5 ms·

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or expe

by cletus 6y ago

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop. Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't believe Big Tech will ever go fully remote. There are inherent advantages in physical colocation. I see this as a means of satisfying the ever-increasing demand. The Bay Area in particular is both largely exhausted in available talent and saturated in how many more people can be supported (given available housing and infrastructure). Disclaimer: I work for Facebook and have gone remote.

sokoloff 6y ago
Those can’t-loopers are interviewing for many scores of jobs before they wiggle slightly higher on one interview and get hired. The ones who can code interview at a couple places and pick from among their offers. I don’t think you can extrapolate from how many terrible coders you see in interview pipelines that the industry is overall terrible. The interview selection processes working is what you’re seeing.
nly 6y ago
> London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't know. NY seems to be consistently more expensive judging by [0], particularly rent. Overall NY taxes are only 1-3% lower from my calculations, so I think overall NY'ers don't have it much better. The UK is also particularly generous when it comes to tax-advantaged investment and has state healthcare. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&city1=London&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- cletus 6y ago
  I've lived in both NYC and London (although not in London for years now). Housing is a hard one to compare. Your link mentions city center and out of city center. I'm not sure what that means exactly. The big issue with London is you have to go _far_ to get affordable housing and commute times are generally terrible. I'm not sure what the picture looks like now with Crossrail. The thing about New York is yes, Manhattan is expensive (generally) but affordability within 30 minutes of, say, Midtown can be substantially higher. London doesn't really have that. You'll see charts showing commuter towns being X minutes from Liverpool Street, King's Cross, whatever. My experience with London was that those were... unrealistic. Or rather they assumed everything went right. And it almost never does. Particular if a transfer is involved.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    My experience of London: - There's little difference, time-wise, between being located in a town on commuter rail, vs somewhere three connections away on the tube. If you're inside the M25 but outside the North / South Circular, you need to be very close to a station or you're practically worse off than someone living in a town on the railway. - Motorcycles and scooters, and increasingly, electric bicycles, are the big hack. Free or cheap parking, mostly unaffected by traffic (filtering), not stuck when the trains are cancelled, not constrained by the sparseness of the rail and tube network as you get further from the centre. Crossrail isn't open yet (due next year, but I wouldn't bet on it); Crossrail 2 is mothballed and probably won't be built for a few decades. I live in a 120sqm 4 bed house with garden in Enfield, 40 minutes motorcycle commute from Clerkenwell, or 60-80 minutes by tube and train, depending on delays and timing (don't leave enough slack and you miss a connection). We used to live in a very small 60 sqm 3 bed house with garden in Bow, which was about 30 minutes from Clerkenwell. Mortgage now is £1500; rent (for over 10 years, nice landlord) used to be £1300. There's fewer food delivery options, and an Uber home is (or was) the preferred route after a night out, vs a night bus to Bow, but overall it's a higher quality of life. Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich.
    - bogomipz 6y ago
      >"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich." I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?
      - cletus 6y ago
        I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London. Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substantially better than being a salaried employee in London (although food in particular is MUCH more expensive in Switzerland such that people will drive an hour to Aldi across the border in Germany to go shopping). Fun fact #1: there are limits to how many groceries you can bring into Switzerland. Meat in particular. You can get checked for this at the border. Fun fact #2: IIRC years ago the supermarket just across the border in Germany had the highest revenue of any supermarket in Germany. As for work authorization, it is relatively easy for EU citizens to get and somewhat harder for non-EU citizens. It generally takes 5 years on a B permit (work visa) to get a C permit (permanent residence) if you're EU, 10 if you're not. I imagine with Brexit, UK citizens are now in the harder category.
blub 6y ago
This "can't code a for loop" is a misleading statement given the kind of interviews that are typical at e.g. Facebook. Even if that candidate could code a for loop and a while loop and knew the syntax of that programming language by heart and knew their algorithms to boot, it's more than likely that they would fail the interview anyway. Complaining about people that can't code loops emphasizes that the candidates are incompetent while omitting the also very relevant fact that many companies are ridiculously difficult to please.
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies. A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.

by cletus 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago

Those can’t-loopers are interviewing for many scores of jobs before they wiggle slightly higher on one interview and get hired. The ones who can code interview at a couple places and pick from among their offers. I don’t think you can extrapolate from how many terrible coders you see in interview pipelines that the industry is overall terrible. The interview selection processes working is what you’re seeing.

nly 6y ago

> London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't know. NY seems to be consistently more expensive judging by [0], particularly rent. Overall NY taxes are only 1-3% lower from my calculations, so I think overall NY'ers don't have it much better. The UK is also particularly generous when it comes to tax-advantaged investment and has state healthcare. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&city1=London&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

cletus 6y ago
I've lived in both NYC and London (although not in London for years now). Housing is a hard one to compare. Your link mentions city center and out of city center. I'm not sure what that means exactly. The big issue with London is you have to go _far_ to get affordable housing and commute times are generally terrible. I'm not sure what the picture looks like now with Crossrail. The thing about New York is yes, Manhattan is expensive (generally) but affordability within 30 minutes of, say, Midtown can be substantially higher. London doesn't really have that. You'll see charts showing commuter towns being X minutes from Liverpool Street, King's Cross, whatever. My experience with London was that those were... unrealistic. Or rather they assumed everything went right. And it almost never does. Particular if a transfer is involved.
- barrkel 6y ago
  My experience of London: - There's little difference, time-wise, between being located in a town on commuter rail, vs somewhere three connections away on the tube. If you're inside the M25 but outside the North / South Circular, you need to be very close to a station or you're practically worse off than someone living in a town on the railway. - Motorcycles and scooters, and increasingly, electric bicycles, are the big hack. Free or cheap parking, mostly unaffected by traffic (filtering), not stuck when the trains are cancelled, not constrained by the sparseness of the rail and tube network as you get further from the centre. Crossrail isn't open yet (due next year, but I wouldn't bet on it); Crossrail 2 is mothballed and probably won't be built for a few decades. I live in a 120sqm 4 bed house with garden in Enfield, 40 minutes motorcycle commute from Clerkenwell, or 60-80 minutes by tube and train, depending on delays and timing (don't leave enough slack and you miss a connection). We used to live in a very small 60 sqm 3 bed house with garden in Bow, which was about 30 minutes from Clerkenwell. Mortgage now is £1500; rent (for over 10 years, nice landlord) used to be £1300. There's fewer food delivery options, and an Uber home is (or was) the preferred route after a night out, vs a night bus to Bow, but overall it's a higher quality of life. Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich.
  - bogomipz 6y ago
    >"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich." I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?
    - cletus 6y ago
      I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London. Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substantially better than being a salaried employee in London (although food in particular is MUCH more expensive in Switzerland such that people will drive an hour to Aldi across the border in Germany to go shopping). Fun fact #1: there are limits to how many groceries you can bring into Switzerland. Meat in particular. You can get checked for this at the border. Fun fact #2: IIRC years ago the supermarket just across the border in Germany had the highest revenue of any supermarket in Germany. As for work authorization, it is relatively easy for EU citizens to get and somewhat harder for non-EU citizens. It generally takes 5 years on a B permit (work visa) to get a C permit (permanent residence) if you're EU, 10 if you're not. I imagine with Brexit, UK citizens are now in the harder category.

blub 6y ago

This "can't code a for loop" is a misleading statement given the kind of interviews that are typical at e.g. Facebook. Even if that candidate could code a for loop and a while loop and knew the syntax of that programming language by heart and knew their algorithms to boot, it's more than likely that they would fail the interview anyway. Complaining about people that can't code loops emphasizes that the candidates are incompetent while omitting the also very relevant fact that many companies are ridiculously difficult to please.

Hydraulix989 6y ago
The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies. A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.