I moved from Silicon Valley to nyc met a couple other nerdy friends talked to girls every weekend with them at the bars. I cold approached them. The first were very hard but I got used to it.
What does this mean on a real world level in NYC? Can anyone offer 350+ to 15+ YOE in NYC besides FAANG. 4 years ago I interviewed and failed 6/6 design and 4/6 leetcode (passed lyft and fb leetcode). 4 years ago I studied about 50-100 LC and did a design review class to get that far . I’m much better at design but couldn’t pass 5 hard LC. I’ve got a family and with work it’s a lot to do that much studying every day again. 4 years ago I could not get any 300+ offers
I'm working in sell side banks and $200k base is pretty much top for VP you'll see. Bonuses are not significant any more. The exception is if you're a strat with lots of market knowledge you could hit that 350 TC but you'd need lots of industry experience.
In nyc there are Orthodox Jews who work in medicine and finance and law who will not answer the phone or work on the sabbath. These are people who can make millions a year and are otherwise slaves to their jobs working 80 hour+ weeks. They have backups during the day they are off. The jobs they do are much more intense then tech work
I managed to get a A- in Ericsson’s 373 as an undergrad (grads took the same class but had their own curve) in 2001. Great class, great experience, great teacher. Pushed me to do algorithms at a difficulty I didnt hunk possible.
I don’t understand why getting a degree in cs at a good peogram isn’t good enough for the proof you can code. I had to write a ray tracer in graphics, calculate recurrence relations and code them in advanced algorithms analyzing all sorts of run times, wrote a compiler.
My friends in top law firms hire from top law schools and don’t ask technical questions to candidates. If they make it through top law schools they have an extremely high success rate as employees. Should be same for our field.
This data actually has the impact of me not applying for a job. I'm thinking of looking around - been at my current gig as a senior engineer for years and I have about 15 years experience. But at my current comp at a major Corp in nyc, I'd need to make about $225k minimum before stock options (including perks mentioned in a comment here ) to switch. I'm not a manager just a senior dev.
Maybe I'm the type of candidate they are trying to weed out, but I'm not looking for like 300k or something. Just market rate for my skills. I've got a family and it's expensive to live in the nyc area
Not only that, but to me that entire rubric for the self-assessment of skill is extremely off-putting. It's also baffling to me that the salaries they peg against are salaries of start-ups and certain VC-backed companies.
Why isn't it the case that you base your salaries against every other place in the world trying to hire the same people you are? It's not defensible to say, well we pay $130k for that kind of developer because AZ companies also pay in that range, and so does Blue Apron, ENSO Financial, and Spotify (or whomever). That's silly. Because DE Shaw, Google, Coatue, Two Sigma, Comcast, Capital One, Amazon, Facebook, or a host of others might be willing to hire that same developer for that same type of role with similar benefits and they are certainly paying more than this.
You're always competing for talent against anyone else trying to hire the same people. Not against one particular niche set of companies who are similar to you in some superficial on-paper ways. That just seems like a very unfortunate way of determining what their idea of a "market rate" is.
