Hope you’re willing to relocate to SF and still spend 50+% of your income on housing you will never own.
If you get a good offer from big tech to move to a high CoL area, it can be worth it because the offers are that good. You will be able to pay off a home within a decade. Even if you start at entry level you will be expected to be promoted within a couple of years. For most hirees this will already make them senior. It’s expected that everyone can eventually make it to senior.
I wasn’t suggesting someone randomly move to SF without an excellent employment opportunity.
As for startup equity, one could argue it shouldn’t be considered part of total comp since most startups do not exit successfully and even fewer exit in a way where the payout will be comparable to a big tech salary.
It’s expected that everyone can eventually make it to senior.
I think this may be the crux of the issue. Of course it is possible to make a lot of money in software. Of course you only want to take excellent offers. The issue I am addressing is that a lot of people see the annual salaries (or the TC figures, or projections of where their career will take them in five years) and take them as inevitabilities, and they simply aren’t. They can’t be; corporations are structured as pyramids and the higher you go, the fewer spots there are with more people competing for them. Promotions can’t be expected because the system is designed to make sure that most people don’t get them. And yet, everyone treats them as inevitable because the the ones who do get them stick around the company and the ones who don’t leave and fall out of touch with their former colleagues. It’s a pretty stable self-sustaining delusion.
I will allow that it is possible to make that salary without living in SF or any major tech center. I’ve done it and I know others who have done it. But it takes a while to get there and most people never do. And crucially, it’s not because they’re worse engineers. It takes a strong network, a little bit of educated risk-taking, and a series of lucky breaks that you won’t be able to fully appreciate until after the fact. But I think for people who want to get into software with a high salary, taking a junior engineering role at a massive company in the bay area (or wherever) with a lucrative salary is the more common route, and those engineers usually get disillusioned pretty quickly at how far that paycheck doesn’t go.
The hard part is getting an offer from a top company in the first place. It’s a lot of luck and the interview process is designed more to avoid bad engineers than it is to find good ones.
Getting to senior shouldn’t be too difficult for any competent engineer. Getting to staff requires significantly more effort.
Also until recently these companies never did lay offs. You had to be PIP’d before being let go.
The real trap is joining a startup. Unless you’re very early it’s a huge roll of the dice.
Getting to senior shouldn’t be too difficult for any competent engineer.
And yet it is, by design. The big lie is that promotions are a meritocracy. In reality promotions are kept as scarce as they reasonably can be while keeping people from jumping ship. Not zero, but as low as feasible.
Also IDK where you worked but software industry layoffs have been around as long as the software industry. They’ve been higher the last several years than they were before, but there’s always a background level of layoffs in between the big waves, the latest of which seems to be cresting now.
A lot of startups are traps, but I’d agree that even the ones that aren’t traps / scams / obviously insane are pretty risky. I’ve joined 3 startups that had less than 5 employees and one of them was a trap that failed, which I learned from and would avoid today. The other two also failed, but for reasons that I don’t think I could have reasonably foreseen at the time of joining. I think they were pretty good ideas and good teams, they just failed for some of the many reasons that new businesses fail. Sometimes I think the risk is worth it, but it’s undeniably risky.
Also agree re: interviewing. It is astounding to me how bad we as an industry are at it, which I think is part of why we keep getting suckered by snake oil efficiency experts that claim to handle hiring for you. Like, if we really understood how to select for someone who would be a good engineering team member instead of someone good at interviewing (and/or worked to make sure those two domains overlap as much as possible), it would be obvious to all of us why these systems (which cost a shitload of money) make the process worse and make the outcomes worse, and then profit by how they made everything worse.
From the stats I’ve seen, the distribution is about:
SWE ~ 30%
Senior ~ 45%
Staff ~ 15%
Senior Staff < 5%
So the majority of employees are senior engineers with staff being achievable.
In terms of layoffs, the FANG companies really haven’t had any major cuts until after COVID. Although Amazon PIPs like 10% of their workforce every year or something.
The problem with interviewing is we haven’t found a better solution that’s scalable. I’ve got some idea for smaller companies but when you’re larger it’s a different challenge.
And I was addressing this:
If you get a good offer from big tech to move to a high CoL area, it can be worth it because the offers are that good. You will be able to pay off a home within a decade. Even if you start at entry level you will be expected to be promoted within a couple of years. For most hirees this will already make them senior. It’s expected that everyone can eventually make it to senior.
I wasn’t suggesting someone randomly move to SF without an excellent employment opportunity.
As for startup equity, one could argue it shouldn’t be considered part of total comp since most startups do not exit successfully and even fewer exit in a way where the payout will be comparable to a big tech salary.
I think this may be the crux of the issue. Of course it is possible to make a lot of money in software. Of course you only want to take excellent offers. The issue I am addressing is that a lot of people see the annual salaries (or the TC figures, or projections of where their career will take them in five years) and take them as inevitabilities, and they simply aren’t. They can’t be; corporations are structured as pyramids and the higher you go, the fewer spots there are with more people competing for them. Promotions can’t be expected because the system is designed to make sure that most people don’t get them. And yet, everyone treats them as inevitable because the the ones who do get them stick around the company and the ones who don’t leave and fall out of touch with their former colleagues. It’s a pretty stable self-sustaining delusion.
I will allow that it is possible to make that salary without living in SF or any major tech center. I’ve done it and I know others who have done it. But it takes a while to get there and most people never do. And crucially, it’s not because they’re worse engineers. It takes a strong network, a little bit of educated risk-taking, and a series of lucky breaks that you won’t be able to fully appreciate until after the fact. But I think for people who want to get into software with a high salary, taking a junior engineering role at a massive company in the bay area (or wherever) with a lucrative salary is the more common route, and those engineers usually get disillusioned pretty quickly at how far that paycheck doesn’t go.
The hard part is getting an offer from a top company in the first place. It’s a lot of luck and the interview process is designed more to avoid bad engineers than it is to find good ones.
Getting to senior shouldn’t be too difficult for any competent engineer. Getting to staff requires significantly more effort.
Also until recently these companies never did lay offs. You had to be PIP’d before being let go.
The real trap is joining a startup. Unless you’re very early it’s a huge roll of the dice.
And yet it is, by design. The big lie is that promotions are a meritocracy. In reality promotions are kept as scarce as they reasonably can be while keeping people from jumping ship. Not zero, but as low as feasible.
Also IDK where you worked but software industry layoffs have been around as long as the software industry. They’ve been higher the last several years than they were before, but there’s always a background level of layoffs in between the big waves, the latest of which seems to be cresting now.
A lot of startups are traps, but I’d agree that even the ones that aren’t traps / scams / obviously insane are pretty risky. I’ve joined 3 startups that had less than 5 employees and one of them was a trap that failed, which I learned from and would avoid today. The other two also failed, but for reasons that I don’t think I could have reasonably foreseen at the time of joining. I think they were pretty good ideas and good teams, they just failed for some of the many reasons that new businesses fail. Sometimes I think the risk is worth it, but it’s undeniably risky.
Also agree re: interviewing. It is astounding to me how bad we as an industry are at it, which I think is part of why we keep getting suckered by snake oil efficiency experts that claim to handle hiring for you. Like, if we really understood how to select for someone who would be a good engineering team member instead of someone good at interviewing (and/or worked to make sure those two domains overlap as much as possible), it would be obvious to all of us why these systems (which cost a shitload of money) make the process worse and make the outcomes worse, and then profit by how they made everything worse.
From the stats I’ve seen, the distribution is about:
SWE ~ 30%
Senior ~ 45%
Staff ~ 15%
Senior Staff < 5%
So the majority of employees are senior engineers with staff being achievable.
In terms of layoffs, the FANG companies really haven’t had any major cuts until after COVID. Although Amazon PIPs like 10% of their workforce every year or something.
The problem with interviewing is we haven’t found a better solution that’s scalable. I’ve got some idea for smaller companies but when you’re larger it’s a different challenge.