3 ms·

Well, your 12 years my senior so age is something else eh? ;) I started out at 19 working at a FANG (because of privacy and such I don’t want to drop which one)

Well, your 12 years my senior so age is something else eh? ;) I started out at 19 working at a FANG (because of privacy and such I don’t want to drop which one) not as an engineer but doing support work. Within a year I got the chance to be a junior engineer no questions asked (basically) because my manager at the time was impressed at my grasp to “get it” when it came to application usability. That is to say I got extremely lucky. I know that. My takeaway since (I’ve been a software engineer for ~10 years now) is that the way I was treated as a junior is what I described throughout this post, and my mentors were the ones that drilled home what the hidden costs were taking jobs based on salary, how to properly evaluate benefits etc. I learned a boat load. So I want to preach to developers and companies alike that things can and should be evaluated differently and to avoid pitfalls that are easy in this industry

scarface74 7y ago
And that’s just it. You worked at a FAANG - a company large enough that could carry the dead weight of junior developer (no insult intended we were all dead weight at some point). I’ve worked at smaller companies by choice or at smaller divisions of large companies (occasionally). One developer salary is a major cost and can add to their revenue. If you only have a few openings, you better make them count. For instance, I know that some features I designed and developed from the ground up was the difference between us getting a client (B2B) and not getting a client. I also know how much revenue that client added directly to our bottom line. I was what is usually called a Single Responsible Individual. When one hire needs to be that impactful, there is no room for training juniors. All of our local software engineers can point to a feature they spearheaded that added measurably to our revenue. Now the hard truth is, why hire junior developers locally when you can hire people with much more experience overseas for the same price? I know the stereotype of the crappy outsourced developer, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Anecdotally, I was lucky enough never to be a junior developer[1], I got my first job out of college with a small company based on an internship the previous year. My first assignment was create a networked data entry system in C that was the basis of a new department that they were starting that allowed them to double in size. But I had been a hobbyist programmer for a decade. By the time I got my next job, I was already considered a mid level developer. [1] yeah that did hurt me later on. I didn’t get any type of real mentoring and stayed an “expert beginner” for a decade.
- no_wizard 7y ago
  Because you can mold junior developers into a certain quality. You can’t always do that successfully when you hire experienced developers sometimes. That’s why I was brought into the situation I was: it was more cost effective to get me up to speed than it had been trying to hire experienced developers for the same work, because they had too many pre conceived notions about how the product was to to be built For what it’s worth I work at a small company now that is a startup and this is how we do things, to great success, the way I described it To be clear, I do not work in Silicon Valley either, never lived in SV. So I get that part of it
  - scarface74 7y ago
    That’s the point. Once you have “molded” the junior developer for a year a two, they can easily jump ship for greener pastures. I’ve seen the argument about paying them market rates. But honestly, if they are young and unencumbered, their “market” is the entire US. Meaning you may not have been in the position to pay them what they could make if they were willing to move across the country. To go into more anecdotal detail, I had been programming as a hobbyist since I was 12 in assembly for 10 years by the time I graduated from a no name college in the south. I had two job opportunities - one making an entry level developer salary writing COBOL [1] in a slightly larger city, or working as a computer operator in a major city. I chose the latter job that paid much less just to get to the city. I got lucky and I was the only one who knew how to program so they gave me the previously mentioned project straight out of college. They gave me a raise the next year to that of an entry level developer (I was hourly at first and got a lot of overtime). But now, three years later, the project was done and with a major green field C project under my belt, my market value had gone up more than 50%. They couldn’t justify paying me that and I got another job. Now if a similar scenario had played out in today’s market instead of 1999, even if they could have matched my local salary of $80-$100K for a mid level developer, I could have spent a year studying “algorithms and leetCode”, picked up and moved to SV and doubled or tripled my total comp. There is no way they could compete with that. Let’s look at the current state of affairs. Almost every engineer at my company is between 35-50. They purposefully created the office in the burbs three years ago to attract older developers. They not only get experience, paying local market salary is relatively easy comparatively. The chance of any of us uprooting our families, selling our big, relatively cheap 3000 square foot houses in the burbs with the great school systems and moving to the west coast is slim.
cameronbrown 7y ago
19 at a FANG company? That's pretty cool they let you switch.
- no_wizard 7y ago
  It wasn’t a usual set of circumstances and I had a good manager who basically bet his neck in me being a good fit. I’ll never forget such an act of kindness. I hope to pass that in as much as possible in a responsible way

scarface74 7y ago

And that’s just it. You worked at a FAANG - a company large enough that could carry the dead weight of junior developer (no insult intended we were all dead weight at some point). I’ve worked at smaller companies by choice or at smaller divisions of large companies (occasionally). One developer salary is a major cost and can add to their revenue. If you only have a few openings, you better make them count. For instance, I know that some features I designed and developed from the ground up was the difference between us getting a client (B2B) and not getting a client. I also know how much revenue that client added directly to our bottom line. I was what is usually called a Single Responsible Individual. When one hire needs to be that impactful, there is no room for training juniors. All of our local software engineers can point to a feature they spearheaded that added measurably to our revenue. Now the hard truth is, why hire junior developers locally when you can hire people with much more experience overseas for the same price? I know the stereotype of the crappy outsourced developer, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Anecdotally, I was lucky enough never to be a junior developer[1], I got my first job out of college with a small company based on an internship the previous year. My first assignment was create a networked data entry system in C that was the basis of a new department that they were starting that allowed them to double in size. But I had been a hobbyist programmer for a decade. By the time I got my next job, I was already considered a mid level developer. [1] yeah that did hurt me later on. I didn’t get any type of real mentoring and stayed an “expert beginner” for a decade.

no_wizard 7y ago
Because you can mold junior developers into a certain quality. You can’t always do that successfully when you hire experienced developers sometimes. That’s why I was brought into the situation I was: it was more cost effective to get me up to speed than it had been trying to hire experienced developers for the same work, because they had too many pre conceived notions about how the product was to to be built For what it’s worth I work at a small company now that is a startup and this is how we do things, to great success, the way I described it To be clear, I do not work in Silicon Valley either, never lived in SV. So I get that part of it
- scarface74 7y ago
  That’s the point. Once you have “molded” the junior developer for a year a two, they can easily jump ship for greener pastures. I’ve seen the argument about paying them market rates. But honestly, if they are young and unencumbered, their “market” is the entire US. Meaning you may not have been in the position to pay them what they could make if they were willing to move across the country. To go into more anecdotal detail, I had been programming as a hobbyist since I was 12 in assembly for 10 years by the time I graduated from a no name college in the south. I had two job opportunities - one making an entry level developer salary writing COBOL [1] in a slightly larger city, or working as a computer operator in a major city. I chose the latter job that paid much less just to get to the city. I got lucky and I was the only one who knew how to program so they gave me the previously mentioned project straight out of college. They gave me a raise the next year to that of an entry level developer (I was hourly at first and got a lot of overtime). But now, three years later, the project was done and with a major green field C project under my belt, my market value had gone up more than 50%. They couldn’t justify paying me that and I got another job. Now if a similar scenario had played out in today’s market instead of 1999, even if they could have matched my local salary of $80-$100K for a mid level developer, I could have spent a year studying “algorithms and leetCode”, picked up and moved to SV and doubled or tripled my total comp. There is no way they could compete with that. Let’s look at the current state of affairs. Almost every engineer at my company is between 35-50. They purposefully created the office in the burbs three years ago to attract older developers. They not only get experience, paying local market salary is relatively easy comparatively. The chance of any of us uprooting our families, selling our big, relatively cheap 3000 square foot houses in the burbs with the great school systems and moving to the west coast is slim.

cameronbrown 7y ago

19 at a FANG company? That's pretty cool they let you switch.

no_wizard 7y ago
It wasn’t a usual set of circumstances and I had a good manager who basically bet his neck in me being a good fit. I’ll never forget such an act of kindness. I hope to pass that in as much as possible in a responsible way