3 ms·

Its shocking to me how people don't get bored of rehashing this same, tired opinion over and over and over again and discussing it with hundreds of comments. Th

by vp8989 5y ago

Its shocking to me how people don't get bored of rehashing this same, tired opinion over and over and over again and discussing it with hundreds of comments. There is a blog post like this every other day on the front page of HN and it always generates the exact same discussion.

tubby12345 5y ago
I have said this before: it's group therapy for entitled devs that feel they're entitled to oversized salaries just because they have tenure. Young grads accept the process as is. People that are either happy with their comp or comfortable putting in the work do not lament the process - they just accept it and proceed. Only devs that have been doing it a while, whose salaries have plateaued, that either never learned data structures or can't muster the will to review, bemoan the LC grind. The most utterly absurd instantiation is the dev that's 100% sure that FAANG is going to fail soon because they're passing on people like him/her that are just so talented that they don't need to prove it with any assessment. There's also the MGTOW-esque subgroup that eschews such interviews and will proclaim it proudly, along with their salary. Personally I'd be embarrassed if I was making a less than obscene dev salary, which is still upper middle class anywhere in the world, and all the while complaining that I deserve more for no added effort. What's funny is there are other professions where the same sort of multimodal distribution in compensation exists (big law vs everyone else, competitive specialties vs general practice in medicine, IB and PE vs everyone else in finance) and I have never seen members of those communities complain as much as developers do. Edit: I have a friend that's trying to break into FAANG (as a DS) who I've been coaching. He has a stats PhD and basically no software training whatsoever, outside of R. Since DS loops still have LC questions it's been very hard for him. I have never heard him once express feelings of resentment over the process - he fails an interview and just goes back to practicing. He's also a first gen immigrant from a very poor part of the middle east. Admittedly it's hard to assign/attribute his perseverance to any particular thing but naive intuition dictates that some of it must be his humility - something that software as an industry seriously lacks.
- majormajor 5y ago
  From friends and acquaintances in other industries with similar income distributions, "knock out 4-to-6 programming problems in a short amount of time" is one of the least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one. Not to mention that if you can knock out those problems, you may not even be required to have a degree or other formal credentials. That's not even getting into how hilariously unrealistic "trial periods", for instance, are. Why am I going to leave a job for just a trial period without any more thorough attempt to check fit before hand? Why would I invest that much time in side work if I'm doing it before quitting, when I could get a FAANG offer instead for single-digit-days-amount of brushing up?
  - tubby12345 5y ago
    >least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one. exactly. i mean like try to apply to IB at a BB and see if anyone even skims your resume without an ivy+ on it. they can't fathom how good they have it because they've never done anything else (which is, of course, what breeds entitlement).
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      Do people get a FAANG interview with no recognizable credentials? Surely they have to sift the CVs somehow?
      - girvo 5y ago
        For the F in that list, at least, definitely. Though that was because they used a different metric to sift/choose me for an interview (and a decade of experience) despite my lack of tertiary education.
        lordnacho 5y ago
        How did you get the interview? They must get a lot of junk applications, what did you write to make them actually look at you instead of direct to trash, and then decide to interview?

by vp8989 5y ago

tubby12345 5y ago

I have said this before: it's group therapy for entitled devs that feel they're entitled to oversized salaries just because they have tenure. Young grads accept the process as is. People that are either happy with their comp or comfortable putting in the work do not lament the process - they just accept it and proceed. Only devs that have been doing it a while, whose salaries have plateaued, that either never learned data structures or can't muster the will to review, bemoan the LC grind. The most utterly absurd instantiation is the dev that's 100% sure that FAANG is going to fail soon because they're passing on people like him/her that are just so talented that they don't need to prove it with any assessment. There's also the MGTOW-esque subgroup that eschews such interviews and will proclaim it proudly, along with their salary. Personally I'd be embarrassed if I was making a less than obscene dev salary, which is still upper middle class anywhere in the world, and all the while complaining that I deserve more for no added effort. What's funny is there are other professions where the same sort of multimodal distribution in compensation exists (big law vs everyone else, competitive specialties vs general practice in medicine, IB and PE vs everyone else in finance) and I have never seen members of those communities complain as much as developers do. Edit: I have a friend that's trying to break into FAANG (as a DS) who I've been coaching. He has a stats PhD and basically no software training whatsoever, outside of R. Since DS loops still have LC questions it's been very hard for him. I have never heard him once express feelings of resentment over the process - he fails an interview and just goes back to practicing. He's also a first gen immigrant from a very poor part of the middle east. Admittedly it's hard to assign/attribute his perseverance to any particular thing but naive intuition dictates that some of it must be his humility - something that software as an industry seriously lacks.

majormajor 5y ago
From friends and acquaintances in other industries with similar income distributions, "knock out 4-to-6 programming problems in a short amount of time" is one of the least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one. Not to mention that if you can knock out those problems, you may not even be required to have a degree or other formal credentials. That's not even getting into how hilariously unrealistic "trial periods", for instance, are. Why am I going to leave a job for just a trial period without any more thorough attempt to check fit before hand? Why would I invest that much time in side work if I'm doing it before quitting, when I could get a FAANG offer instead for single-digit-days-amount of brushing up?
- tubby12345 5y ago
  >least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one. exactly. i mean like try to apply to IB at a BB and see if anyone even skims your resume without an ivy+ on it. they can't fathom how good they have it because they've never done anything else (which is, of course, what breeds entitlement).
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Do people get a FAANG interview with no recognizable credentials? Surely they have to sift the CVs somehow?
    - girvo 5y ago
      For the F in that list, at least, definitely. Though that was because they used a different metric to sift/choose me for an interview (and a decade of experience) despite my lack of tertiary education.
      - lordnacho 5y ago
        How did you get the interview? They must get a lot of junk applications, what did you write to make them actually look at you instead of direct to trash, and then decide to interview?