
Engineer salary negotiation: from $120K to $250K offer - zavulon
http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-i/
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780)

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citrusx
Note that the offer was "highly illiquid", and the yearly salary offer was
only $130k.

Personally, I don't consider any of the "might vest and become valuable" parts
of an offer to be actual compensation. But, your mileage may vary.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I got a call from Google. They were raising the offer to 211K. That’s 211K.
> Liquid. I’d receive all of that before a year’s end.

That offer might be more to your taste. The fact that he chose an offer with
less liquidity doesn't mean he didn't have the option.

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aerovistae
My fascination at this inside look at a strong candidate's experience
interviewing in the Bay Area with well known companies is counterbalanced by
my repulsion that people can actually write and promote such self-aggrandizing
blog posts with pride. I would be ashamed to hand anyone something I had
written explaining how I was the smartest person in some anecdotal room.

Every person I ever met who really impressed me, did it without telling me I
should be impressed.....at least, the ones I liked being around.

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oldmartin
From no experience to teaching web dev at a bootcamp after three months? one
year later offered roles by Google and Airbnb for $250k a year? Is this truly
possible?

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byoung2
No. I've been pretty aggressive at getting raises and the fastest increases
I've been able to get are from $55k in 2009 to $110k in 2011, to $140k in
2013, to $175k in 2015, to $250k in 2016.

These are base salary figures, no bonuses or options.

~~~
orsenthil
Where do you go for a $250K base salary?

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byoung2
I should put a disclaimer on that...under $175k I was a software engineer, at
$175k director of engineering, $250k I had to become a freelance consultant,
which is variable but averages $250k+ for me.

This is all in Los Angeles, CA

~~~
oarsinsync
Any chances you could update the previous post to reflect which are salaried,
and which are contracting? The two aren't really fair comparisons.

For context, in the UK, an engineer making £60-70k salary can expect about
£500/day contracting (£120k annualised at 48 weeks working).

And the contract gigs tend to be 6-12 month contracts anyway.

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aerovistae
Also, with regards to this quote from the conclusion~

> In the end, I didn’t get a single offer through a raw application. Every
> single offer came through a referral of some kind. (This I did not expect,
> and strongly influences the advice I’d give to a job-seeker.)

I don't know if I would call TripleByte "referrals"....it's not a raw
application, but it's not really the same as knowing someone at the company
either. This is a separate and somewhat new category of its own, these
companies like TripleByte.

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savvyraccoon
Is it ethical to disclose offers?

~~~
Asparagirl
Absolutely. Keeping these things secret benefits no one but the employers.

~~~
ikeboy
That's not so obvious; if a norm against disclosing lets employers pay better
performers/ people they want/etc more, then the result of disclosing is a
flatter pay grid, which benefits those that would be at the low end, but hurts
those at the high end.

I don't know or have specific reason to think it's true, but it's one model
that's not obviously wrong (if it is, I'm more than happy to hear why).

~~~
beeboop
This is only true if there is a fixed pot of money to use on salaries. This is
usually not the case.

~~~
ikeboy
There's certainly not an unlimited amount to spend on salaries; as long as a
company is not willing to spend 250k on everyone, but is willing to spend it
on some, this could be true.

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Gratsby
There seems to be a bit of a gap here. AirBnB and Google don't seem like the
target market for Triplebyte.

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thaumasiotes
I find the beginning of the story more interesting than the end:

> Of the 20+ applications I sent, I was rejected from every single one without
> so much as a technical screen. One recruiter from Udacity did actually get
> on the phone with me—I had pointed out a CSS error on their website in my
> application and uploaded a private Youtube video showing them how to fix it.
> The recruiter thanked me and we joked about it, only for him to later tell
> me they weren’t looking for anyone with my skillset. Again, without even a
> technical screen.

> I began plumbing my network. I had one big advantage I hadn’t yet leveraged:
> the students I’d taught. Many of them were working at very strong companies,
> though they were mostly very junior. At least with their referrals, I’d be
> able to crack open that window.

> Every student I asked was more than excited to refer me. Finally, I had
> fast-tracked myself into the processes at several awesome companies: Shift,
> FutureAdvisor, PagerDuty, and Twilio.

> I was rejected at all of them. Again, without even a technical screen.

> somehow, through the flurry of rejections, a referral from a classmate of
> mine who was working at 23AndMe came through. He had paired with me during
> our cohort and spoke very highly of me, so they scheduled me for a technical
> phone screen.

> I was nervous, but once I got on the phone and got rolling on some concrete
> questions, I crushed everything my interviewer asked me. He was blown away.
> He told me he’d never heard as thorough of a technical analysis on this
> problem before, and immediately invited me to do an onsite at their
> headquarters in Mountain View.

> I killed the onsite. And when I say killed, I mean murdered with such
> ruthless brutality that my children’s children will carry the sin with them.
> To this day, it’s the onsite that I felt most confident in. I remember
> pacing back and forth at the CalTrain station as I awaited my train back to
> San Francisco, savoring how masterfully I deconstructed each and every
> question they posed to me. It seemed like everyone who’d interviewed me was
> ebullient at how quickly and rigorously I’d answered all their questions.

> Finally, it seemed like I’d cracked the code.

> A week and a half later I open my inbox, and there fresh and white, a reply
> from my 23AndMe recruiter. The subject: 23AndMe. I open it up to read:
    
    
        Thank you for your patience and your time to meet with 
        our SWE team. We appreciate the opportunity to consider
        you for employment with 23andMe. I want to update you on 
        our search and let you know at this time we are moving
        ahead with another candidate.
    

> I applied to the all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from their
> platform. I got no bites anywhere on AngelList or LinkedIn—not even cold
> e-mails from recruiters. Nothing from WhiteTruffle or SmartHires.

> I asked friends, students, anyone I knew for referrals. I started reaching
> out to non-engineers. I asked anyone at all who worked at all at a tech
> company I found compelling.

> [...]

> Now that I had offers in hand, it was time to turn the crank. I reached out
> to every company I was talking to and told them I’d just received several
> offers, but was very much interested in moving forward. With that, suddenly
> recruiters started tripping over themselves to get me on site. I was no
> longer the ugly boy at the party.

> I started mowing down onsites. My performance and experience were no
> different, yet I was treated completely differently. Phone screen from
> Google. Gusto raised their offer. Phone screen from Stripe. Yelp raised
> their offer. TripleByte raised their offer. Then the phone screen at Google
> converted to onsite.

My immediate reaction to this is "I can't wait to hear someone say 'the market
for developers is so hot right now'".

They say nothing is more attractive to women than the quality of already-
having-a-girlfriend (or wife). It means some other girl already did the hard
work of evaluating you and you passed.

So I conclude a couple of things from this:

\- these companies have absolutely no idea what they're looking for in an
employee, and they know that. So they hire based almost exclusively on whether
you have a job offer from somebody else. That somebody else obviously thought
you were (or weren't...) good enough, and their judgment beats ours!

\- these companies seem to be terrified of hiring anyone who might not work
out. Judging by their behavior, the cost they suffer from hiring someone
without a competing offer in hand must be enormous, far more than the full
cost of employing an engineer. This makes sense in the dating context, given
the tradition of marriage ("no backsies"). It makes less sense to me in the
employer-employee context. What's going on? Whatever this gigantic impediment
to letting someone go if they're not _the perfect fit_ for your job opening
might be, it's driving the whole abusive process.

