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Blotto Skorzany posted:150k is on the low end for financials for someone with a bachelors And that's exactly the problem, although the numbers are a bit of an exageration. Everyone I know from CS (graduated ~10 years ago) who went to work for Goldman (or other such places) is making a tenth what the OR crowd is making now. You make good money as a programmer at a bank, but make no mistake, you're the help.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:29
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Blotto Skorzany posted:150k is on the low end for financials for someone with a bachelors Not for software engineers unfortunately.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:29
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Correct me if I'm wrong (especially if I'm underestimating!), but I think $120k-130k/yr salary + $20-50k/yr in RSUs at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook is typical, plus about 20-30% more on top of that if you ask for more and show similar offers from similar companies. And if you apply to all 4, plus Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc., you have a good chance of getting multiple offers, even if only two. So it seems that with adequate preparation, it should be feasible to make >= $200k/yr in salary and stock, and definitely feasible to make > $150k/yr. Add to that the chance to work with people who are at the top of the industry skill-wise, and it seems like there's zero reason to consider working for any finance companies if $150k is really considered decent for a SWE at those places.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:42
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KernelSlanders posted:Bridgwater Just make sure to read Ray Dalio's 123-page manifesto first.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:44
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Safe and Secure! posted:Correct me if I'm wrong (especially if I'm underestimating!), but I think $120k-130k/yr salary + $20-50k/yr in RSUs at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook is typical, plus about 20-30% more on top of that if you ask for more and show similar offers from similar companies. And if you apply to all 4, plus Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc., you have a good chance of getting multiple offers, even if only two. So it seems that with adequate preparation, it should be feasible to make >= $200k/yr in salary and stock, and definitely feasible to make > $150k/yr. Add to that the chance to work with people who are at the top of the industry skill-wise, and it seems like there's zero reason to consider working for any finance companies if $150k is really considered decent for a SWE at those places. What's your educational background / experience like? I personally have not heard of anyone getting $50K in RSUs YEARLY out of any (edit: big tech) company fresh out school at any level.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:47
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shodanjr_gr posted:Not for software engineers unfortunately. What financials are you referring to where programmer salaries are lousy? The recruiters for trading firms that are talking to me currently are giving out numbers considerably higher than the base salary and bonus at InFaceGoogeZon, though I assume their stock grants are much worse and everything besides comp is probably worse. They also care more about signal processing things on my resume than any of the tech firm recruiters do, though that's understandable.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:48
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kitten smoothie posted:Just make sure to read Ray Dalio's 123-page manifesto first. Every big place has strange culture poo poo. Remember the KPMG song? Paypal in it's early days rejected candidates for getting "Star Wars or Star Trek?" wrong.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:50
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KernelSlanders posted:Every big place has strange culture poo poo. Remember the KPMG song? Paypal in it's early days rejected candidates for getting "Star Wars or Star Trek?" wrong. Bridgewater is a loving cult though. There is weiiiird poo poo going on at that company. edit holy poo poo I skimmed over that manifesto. Mother of god. Bruegels Fuckbooks fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 04:51
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shodanjr_gr posted:What's your educational background / experience like? I personally have not heard of anyone getting $50K in RSUs YEARLY out of any (edit: big tech) company fresh out school at any level. Bachelor's in computer science, bachelor's in math and getting close to two years of experience, so not fresh out of school. And I don't mean to imply that those numbers are for fresh grads - I know that fresh grad compensation packages are quite a bit lower. It's my understanding that these numbers are typical for non-entry-level SWEs. Safe and Secure! fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 04:54
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Blotto Skorzany posted:What financials are you referring to where programmer salaries are lousy? The recruiters for trading firms that are talking to me currently are giving out numbers considerably higher than the base salary and bonus at InFaceGoogeZon, though I assume their stock grants are much worse and everything besides comp is probably worse. They also care more about signal processing things on my resume than any of the tech firm recruiters do, though that's understandable. Most banks, Bloomberg, etc...From what you're describing it seems that you're getting recruited for more of a quant position that generic S.E...I would figure those pay substantially more.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:55
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Safe and Secure! posted:Correct me if I'm wrong (especially if I'm underestimating!), but I think $120k-130k/yr salary + $20-50k/yr in RSUs at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook is typical, plus about 20-30% more on top of that if you ask for more and show similar offers from similar companies. And if you apply to all 4, plus Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc., you have a good chance of getting multiple offers, even if only two. So it seems that with adequate preparation, it should be feasible to make >= $200k/yr in salary and stock, and definitely feasible to make > $150k/yr. Add to that the chance to work with people who are at the top of the industry skill-wise, and it seems like there's zero reason to consider working for any finance companies. If you have any amount of experience those net income numbers are pretty easy to get at the big companies. Maybe more on the salary/bonus side, less on the RSUs side but similar totals. The big companies generally have salary bands for different levels so theres not a huge variability in salary (RSU amounts vary massively based on join date and things like if you were part of an acquisition) so what you find on glassdoor and the like are a pretty good representation. If you are interested in applying at Facebook and think you actually have the necessary ability you should reach out to some of us goons who work here to get a referral (me, the last goon I referred ultramiraculous). Yes I mention it because it means we get a referral bonus but it'll guarantee you at least get an email back from a recruiter so its mutually beneficial and its also a good chance to get some insight into the interview process. As of today I've done 121 interviews here so I kind of understand it? I imagine theres similar connections you could make at other big name companies around here. Its almost always worthwhile to try to start the process through the back door if possible.
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Jan 30, 2015 04:57
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Safe and Secure! posted:Bachelors in computer science, bachelors in math and getting close to two years of experience, so not fresh out of school. And I don't mean to imply that those numbers are for fresh grads - I know that fresh grad compensation packages are quite a bit lower. It's my understanding that these numbers are typical for non-entry-level SWEs. Honestly I can't speak to how work experience affects one's compensation because I haven't had interactions with people job-searching at that level  .
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Jan 30, 2015 04:58
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Bridgewater is a loving cult though. There is weiiiird poo poo going on at that company. Ok, I'm not really a Bridgewater fanboi, but name a hedge fund you'd rather take your CS degree to.
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Jan 30, 2015 05:37
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KernelSlanders posted:Ok, I'm not really a Bridgewater fanboi, but name a hedge fund you'd rather take your CS degree to. I'm not basing this off of anything but actually knowing like four or five people who work at Bridgewater or used to work at Bridgewater, but it does not sound like my kind of thing at all.
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Jan 30, 2015 10:47
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Don't work at Bridgewater. Holy poo poo, do not work at Bridgewater.Safe and Secure! posted:So I'm looking to apply to the following big companies, because I figure they tend to have the smartest people, the highest compensation, and name-recognition (not sure if it would help me much in the long run, but I would enjoy having recognizable a name on my resume): I would add Dropbox to this list.
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Jan 30, 2015 11:26
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a slime posted:I would add Dropbox to this list. They have about 1000 employees, quite a bit smaller than the others on that list.
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Jan 30, 2015 11:32
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Skuto posted:They have about 1000 employees, quite a bit smaller than the others on that list. Do you know what the breakdown is like? i.e., how much of that is engineering?
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Jan 30, 2015 12:43
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I'm guessing this has been brought up before, but I'm getting the impression that I'm going to have to sort of choose one technology (Java or .NET specifically) moving forward. I'm of the mind that a real programmer can move between languages, especially Java and C#, but I don't know that my opinion will count as experience for future positions. So I guess what I'm asking is: Is my assessment accurate? Which one should I choose? I like C# as a language more than Java, but if we assume that the future/present is more in mobile applications I get the feeling that Java is the way to go.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:03
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I went from desktop C# to Android dev without any Android experience and it wasn't a big roadblock.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:06
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Fancy Corndog posted:Which one should I choose? Which one pays more and/or is used by the more personally and professionally fulfilling companies in the area you want to live in? Or just go with C# because it's a less ugly language.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:26
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Munkeymon posted:Which one pays more and/or is used by the more personally and professionally fulfilling companies in the area you want to live in? This. Don't let "android is a more popular platform than Windows Phone" stop you from choosing C# -- there's Xamarin for cross-platform mobile development in C#, and web-based cross-platform solutions are also very popular. There's nothing wrong with Java, but it's fallen pretty far behind in terms of language features when compared to C#. Java 8 is better -- it introduced some quality of life stuff that C# has had for 5+ years -- but it's still behind.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:37
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Java 8? LOL! Some Java 7 features have recently become usable in Android. Not all of them, though. I'm also not clear if you still need Java 6 to actually compile AOSP or if you can safely update.
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Jan 30, 2015 16:44
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Skuto posted:They have about 1000 employees, quite a bit smaller than the others on that list. His question was about smartest people, compensation, and industry name recognition not size. Dropbox fits all of those.
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Jan 30, 2015 17:13
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Is Java 8 still open source or has Oracle sewn it all up and told everyone to pay up or get hosed yet? I kinda stopped paying attention around when they lost that absurd lawsuit.
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Jan 30, 2015 17:44
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pr0zac posted:His question was about smartest people, compensation, and industry name recognition not size. It was supposed to be a list of big companies, read his first sentence. Dropbox is definitely worth applying to but it's not comparable to the others on the list (for better or worse), so I pointed that out. How's Cisco's engineering in the USA? I've had good experiences when consulting for them, but on the other hand it was also obvious that because they bought so much stuff up there was likely huge variation from site to site.
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Jan 30, 2015 17:55
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Several of my coworkers all used to work for a company that was acquired by Cisco; one of them jumped to my company and brought the others in, as often happens. One of them told me "if Cisco buys your company, GTFO" but he didn't really elaborate much more on that besides the usual stuff that happens when a big company swallows up a small one and dismantles the culture in short order.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:15
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Skuto posted:It was supposed to be a list of big companies, read his first sentence. Dropbox is definitely worth applying to but it's not comparable to the others on the list (for better or worse), so I pointed that out. My impression was size wasn't actually the crux or he would've listed IBM, Cisco, and Oracle. Its comparable to the other companies with regard to the other qualifications he asked about. Definitely higher standards than Twitter or Yahoo or Ebay. Whatevs though, semantics! Wrt Cisco, I wouldn't want to work there at this point. When I graduated college it was my dream job (that I failed to get lmao) and I've known a lot of people who've worked there. Those who started 8-10 years ago loved it at the time, those who still work there now hate it. Most have left already. Part of the issue seems to be most of the smart, motivated people have moved on to startups or the "hot" companies we were previously discussing and the majority of the remaining engineers are the its just a job, chose it for the money, do the minimum necessary types. Even just in the networking space it seems the best people and most interesting work is at Juniper, Aruba, and Palo Alto Networks now. They're also really hurting I think since a lot of their big business customers are moving to build their own platforms and cloud services and this is just going to continue going downhill for them. I'm basing this purely off SWEs working in the bay area (and one in Boston) though, so perhaps its different elsewhere?
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Jan 30, 2015 18:20
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I know a couple of people in small research groups at Cisco that love it. Been there for <3 years. All in Europe, though. Company culture seems very closed, I have no idea what they do despite them being longtime colleagues---large part of the reason I didn't apply there.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:27
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Probably dumb question to follow. I misremembered the OP waited until the semester I'm graduating (this one) to start putting out for jobs, and I'm only putting my resume together now to get it evaluated here. The upside is that through 2014 I was working with a startup company, partially as an tester (QA kind), an intern, and kind of a junior dev(where I mostly wrote unit tests hee-haw). I had a handful of different responsibilities, but I guess they could all be umbrella'd under 'intern', though I'd like to throw around other titles. Since it was all under one company and only through a year, do I just list one or two of those titles with all my bullets, or break the bullets up between different titles? I'm leaning towards the former, but I figure I'd ask.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:45
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I'd probably just lump it all as "Software Engineering Intern" for the title and elaborate honestly in the resume and in person.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:16
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shodanjr_gr posted:Not for software engineers unfortunately. Bloomberg has a hiring bonanza in February and are offering reduced salaries of 160k pa? Firms on finance side: WorldQuant / Millenium, NASDAQ OMX, Two Sigma, Jane Street, Bloomberg, D. E. Shaw (not Research where D. E. Shaw now works), E*Trade, Hudson River Trading, MayStreet, Point 72 (sans Steve Cohen), Thomson Reuters, and Renaissance Tech. Scary companies to avoid: Bridgewater
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Jan 30, 2015 20:35
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Fancy Corndog posted:I'm guessing this has been brought up before, but I'm getting the impression that I'm going to have to sort of choose one technology (Java or .NET specifically) moving forward. I'm of the mind that a real programmer can move between languages, especially Java and C#, but I don't know that my opinion will count as experience for future positions. I have been thinking a bit about this type of thing recently. It seems like this type of thinking on the part of companies - meaning, wanting specifically someone with experience in very specific languages/technologies - would be very short sighted. Wouldn't a good developer be able to learn other languages or technologies relatively easily? Isn't the main thing his experience in the field over all and the software engineering skills he has developed over the years? Heck, I never used .NET before my internship-then-job; I had been using Java, and I was able to switch pretty easily despite being a very inexperienced newbie - shouldn't this be more or less a non-issue for good devs? Why are so many job postings loaded with references to specific technologies?
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Jan 30, 2015 21:12
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Assuming we're not talking about huge paradigm shifts like C -> Haskell, or specific libraries like OpenGL (sans experience in, say, Direct3D), you're mostly right. However, all other things being equal someone with experience in the specific technology will be better than the person without it simply because then there's less acclimation time. C# <-> Java is about as close as you can get, but there is perhaps a continuum here. A Python/Ruby/Javascript programmer is probably more capable of learning C than a non-programmer, but a Java or especially C++ programmer is probably going to learn quicker.
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Jan 30, 2015 21:19
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Doghouse posted:Why are so many job postings loaded with references to specific technologies? Gotta have keywords for the computers to screen people with. Also, on a less cynical note, if you have 100 applicants, how do you pare that down to something reasonable to deal with? At the very least, you sort the applicants into groups, and you put the ones who have experience in the majority of technologies your company uses in the highest priority group. You get enough applicants and odds are you're going to find someone you want to hire before you get to the rest.
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Jan 30, 2015 21:29
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A good developer can pick up the syntax of a new language in a weekend, but learning all of the pitfalls and idioms of that language is something that only experience can teach. Some places, especially smaller companies, are looking for someone that is already familiar with their technology stack so there's minimal ramp-up.
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Jan 30, 2015 22:44
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Doghouse posted:Why are so many job postings loaded with references to specific technologies? Longer answers are: 1. Not everyone is a "good developer", and in particular, there's a shortage of them. Mediocre developers are still employable for certain tasks but they don't move around as easily. 2. Some people prefer to work with specific technologies and don't want to take on a job using a technology they don't like, even if they could do it. 3. "Being able to switch" and actually having experience with a technology isn't the same thing, even for people who can do it. In an internship, you usually have a couple of weeks to ramp up, and the project scope is usually sufficiently small that the problems are tractable even with limited experience. However, sometimes a company needs to hire someone who is well versed in a technology and understands its pitfalls because they need an experienced person on the project now and can't afford the ramp up time needed to tackle more difficult problems. Edit: 4. There's some technologies you absolutely don't want someone inexperienced working with, particularly anything that's security sensitive (and hiring someone without a security background), and pretty much anything done in C.
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Jan 30, 2015 22:47
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Ithaqua posted:A good developer can pick up the syntax of a new language in a weekend, but learning all of the pitfalls and idioms of that language is something that only experience can teach. Some places, especially smaller companies, are looking for someone that is already familiar with their technology stack so there's minimal ramp-up. I wouldn't be so sure on the syntax part. I Know I consider myself a good developer but I know it would take me a lot more than a week to get comfortable with something like haskell or mumps.
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Jan 30, 2015 22:47
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KARMA! posted:mumps. Why would you ever do this to yourself?
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Jan 30, 2015 23:32
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The March Hare posted:The Times employ a pretty rad set of dudes. I think they have the guy who made d3js and the dude who maaade... sass? or less. They have the opposite of the one they use, can't remember which. NYT is definitely up there for places I'd love to work at. Really dig all the data journalism they do.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:37
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Ithaqua posted:A good developer can pick up the syntax of a new language in a weekend, but learning all of the pitfalls and idioms of that language is something that only experience can teach. Some places, especially smaller companies, are looking for someone that is already familiar with their technology stack so there's minimal ramp-up. This is pretty true, and kind of ties into the old "a Fortran programmer can write Fortran in any language" saying. Sending a C programmer off to write Java is probably going to result in a bunch of weird static functions and such all over the place. Still, this is a matter of paradigm more than language. A C++ programmer isn't necessarily a good fit for a C++ programming position depending on how much the subsets of the language that the company and the applicant use overlap.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:46
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