
Tech Companies, New and Old, Clamor to Entice Cloud Computing Experts - malz
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/technology/tech-companies-new-and-old-clamor-to-entice-cloud-computing-experts.html
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accountatwork
> [Tom] Chavez thinks industry titans like Larry Page, the chief executive of
> the Alphabet holding company that includes Google, are intentionally driving
> up salaries. “If I was Larry, I’d do the same thing: throw a few more
> million at people and cut off everyone else’s oxygen.”

Cut off everyone else's oxygen? There are maybe 10 companies that hire in
volume and are willing to match top tier offers. The companies that aren't
willing to match top tier offers could do so by hiring fewer people and paying
them better, but they choose not to. Those companies are cutting off their own
oxygen.

Some companies are willing to pay more than others, often by 2x or more, and
those companies have a lot more options when it comes to hiring. That's how
the market works now that the wage suppressing no-poach agreement has been
canceled. And frankly, that's how it should work. Companies should be able to
go out and pay market rate to get the people they want. And people should be
able to take advantage of that.

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marblar
I’ve lost track of this metaphor.

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tostitos1979
I am skeptical about these 1 million dollar paychecks. Take LinkedIn for
example. With the recent reduction in their share price, is a mid-level
engineer really making 300K to a million? I doubt this.

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matt_wulfeck
I know a $300k paycheck at Netflix wouldn't be very unusual for highly skilled
cloud engineers.

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marssaxman
Is that some aggregate estimated "total compensation" figure or are they
making $300K in real money? That sounds very, very high for what I have seen.

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matt_wulfeck
Netflix is known to be at the high end of salary as base pay. You can see the
numbers yourself by looking at H1B petitions. I see many software engineers
above $300k [1]. I don't think it's the norm in the valley, but for someone
highly skilled it's attainable.

[1]
[http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Netflix&job=SENIOR+SOFTWARE...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Netflix&job=SENIOR+SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=&year=All)

~~~
tostitos1979
Agreed. Netflix is known to be an outlier. My understanding is that it is also
a relatively high stress place to work.

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deirdres
Having met a number of Netflix employees (and knowing one extremely well), I
don't think this is actually true. YMMV.

~~~
tostitos1979
The high stress part or that their employees are generally near the top of the
game?

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bitwize
Well, I missed the cloud boat, so it's no wonder I can't be employed in this
market.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Throw away this type of thinking and start renewing your mind. Understand that
the cloud is as much about thinking different as is it is about items on a
resume or hosts in a datacenter.

Take a project you've done and start figuring out what it would take to do it
at 100x the traffic. Now figure out what it would take to make each of the
instances stateless. Lastly, how can you make it work through network
partitions, latency, and eventual consistency?

These are real problems people in the "cloud" are working with. Just being
able to talk about these types of problems excitedly says a lot about where an
engineer fits.

~~~
bitwize
People say things like that right up until it comes time to pull the trigger
on a hiring decision. Then it is "you don't have the kind of background we're
looking for. Best of luck in your job search."

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neduma
What skills exactly needed here?

~~~
thinkingkong
Cloud Computing experts could apply to a lot. But if any anecdotal evidence
from friends is accurate, you basically need to understand how to build
massively distributed highly reliable systems and that's a rather unique skill
set. It's because not a lot of places actually _require_ those skills.

Most companies mess around with tools or distributed storage systems because
it's fun, not because they actually need to do it. Debugging live systems at
scale is another bit of black magic. If you basically know what Brendan Gregg
does then you could probably qualify for these types of jobs.

[http://www.brendangregg.com/](http://www.brendangregg.com/)

~~~
xenihn
I think the biggest thing is that you can't get "real"
cloud/systems/devops/whatever experience on your own, unless you manage to
build something that attracts the kind of traffic that you'd see once you're
managing instances for a mature product.

~~~
fapjacks
Exactly right. I love doing that kind of thing but it's hard to find an
environment in which I can practice those skills. Loads of reading and
simulation, very little time at-bat. That's too bad, because that's the kind
of work that makes me truly happy.

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serge2k
> Many of them are the kind of jobs that now pay $300,000 to $1 million a year

yeah, but you have to work for Oracle.

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falsedan
Where's South Park?

edit: oh, next to South Beach, never mind.

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ilaksh
The future of the cloud is consumer /mobile/desktop devices. The big data
centers will be outdated within five or so years.

~~~
chatmasta
Not as long as workloads remain asymmetrical between consumption and
computation.

