't think about work. If I stay up all night working, I try to read a fiction book for fifteen or twenty minutes before falling asleep. Little things like that will keep you sane and happy for the marathon it will take to get to where you need to be.

> Maybe i should realise that i am just a wannabe entrepreneur, a wantepreneuer.

Yeah, you probably are. So fix that. Step one, learn to code (better?), and get a development job. Do that for a bit, save some money, then figure out step 2. You can't change the past so don't let it unduly influence what you'll do next.

Why kotlin and not scala? Kotlin is like Scala--, in addition to not really having a job market.

1. Are you sure you're offering above market? I can't tell you the number of times i've been contacted by a company with a 'great market rate' salary, offering me a better position than I'm in, for way less than my current salary.

2. Smart people want to work with smart people, so make sure the people doing the interview are doing the right things to attract the right folks. If I see a red flag in an interview, I'm going to be very weary.

3. Get involved in a community! Whatever your stack is, start going to meetups for it, release some open source, give talks on your infrastructure, etc. Pretty soon you can be one of the names that comes up when someone is looking to work with a certain technology.

Look at Jane Street's model. They are a tiny (or, at least used to be, maybe now they're just small) compared to the big companies. They are the OCaml guys, they don't have a big team, but if you want to make $$$ are interested in functional programming, you absolutely look into working there and their name comes up in a lot of conversations. Good luck!