6 ms·

Not sure I'm reading this right. You went from making $634K per year to $72/hour??? I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software e

Not sure I'm reading this right. You went from making $634K per year to $72/hour??? I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. That is life-changing money. It's like winning the lottery.

mhb 4y ago
https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
yieldcrv 4y ago
People quit because they make enough. Between real estate, and the equities market, a few million dollars can support your lifestyle indefinitely. But also factor in that this group of people can also be limited partners in Private Equity and Hedge Funds forever and get tiny pieces of a couple big bets (and I would seriously ignore articles that say the S&P beats them. YMMV, good luck!)
- jefftk 4y ago
  FWIW I don't have a few million dollars or other large investments, and I do still need to make some money from my work. But I can also live well on much less than I had been making!
amarshall 4y ago
> That is life-changing money. Yes, and it seems they used it to change their life.
- mcv 4y ago
  Yeah, it's not like it was a couple of months for that kind of money; it was years. More than enough to change your life and start working for fun or charity instead of for money.
jldugger 4y ago
> I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. Imagine how much money can be saved by shaving 5 percent off an annual AWS bill of 10 million dollars. (dont forget to factor in present value of future year's savings!) Now imagine a company like Google that spends way more than 10mil on infra. And even if your infra is cheap, virtually every tech giant has shown that shaving 100ms off a request is a massive boost to customer engagement metrics, so maybe it _shouldn't_ be that cheap. And product teams are just as valuable, if not more so. That explains the demand. On the supply side, people who can actually do the work are hard to find. There's a massive gulf between having a degree in CS and actually making good on improving complex software. I've watched like three teams fail to deliver on a GSLB[1] optimization tool. Two of the three iterations didn't recognize this as NP complete (bin-packing, essentially) and the third is learning the hard way that there's calculating an optimal response is only part of the problem -- you also have to change state without inducing outages on the receiving end, and a naive SAT solver won't produce that. Beyond that, bay area is expensive to live in, and is high tax. $634k becomes more like $300k, in a city where you might spend $5k a month in rent. So there's definitely a _floor_ to salaries. Also: once all this is accounted for, retaining talent with equity grants has a side effect of accidentally pushing wages above target. Some places like Amazon seem to explicitly take this into account when issuing refreshers, others not so much. Which means to hire someone away from Google is really hard. But really easy to recruit from Meta at the moment, as their stock has fallen 60 percent so income has fallen as well. Beware of the double edged sword. [1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-server-load-balancing-gslb/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-serv...
- tjbiddle 4y ago
  > Initially a temp via NextSource, at $72/hr. I took a significant pay cut for this role because I think the work is very important.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    he could invest 50% or more of his salary in this work via donation and it would probably help the cause much more than his 40 hours/week. It sounds more like a middle life crisis to me.
sidlls 4y ago
Half that compensation is in equity grants. Google generates millions of dollars in revenue per employee. The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low? The answer is the same as it is for other jobs: because the labor market isn’t the same kind of market that your econ 101 supply/demand curves model. There is too much information asymmetry and individual laborers’ motivations aren’t all aligned bedsides.
- badpun 4y ago
  > The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low? The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
  - brookst 4y ago
    There are lots of people with the technical skills to work at Google. Only a subset of them have the right personality to work at Google. It is a very unique culture.
    - tasuki 4y ago
      This sounds like something a Googler would say.
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        I could believe it as a big tech guy working at a different company Google's internal culture sounds awful to me*. Tons of kool-aid chugging, shadowy political battles, people obsessed with tech for the sake of tech... plus they don't generally interview for a specific position, instead you interview for Google at large and then have to find a team that wants you once you pass the bar. Passing the bar is also obnoxious. Maybe there are a lot of transcendent super-geniuses out there who can do it without studying, but IMO the Google bar is tuned to baseline-assume that you can crank out a Leetcode Hard problem in a few minutes, then they throw extra twists in on top of that. So you have to spend months of your precious free time cranking away at coding practice just to get an offer, and then hope that you can find a job you like once you're in. OR you can go to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc and make just as much money. * I can appreciate how it'd appeal to a lot of people though. One man's "Kool-aid chugging" is another's "Pursuit of social justice", one man's boondoggle is another's cool tech, one man's "shadowy political battles" are another's "Engineer-first Meritocracy"
pelasaco 4y ago
Not saying that publishing your salary isn't important, but for me the linked article sounds more like bragging and virtual signaling, like "I went from dishwasher to google developer, earning almost 700k/year but i gave up from everything to work with what I love.".. From $634k/year, to something like $34560/year? This makes 0 sense. If he would donate $400k/year to the cause that he wanted to help, would be much better for the cause and to his own familiy, than he investing 40 hours per month on that.
- differentView 4y ago
  Maybe his talent is worth more, especially when he's passionate about the work.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I've been maintaining this page since I was at BBN, when I was earning much less. > If he would donate $400k/year to the cause I used to do that: https://jefftk.com/donations https://jefftk.com/donations I don't actually think it would be better altruistically: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
  - jcheng 4y ago
    This is a much more interesting and inspiring story than OP. Wow.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer If the engineer earns you or saves you 1.2 million why on earth wouldn't you be prepared to pay 600k for them?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  While I think that's equitable, you could also see how an employer might try to keep a larger share. And most employees would probably agree to getting something substantially less.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Basically that's what those companies did, and then some of those engineers started 1 trillion dollar corporations since they couldn't convince anyone to pay them 600k
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > you could also see how an employer might try to keep a larger share But trying to keep a larger share means you lose out on all of it, as you will get outbid. If they can save other companies 1.2 million as well (which they will because few companies are so unique) then their price will naturally creep up towards that value as others will be willing to pay more because it's a good deal.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Because when you're a large monopolistic corporation receiving billions of dollars every quarter on the basis of work which was carried out decades ago, there are always going to exist many inefficiencies which unnecessarily cost you millions of dollars; many of these inefficiencies are created by your own employees and could have been avoided through a bit of additional foresight. Also, there always exists many other engineers on the market which you didn't hire and which could also have saved you millions and they would have done it for a lot less money. Google receives a huge number of job applications and the selection process involves a great deal of randomness/luck.
newshorts 4y ago
Consider cost of living and taxes in the Bay Area as well. These salaries would be extreme in a place like Idaho but in the Bay Area your money can quickly disappear.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I'm in Boston, which is more expensive than Idaho, but significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. For example, in 2015 I was able to buy a house that would have cost ~5x as much in a comparable location (25min commute to work, 10min from a subway station) in the Bay.
klooney 4y ago
I really should try to go work for Google. It would be worth grinding a little leetcode.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  You should do it, man. People read a Google Zero blog post or something and think "Oh I'm not on their level", when the reality is far different. I think it's mostly hard work, infrastructure, and experience that lets people accomplish amazing stuff at these giant companies. Sure, you need some baseline level of smarts, but it isn't some obscene 1/1000 genius. I'd be willing to bet that at least a quarter of all programmers are smart enough to work at FAANG and make 300-600k. Interview/Leetcode problems are a lot like mystery novels or sudoku puzzles. Once you know the basic building blocks (data structures, algorithms, sneaky tricks) they're hard but not THAT hard. Google's a bit of a different beast from the rest of the FAANG companies. They take it as a baseline assumption that you can easily crank through a super hard coding question, and throw a wrench into it while you're working on it. IMO it's still doable to pass the bar though. After a couple of years in big tech and exposure to the tricks of the trade, you too will be able to do stuff that blows people's minds. Such as quit to take a 75% pay cut for a job that's personally meaningful

mhb 4y ago

https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...

yieldcrv 4y ago

People quit because they make enough. Between real estate, and the equities market, a few million dollars can support your lifestyle indefinitely. But also factor in that this group of people can also be limited partners in Private Equity and Hedge Funds forever and get tiny pieces of a couple big bets (and I would seriously ignore articles that say the S&P beats them. YMMV, good luck!)

jefftk 4y ago
FWIW I don't have a few million dollars or other large investments, and I do still need to make some money from my work. But I can also live well on much less than I had been making!

amarshall 4y ago

> That is life-changing money. Yes, and it seems they used it to change their life.

mcv 4y ago
Yeah, it's not like it was a couple of months for that kind of money; it was years. More than enough to change your life and start working for fun or charity instead of for money.

jldugger 4y ago

> I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer and I especially can't understand why someone would quit such a job. Imagine how much money can be saved by shaving 5 percent off an annual AWS bill of 10 million dollars. (dont forget to factor in present value of future year's savings!) Now imagine a company like Google that spends way more than 10mil on infra. And even if your infra is cheap, virtually every tech giant has shown that shaving 100ms off a request is a massive boost to customer engagement metrics, so maybe it _shouldn't_ be that cheap. And product teams are just as valuable, if not more so. That explains the demand. On the supply side, people who can actually do the work are hard to find. There's a massive gulf between having a degree in CS and actually making good on improving complex software. I've watched like three teams fail to deliver on a GSLB[1] optimization tool. Two of the three iterations didn't recognize this as NP complete (bin-packing, essentially) and the third is learning the hard way that there's calculating an optimal response is only part of the problem -- you also have to change state without inducing outages on the receiving end, and a naive SAT solver won't produce that. Beyond that, bay area is expensive to live in, and is high tax. $634k becomes more like $300k, in a city where you might spend $5k a month in rent. So there's definitely a _floor_ to salaries. Also: once all this is accounted for, retaining talent with equity grants has a side effect of accidentally pushing wages above target. Some places like Amazon seem to explicitly take this into account when issuing refreshers, others not so much. Which means to hire someone away from Google is really hard. But really easy to recruit from Meta at the moment, as their stock has fallen 60 percent so income has fallen as well. Beware of the double edged sword. [1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-server-load-balancing-gslb/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/global-serv...

tjbiddle 4y ago
> Initially a temp via NextSource, at $72/hr. I took a significant pay cut for this role because I think the work is very important.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  he could invest 50% or more of his salary in this work via donation and it would probably help the cause much more than his 40 hours/week. It sounds more like a middle life crisis to me.

sidlls 4y ago

Half that compensation is in equity grants. Google generates millions of dollars in revenue per employee. The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low? The answer is the same as it is for other jobs: because the labor market isn’t the same kind of market that your econ 101 supply/demand curves model. There is too much information asymmetry and individual laborers’ motivations aren’t all aligned bedsides.

badpun 4y ago
> The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low? The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
- brookst 4y ago
  There are lots of people with the technical skills to work at Google. Only a subset of them have the right personality to work at Google. It is a very unique culture.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    This sounds like something a Googler would say.
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      I could believe it as a big tech guy working at a different company Google's internal culture sounds awful to me*. Tons of kool-aid chugging, shadowy political battles, people obsessed with tech for the sake of tech... plus they don't generally interview for a specific position, instead you interview for Google at large and then have to find a team that wants you once you pass the bar. Passing the bar is also obnoxious. Maybe there are a lot of transcendent super-geniuses out there who can do it without studying, but IMO the Google bar is tuned to baseline-assume that you can crank out a Leetcode Hard problem in a few minutes, then they throw extra twists in on top of that. So you have to spend months of your precious free time cranking away at coding practice just to get an offer, and then hope that you can find a job you like once you're in. OR you can go to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc and make just as much money. * I can appreciate how it'd appeal to a lot of people though. One man's "Kool-aid chugging" is another's "Pursuit of social justice", one man's boondoggle is another's cool tech, one man's "shadowy political battles" are another's "Engineer-first Meritocracy"

pelasaco 4y ago

Not saying that publishing your salary isn't important, but for me the linked article sounds more like bragging and virtual signaling, like "I went from dishwasher to google developer, earning almost 700k/year but i gave up from everything to work with what I love.".. From $634k/year, to something like $34560/year? This makes 0 sense. If he would donate $400k/year to the cause that he wanted to help, would be much better for the cause and to his own familiy, than he investing 40 hours per month on that.

differentView 4y ago
Maybe his talent is worth more, especially when he's passionate about the work.
jefftk 4y ago
I've been maintaining this page since I was at BBN, when I was earning much less. > If he would donate $400k/year to the cause I used to do that: https://jefftk.com/donations https://jefftk.com/donations I don't actually think it would be better altruistically: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-acid-observatory https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
- jcheng 4y ago
  This is a much more interesting and inspiring story than OP. Wow.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> I can't understand why any company would pay so much money for a software engineer If the engineer earns you or saves you 1.2 million why on earth wouldn't you be prepared to pay 600k for them?

lordnacho 4y ago
While I think that's equitable, you could also see how an employer might try to keep a larger share. And most employees would probably agree to getting something substantially less.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Basically that's what those companies did, and then some of those engineers started 1 trillion dollar corporations since they couldn't convince anyone to pay them 600k
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > you could also see how an employer might try to keep a larger share But trying to keep a larger share means you lose out on all of it, as you will get outbid. If they can save other companies 1.2 million as well (which they will because few companies are so unique) then their price will naturally creep up towards that value as others will be willing to pay more because it's a good deal.
jongjong 4y ago
Because when you're a large monopolistic corporation receiving billions of dollars every quarter on the basis of work which was carried out decades ago, there are always going to exist many inefficiencies which unnecessarily cost you millions of dollars; many of these inefficiencies are created by your own employees and could have been avoided through a bit of additional foresight. Also, there always exists many other engineers on the market which you didn't hire and which could also have saved you millions and they would have done it for a lot less money. Google receives a huge number of job applications and the selection process involves a great deal of randomness/luck.

newshorts 4y ago

Consider cost of living and taxes in the Bay Area as well. These salaries would be extreme in a place like Idaho but in the Bay Area your money can quickly disappear.

jefftk 4y ago
I'm in Boston, which is more expensive than Idaho, but significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. For example, in 2015 I was able to buy a house that would have cost ~5x as much in a comparable location (25min commute to work, 10min from a subway station) in the Bay.

klooney 4y ago

I really should try to go work for Google. It would be worth grinding a little leetcode.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
You should do it, man. People read a Google Zero blog post or something and think "Oh I'm not on their level", when the reality is far different. I think it's mostly hard work, infrastructure, and experience that lets people accomplish amazing stuff at these giant companies. Sure, you need some baseline level of smarts, but it isn't some obscene 1/1000 genius. I'd be willing to bet that at least a quarter of all programmers are smart enough to work at FAANG and make 300-600k. Interview/Leetcode problems are a lot like mystery novels or sudoku puzzles. Once you know the basic building blocks (data structures, algorithms, sneaky tricks) they're hard but not THAT hard. Google's a bit of a different beast from the rest of the FAANG companies. They take it as a baseline assumption that you can easily crank through a super hard coding question, and throw a wrench into it while you're working on it. IMO it's still doable to pass the bar though. After a couple of years in big tech and exposure to the tricks of the trade, you too will be able to do stuff that blows people's minds. Such as quit to take a 75% pay cut for a job that's personally meaningful