
How a Silicon Valley engineer negotiated his starting salary from $120k to $250k - dvcrn
http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-engineer-negotiated-a-starting-salary-from-120k-to-250k-in-just-a-few-weeks-2016-4
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geebee
This is pretty cool. One thing to note - he "killed" the google interview.
Although it can vary from one interviewer to the next, it's nearly impossible
to do this without becoming relatively fluid with a subset of data structures
and algorithms, bit manipulation, and design.

Kind of cool to hear he was an English major. Although I doubled with math I
did major in english as well, and it wasn't valuable only as something
different from math/cs - in other words, it didn't build valuable but
different skills such as communication and writing. I think that the kind of
core logical, analytical reasoning we attribute to math or cs style classes is
actually something you really can build through literary analysis. Lit and
philosophy majors (not just because of symbolic logic) in general are much
closer to talent and ability in programming than many of them realize. It
actually isn't an easy major if you take it seriously. Unlike STEM majors,
there's often an option to kick back, read the plot summaries, and rely on the
relative indifference of most classmates to get a good grade - but these
majors contain a small core of extremely devoted core of students who have
pretty exceptional analytical and reading comprehension skills - these are the
people who a professor can say "you know, you really might want to take a look
at <dense obscure work of literature written in old language that is hard to
follow>", and that student will be able to do it over the next 24 hours, with
startling levels of understanding of the text.

It's not a long distance to cover between high levels of literary analysis and
being able to find all matching sub-trees of a node, seriously.

I'm also glad to hera the guy got a strong salary, it gives me some confidence
for the field. The reason is that while $120k a year is a fine salary in most
parts of the country, people like this guy really do have a lot of options. If
you have the ability to read and analyze a text like that, as well as an
ability to transition into a more purely algorithmic way of reasoning, well,
$120 isn't a particularly impressive salary for you. If that's considered a
good salary, then people like this simply won't work in the industry - or if
they do, they won't stay in it. They'll go off in pursuit of better options.

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charleslmunger
His starting salary is still 130k, according to the actual article. He just
has another 95k of RSUs and a 25k signing bonus.

This is sounds like a competitive offer for a level 4 (PhD or junior industry
hire) software engineer at Google.

