8 ms·

That's insane. The residency program is a way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requ

That's insane. The residency program is a way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requirements. SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. This was an incredible opportunity and it's an absolute shame that internal protests killed it. Yes, you get less pay and a smaller stock refresh, but I know a few people who's careers began with this residency and they'd still be struggling without it. I don't even know how to describe this. You get less pay but an amazing opportunity, and then you look back and are upset that you weren't given more? Google took a large risk on these candidates with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go. But they did it anyway just to create opportunities.

Imnimo 5y ago
>with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go. This seems at odds with the article: >Nearly all residents converted to regular employees, according to the presentation
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
b20000 5y ago
“ way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requirements” - sounds like discrimination and should be illegal. meanwhile, people in their 40s are dealing with leetcode BS to get a reasonable position with that sort of compensation even though they have an extensive track record.
- badlucklottery 5y ago
  >sounds like discrimination and should be illegal IME the "unique backgrounds" are "doesn't have a CS degree or a couple years of experience at a big software shop".
  - b20000 5y ago
    yep, discrimination
    - ryan93 5y ago
      You could at least explain how it’s unfair to pay less qualified applicants less money?
      - b20000 5y ago
        it is unfair to require leetcode bullshit interviews from candidates who apply for a job via the normal route but at the same time have programs in place where people can enter some kind of internship or training program via which they can be hired into similar positions without going through the exact same interview process. in fact, it is illegal.
      - JorkJork 5y ago
        It's bold to assume that the Google interview process accepts all qualified applicants.
        b20000 5y ago
        bold? as long as there is no discrimination going on they can do what they want. the problem is, there is plenty of discrimination going on. maybe you don’t care because you work there. good for you. sooner or later, it will matter to you.
        JorkJork 5y ago
        > the problem is, there is plenty of discrimination going on. Try "the interview process is bad and has low recall." > sooner or later, it will matter to you. It already matters to me.
        sneak 5y ago
        Discrimination against all but protected classes (eg race, religion, et c) is not only legal but standard practice; when hiring SWEs you want to discriminate against the inexperienced, those bad at code, et c.
- skt5 5y ago
  >sounds like discrimination discrimination can either be legal or illegal. google legally discriminates by giving offers to those who get the hiring committee's approval. i think getting the hiring committee's approval is a form of legal discrimination.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > discrimination can either be legal or illegal Right, every nonrandom decision is discrimination, but in the US private discrimination is generally legal unless it effects a protected category; because of the rational basis test, in the US, public dsicrimination is generally invalid unless it meets some bar of justification, but unless a particularly protected basis of discrimination is involved or a particularly important right impinged, the bar for validity is very low (a rational relation to a legitimate government function.)
  - b20000 5y ago
    if you know about it, why don’t you do something about it?
crawsome 5y ago
The IT residency you don’t even get stock.
- antognini 5y ago
  Same with the AI residency. (At least I didn't.)
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    You don't, but ai res did have relatively higher bonuses that some what (to be clear, only somewhat) made up for it.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
I know a few people that took EngRes over Amazon despite the pay gap and it really hammered home how much folks think people like me are subhuman - they literally think being a lower paid, probationary employee is better than working at Amazon. I’m glad it’s done for, it was basically just another pipeline for elite students to have a fallback into Google (The folks I knew that took it were CS students from UChicago and UPenn)
- pancaku 5y ago
  Hi rejectedandsad, I'm making my first comment on Hackernews because I saw your remark. I would encourage you to seek help for this negative thinking or at the very least reflect. I promise the majority of people in society do not view you as subhuman for working at Amazon. This is really an irrational thought. Based on your post history I think you are beating yourself up over a non issue. You're working at a top company, with reasonable pay, and exciting projects. Yes some companies pay much higher, have more perks, better wlb, etc. but there will always be a better company wherever you work. Your work doesn't define you. Chin up my friend, and maybe seek some professional help to improve your thoughts. You don't have to go through life suffering like this! I used to get extremely anxious/depressed focusing on my career but after going through therapy, and yes some medication I have been feeling much much better. Best of luck!
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    While I appreciate that and I've been working on it, it seems that whatever I do I just see more evidence for it - the $70k wage cut to not associate with people like me, the significantly lower social class and standard of living people like me have all weighs on me pretty heavily these days.
    - solipsism 5y ago
      If you ever made it to Google, you'd immediately see the stratification within. The elites with their lake houses... the people operating at levels you never will be able to... the people bailing to start startups because Google got boring. Fuck it and be happy. And while you're working on it, you should consider no longer voicing your negative thoughts. It definitely doesn't help, and there's a good chance it makes it worse. (Or don't, I'm not telling you what to do obviously)
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. Just like stores have "up to" 70% discounts. One item is marked off that much, and the rest are given modest discounts. We shouldn't normalize this number as some plain old average, it'd be aspirational for many.
- gravypod 5y ago
  (Opinions are my own. I know nothing about this program.) Using StackOverflow's [0] aggregated statistics of pay based on experience + location we can get some rough estimates Over a 5 to 10 year span as a developer at Google you'd probably touch: Java, Golang, C++, Python, and some part of GCP (or very similar tech). Pay is also different from market location so if we look only at the USA we can look at SF and Manhattan. 5 years: - NYC 25% 96k, 50% 126k, 75% 166k - SF 25% 113k, 50% 149k, 75% 197k 10 years: - NYC 25% 107k, 50% 141k, 75% 186k - SF 25% 126k, 50% 166k, 75% 219k This is also ignoring the FAANG bump that you get from being Xoogler. Also, if you don't get a promotion or are unhappy with your compensation Facebook's levels are an approximate 1:1 mapping to Google and from what I've heard going from Google to Facebook and back to Google is quite common. Some people have joked that there are people that are on a 2 year rotation back and forth. Some more data can be gleamed from here: https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ 500k+ is L6+, while very difficult to obtain, seems doable if you are determined, know your stuff, know how to find the "right" projects, and are also an inspiring leader. [0] - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary
  - lrem 5y ago
    I have hit L6 after 7 years of steep upward trajectory. I have been hired with a PhD and four years of part-time industry experience. I got it now because two years ago our org got a new leader with a mindset very similar to mine, while at the same time a solution I've been developing for a couple years was just found by a tens-of-billions-usd problem. Sure, over the 7 years I've met a couple engineers with a similar trajectory and one with a steeper one. But the vast majority will either take more time to get to L6, or plain decide to stay forever at 4 or 5.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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ashhdsfsa28378 5y ago
To clarify, I can say from experience (having personally helped convert 6 engineering residents at Google), I'm pretty confident the "less pay and a smaller stock refresh" in the article is referring to conversion offers to FTE and stock refreshes after the first year of FTE employment, not to their pay during their residency. Those FTE conversion offers were terrible, from what I saw, with no room for negotiation. The residency program had given these candidates 1 year to build a proven track record of performance and they were fully ramped up by the end, so there was no risk to Google at the time of those offers; if a resident was given an offer, it was because they were a pretty sure thing (far more than any normal interviewed hire). As such, I think their offers should have been higher than a regular hire, not lower. (As someone who was hired direct out of college with little experience, I can confidently say the offers my residents got were _significantly_ lower than my starting offer at the same level.) The article states this a bit unclearly, but I'm pretty sure this is what it means, because it doesn't make sense to refer to year-end bonuses or stock refreshes during residency because they aren't long enough to get these regardless (and I never heard anyone complain about this). That said, as a side note, I do think articles like this tend to sensationalize Google as a whole as the "bad guy". Try to remember, Google is a huge company with lots of people managing its many parts. I personally feel there was a failing here, but if so, it was the fault of a relatively small number of people, not "Google". Even most of the people running this program were good, and the program itself was great (as you said) other than what I said above. There's hundreds of thousands of decisions happening every day at Google. If just a couple bad ones get to define the company as a whole, then no large company can ever be good, no matter how good all the rest of those decisions are.
- creato 5y ago
  > with no room for negotiation. The only room for negotiation is being willing to walk (usually because you have an offer somewhere else). Otherwise, it's not negotiating, it's just begging.
junon 5y ago
> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. Where? lol
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Here in Europe you're unlikely to break $100k in that time.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    That's still really good for Europe. That's €84k, not a lot of careers pay like that after 10 years, even in STEM.
- torhorway 5y ago
  https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Refreshers stacking + stock appreciation, I'd guess.
  - junon 5y ago
    I didn't take it to mean stock appreciation, as pay directly means salary where I'm from.
    - joejerryronnie 5y ago
      They are talking about total comp which is usually base salary + bonus + stock (RSUs). As the person above mentioned, 50% or more of that $500-600K is most likely made up of stacked stock grants. Even if you sell your RSUs right away, a grant typically vests over 4 years. In the current market, that makes older grants much more valuable based on stock appreciation.
- dresdenfire 5y ago
onion2k 5y ago
SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. I don't think that's really true. I'm not arguing that there aren't SWEs whose total comp is $600k. There definitely are. However, those people aren't really SWEs. They're managers, architects, and strategists. They have a lot of people reporting to them, they make decisions about very high level things that are only tangentially related to code, and they work on guiding other engineers to find solutions to hard problems. No doubt being a developer before getting to that role is incredibly helpful and makes you better at it, but if you're earning $600k I very much doubt you're spending more than 25% of your time sat at a keyboard with an IDE open. If you want to earn that much after a decade in work you'd be much better off polishing your management and strategy skills than learning how to write better code. And yes, I realise I'm totally falling in to the 'no true Scotsman' trap here. But sometimes a Scotsman is just an MBA in a kilt. :)
- discobot2 5y ago
  500-600K is L5-L6 at google CA, which is still a lot of coding and maybe some reports, but not necessary.
hkai 5y ago
True equity of outcomes means that people spend different amounts of effort but get to the same results. So people from underrepresented backgrounds should be paid the same as top engineers regardless of output.

Imnimo 5y ago

>with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go. This seems at odds with the article: >Nearly all residents converted to regular employees, according to the presentation

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

b20000 5y ago

“ way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requirements” - sounds like discrimination and should be illegal. meanwhile, people in their 40s are dealing with leetcode BS to get a reasonable position with that sort of compensation even though they have an extensive track record.

badlucklottery 5y ago
>sounds like discrimination and should be illegal IME the "unique backgrounds" are "doesn't have a CS degree or a couple years of experience at a big software shop".
- b20000 5y ago
  yep, discrimination
  - ryan93 5y ago
    You could at least explain how it’s unfair to pay less qualified applicants less money?
    - b20000 5y ago
      it is unfair to require leetcode bullshit interviews from candidates who apply for a job via the normal route but at the same time have programs in place where people can enter some kind of internship or training program via which they can be hired into similar positions without going through the exact same interview process. in fact, it is illegal.
    - JorkJork 5y ago
      It's bold to assume that the Google interview process accepts all qualified applicants.
      - b20000 5y ago
        bold? as long as there is no discrimination going on they can do what they want. the problem is, there is plenty of discrimination going on. maybe you don’t care because you work there. good for you. sooner or later, it will matter to you.
        JorkJork 5y ago
        > the problem is, there is plenty of discrimination going on. Try "the interview process is bad and has low recall." > sooner or later, it will matter to you. It already matters to me.
        sneak 5y ago
        Discrimination against all but protected classes (eg race, religion, et c) is not only legal but standard practice; when hiring SWEs you want to discriminate against the inexperienced, those bad at code, et c.
skt5 5y ago
>sounds like discrimination discrimination can either be legal or illegal. google legally discriminates by giving offers to those who get the hiring committee's approval. i think getting the hiring committee's approval is a form of legal discrimination.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > discrimination can either be legal or illegal Right, every nonrandom decision is discrimination, but in the US private discrimination is generally legal unless it effects a protected category; because of the rational basis test, in the US, public dsicrimination is generally invalid unless it meets some bar of justification, but unless a particularly protected basis of discrimination is involved or a particularly important right impinged, the bar for validity is very low (a rational relation to a legitimate government function.)
- b20000 5y ago
  if you know about it, why don’t you do something about it?

crawsome 5y ago

The IT residency you don’t even get stock.

antognini 5y ago
Same with the AI residency. (At least I didn't.)
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  You don't, but ai res did have relatively higher bonuses that some what (to be clear, only somewhat) made up for it.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

I know a few people that took EngRes over Amazon despite the pay gap and it really hammered home how much folks think people like me are subhuman - they literally think being a lower paid, probationary employee is better than working at Amazon. I’m glad it’s done for, it was basically just another pipeline for elite students to have a fallback into Google (The folks I knew that took it were CS students from UChicago and UPenn)

pancaku 5y ago
Hi rejectedandsad, I'm making my first comment on Hackernews because I saw your remark. I would encourage you to seek help for this negative thinking or at the very least reflect. I promise the majority of people in society do not view you as subhuman for working at Amazon. This is really an irrational thought. Based on your post history I think you are beating yourself up over a non issue. You're working at a top company, with reasonable pay, and exciting projects. Yes some companies pay much higher, have more perks, better wlb, etc. but there will always be a better company wherever you work. Your work doesn't define you. Chin up my friend, and maybe seek some professional help to improve your thoughts. You don't have to go through life suffering like this! I used to get extremely anxious/depressed focusing on my career but after going through therapy, and yes some medication I have been feeling much much better. Best of luck!
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  While I appreciate that and I've been working on it, it seems that whatever I do I just see more evidence for it - the $70k wage cut to not associate with people like me, the significantly lower social class and standard of living people like me have all weighs on me pretty heavily these days.
  - solipsism 5y ago
    If you ever made it to Google, you'd immediately see the stratification within. The elites with their lake houses... the people operating at levels you never will be able to... the people bailing to start startups because Google got boring. Fuck it and be happy. And while you're working on it, you should consider no longer voicing your negative thoughts. It definitely doesn't help, and there's a good chance it makes it worse. (Or don't, I'm not telling you what to do obviously)

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago

> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. Just like stores have "up to" 70% discounts. One item is marked off that much, and the rest are given modest discounts. We shouldn't normalize this number as some plain old average, it'd be aspirational for many.

gravypod 5y ago
(Opinions are my own. I know nothing about this program.) Using StackOverflow's [0] aggregated statistics of pay based on experience + location we can get some rough estimates Over a 5 to 10 year span as a developer at Google you'd probably touch: Java, Golang, C++, Python, and some part of GCP (or very similar tech). Pay is also different from market location so if we look only at the USA we can look at SF and Manhattan. 5 years: - NYC 25% 96k, 50% 126k, 75% 166k - SF 25% 113k, 50% 149k, 75% 197k 10 years: - NYC 25% 107k, 50% 141k, 75% 186k - SF 25% 126k, 50% 166k, 75% 219k This is also ignoring the FAANG bump that you get from being Xoogler. Also, if you don't get a promotion or are unhappy with your compensation Facebook's levels are an approximate 1:1 mapping to Google and from what I've heard going from Google to Facebook and back to Google is quite common. Some people have joked that there are people that are on a 2 year rotation back and forth. Some more data can be gleamed from here: https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ 500k+ is L6+, while very difficult to obtain, seems doable if you are determined, know your stuff, know how to find the "right" projects, and are also an inspiring leader. [0] - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary
- lrem 5y ago
  I have hit L6 after 7 years of steep upward trajectory. I have been hired with a PhD and four years of part-time industry experience. I got it now because two years ago our org got a new leader with a mindset very similar to mine, while at the same time a solution I've been developing for a couple years was just found by a tens-of-billions-usd problem. Sure, over the 7 years I've met a couple engineers with a similar trajectory and one with a steeper one. But the vast majority will either take more time to get to L6, or plain decide to stay forever at 4 or 5.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ashhdsfsa28378 5y ago

To clarify, I can say from experience (having personally helped convert 6 engineering residents at Google), I'm pretty confident the "less pay and a smaller stock refresh" in the article is referring to conversion offers to FTE and stock refreshes after the first year of FTE employment, not to their pay during their residency. Those FTE conversion offers were terrible, from what I saw, with no room for negotiation. The residency program had given these candidates 1 year to build a proven track record of performance and they were fully ramped up by the end, so there was no risk to Google at the time of those offers; if a resident was given an offer, it was because they were a pretty sure thing (far more than any normal interviewed hire). As such, I think their offers should have been higher than a regular hire, not lower. (As someone who was hired direct out of college with little experience, I can confidently say the offers my residents got were _significantly_ lower than my starting offer at the same level.) The article states this a bit unclearly, but I'm pretty sure this is what it means, because it doesn't make sense to refer to year-end bonuses or stock refreshes during residency because they aren't long enough to get these regardless (and I never heard anyone complain about this). That said, as a side note, I do think articles like this tend to sensationalize Google as a whole as the "bad guy". Try to remember, Google is a huge company with lots of people managing its many parts. I personally feel there was a failing here, but if so, it was the fault of a relatively small number of people, not "Google". Even most of the people running this program were good, and the program itself was great (as you said) other than what I said above. There's hundreds of thousands of decisions happening every day at Google. If just a couple bad ones get to define the company as a whole, then no large company can ever be good, no matter how good all the rest of those decisions are.

creato 5y ago
> with no room for negotiation. The only room for negotiation is being willing to walk (usually because you have an offer somewhere else). Otherwise, it's not negotiating, it's just begging.

junon 5y ago

> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. Where? lol

nivenkos 5y ago
Here in Europe you're unlikely to break $100k in that time.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  That's still really good for Europe. That's €84k, not a lot of careers pay like that after 10 years, even in STEM.
torhorway 5y ago
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Refreshers stacking + stock appreciation, I'd guess.
- junon 5y ago
  I didn't take it to mean stock appreciation, as pay directly means salary where I'm from.
  - joejerryronnie 5y ago
    They are talking about total comp which is usually base salary + bonus + stock (RSUs). As the person above mentioned, 50% or more of that $500-600K is most likely made up of stacked stock grants. Even if you sell your RSUs right away, a grant typically vests over 4 years. In the current market, that makes older grants much more valuable based on stock appreciation.
dresdenfire 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience. I don't think that's really true. I'm not arguing that there aren't SWEs whose total comp is $600k. There definitely are. However, those people aren't really SWEs. They're managers, architects, and strategists. They have a lot of people reporting to them, they make decisions about very high level things that are only tangentially related to code, and they work on guiding other engineers to find solutions to hard problems. No doubt being a developer before getting to that role is incredibly helpful and makes you better at it, but if you're earning $600k I very much doubt you're spending more than 25% of your time sat at a keyboard with an IDE open. If you want to earn that much after a decade in work you'd be much better off polishing your management and strategy skills than learning how to write better code. And yes, I realise I'm totally falling in to the 'no true Scotsman' trap here. But sometimes a Scotsman is just an MBA in a kilt. :)

discobot2 5y ago
500-600K is L5-L6 at google CA, which is still a lot of coding and maybe some reports, but not necessary.

hkai 5y ago

True equity of outcomes means that people spend different amounts of effort but get to the same results. So people from underrepresented backgrounds should be paid the same as top engineers regardless of output.