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shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Cicero posted:

Good news, everyone!

Take that, actuaries!

It's a matter of perspective I guess.

From the article

quote:

Mr. Severe says his salary is in line with what most software engineers at his level earn. Most earn a typical mid-level income of about $87,000 and top out at $132,000, according to the study, putting them in the top 25 of all professions by income.

Not to get all D&D but I see some of my smartest friends at college (was a CS major) working at Microsoft and Google and they can expect to top out at 150-200K at the end of their career; less for people at other companies. That's how much an associate (i.e. 3rd year out of college) trader/i-banker/lawyer makes.

If you're the top 10% at a CS program, I'd even argue that you should move out of the software development field and get a job in a better-paying field like finance.

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shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

necrobobsledder posted:

The enjoyability of the finance sector varies considerably though. Let's not forget that investment bankers, after all, continuously report among the lowest rate of job satisfaction. Most software engineers aren't as concerned about their salary as their general job satisfaction, which is mostly achieved by writing decent software that makes a meaningful impact to folks.

I don't do software engineering anymore exactly (I do a mix of writing software and IT admin and architecture), but given what I've heard from my peers I should be able to top out at $200k without having to be stuck at one company forever nor hopping jobs every other year like I have been forced to due to many large companies treating even top-performing employees like utter crap. I'm pretty happy with the flexibility I get with my job now and the opportunities it gives me both personally and professionally, so I'm fine with sticking this out for once.

Also, being in finance (especially on the trading side) almost guarantees you'll be in NYC (or another metropolitan area with :psyduck: costs of living like say London, Luxembourg, Tokyo), and $200k in NYC isn't quite the same as NYC in, say, Silicon Valley. On second thought, I'm here in the Valley and I think NYC is arguably cheaper to live in than here.

Fair point about the enjoyability. Although I'd argue that places like Apple or EA and another game dev companies are worse places to work at than many finance institutions. And the 200K number is start/early-career. It's not unusual to hit 7 figures by end career.

I feel somewhat embarrassed always bringing this up in every CS job related thread but I was a CS major and see a younger version of myself in Cicero and others. There's a tendency to live in a bubble as a CS major - prize smartness and aim for a job at MSFT, Google without considering other fields and the real-world. Another example would be the mild-disdain for the MIS major who many (including myself in the past) would consider the lesser sibling to the CS major when in reality, they get a higher salary out of college and have better long-term career prospects. Or to plan to stay a coder forever when that in effect limits your career growth.

It just depresses me to see literally the best and brightest in the CS field (the top 1%) happy with less than what they should rightfully get paid.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

2banks1swap.avi posted:

It's not deterministically set in stone, no.

My CHANCES are changed as far as what an actuary would have to say about me, though, and that's factual. While I can do this or that to sway it, I'm still going to have to face reality! An INDIVIDUAL can try to make it better for himself or herself, but the fact remains that among the entire group, they will average out making less money than a group which started out in better times!

Then again I'm just now finishing up my first sophomore semester, so with any luck I'll start in a better job market myself.

Dude, you've been posting across multiple forums and threads here obsessing about salaries and your earnings potential. Whatever tactical decisions you make about engineering vs. CS or when you leave school or taking the highest paying job are going to be outweighed by the fact that right now you are an older student with a mediocre GPA ~2.0 at a CC and as far as I can tell no relevant work experience.

Focus on getting your grades up, get some good internships and build a portfolio of projects (e.g. FOSS) on the side.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Jam2 posted:

Yeah, this sort of stuff is the reason I'm interested in the field. I want to be more than what people consider a "computer programmer" (someone who knows how to give instructions to a computer).

I'd like to be a problem solver/scientist/engineer in the realm of computing.

I suppose I can differentiate myself by really internalizing all of the aspects you mentioned (graphs, trees, queues, stacks, cliques, alphabets, and functions). I can see how lazy "programmers" would ignore many of these concepts and how my math background may help me (rigorous proofs, etc.).

This gives me some hope. I was concerned that I'd be severely disadvantaged, but it seems like I can chop up the task of developing competency into manageable portions. I can see myself being an authority on some of these topics within a subset of the tech community down the road. Thanks.

Alum of one of the schools you mentioned. Firstly, congrats - you're going to get a great education at any of the schools you listed!

Secondly, I wouldn't worry too much about competing with the students with prior programming knowledge. While you'll definitely meet a lot of people who have been writing compilers since they were 12, the courses that you'll take (especially in junior/senior year) aren't something that a hobby programmer typically picks up - computer vision, AI, combinatorics, graph theory etc. so you'll be on the same footing as them. Also, there aren't that many courses that focus just on programming.

About undergrad research, it's definitely possible since your schools are heavy on research. Personal anecdote, I took a class in junior year and ended up being approached by the professor teaching it to do research because I aced the class. So just build a good relationship with your professors and don't feel shy asking them if you could do research for them.

Lastly, jobs - LOL it's ridiculous how much of a employee's market it is. As long as you spend time preparing your interview skills, resume - you'll worry more about which offer to accept rather than finding one at all. I've heard from my juniors that mean/median offer salary this year was a bit over $80K.

Good luck!

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Adjusting comp has been a long time coming. I think tech companies are still grossly underpaying their employees - MSFT's net income per employee is about 210K, GOOG's 350K. Just for comparison, Goldman's NI per employee was 213K.

It's embarrassing to hear CS kids mouth off on economics/taxes (especially toeing their companies' party line on taxes being too high) when they're literally being paid peanuts.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Safe and Secure! posted:

What kind of background in finance and statistical analysis? By "rapid application development", do you mean something similar to what are usually called agile development practices?

RAD's basically rapid prototyping. A trader asks you to build a model to price something - you have a day to build it. Even for "longer term" projects, we're talking about delivering a usable product to business in months. Contrast this to a pure tech company like Microsoft where it takes several months for a code change to filter up all the way to the main code-base. It's not a good environment for writing code - no thought for architecture or long term use.

I think 2b1s should work on his interpersonal skills before worrying about his career. Just judging by his posts here, I'd guess he'd have a hard time making through a personality interview let alone a technical one.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

2banks1swap.avi posted:

Do you really think that how I talk to goons with a horrible case of "I AM INVINCIBLE" that I'll never meet is the same as how I act with interviewing managers? Arguing with people over if reality applies to them, on the internet, is not the same as picking my battles (by not having them in the first place) where I work or with friends.

Why would I even talk about unemployment or job security anyway? If everyone who is even remotely competent is so surely employed if not overpaid why would the topic arise? Just because I don't share your world view or belief in the locus of control being completely internal doesn't mean I'm a jackass who goes trying to prosthelytize the workplace.

You disagree with me. We get it. You think everyone who is unemployed is personally responsible and anyone competent has a job and everyone is personally responsible for their fortune. I don't. Why did you bring this back up again?

I couldn't give a poo poo about your babby's first socialist thought. Over the course of this year, I've seen you post about wanting to be a geologist, an enviro engineer, a civil engineer, and now something to do with CS or CE?

You could have spent that half year constructively on learning some skills rather than endlessly posting about your ever-changing goals not to mention that you've spent sometime in CC without trying to do anything harder than Calc 1. I cant wait for you to take some discrete math or a compiler class and have your dreams crushed.

I've had teenagers 6-7 years younger PM me with more concrete plans, skills, and most importantly the desire to learn on their own than you have.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Milotic posted:

On the other hand, it can be very enjoyable for certain personality types. You feel very close to the users, every day is a different challenge, it's great solving a problem within the timeframe, and chatting with the user what they want delivered first. You also see almost immediate impact on the business. On the other hand, it can be stressful as hell, and unpredictable long hours from time to time.

You also find yourself predisposed to using certain technology and certain design patterns. They might not be pretty, they might not be the most technically interesting, robust or cutting edge, but they get the job done. I'd also like to argue you spend a lot less time writing plumbing code, and more time on business logic and problem solving.

I did it for over 3 years, really enjoyed it, was then moved off to be a SharePoint developer, and found I just didn't give a gently caress anymore as I was three degrees of separation from the customers, and I had bullshit 24+ page specifications to plow through for the simplest things. I guess having to work with SharePoint didn't help.

It's definitely a career I'd recommend for the right personality types.

I work as a developer on a trading desk so RAD pros/cons are very close to my heart. I didn't mean to give anyone the impression that it's all bad but there're certainly issues with the development model.

It's funny how literally millions or billions of dollars are traded/invested on the basis of Excel spreadsheets and hacked up DLLs. I don't know if I'd want to be like some developers I've met who are career Excel monkeys or masters of hacking up something that works well enough but requires rearchitecting everytime you need to add a new feature.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Curious to hear about people's interview experiences. Best/worst/funniest interviews?

I'm only on my 2nd job outside of college so I've only been through 5-6 complete interview processes. All of mine have been prosaic - standard online resume drop-off, phone screen, multi-day onsite technical & personality interviews.

I think the vetting process at my current firm is very effective:
1) At the firm level, we start with an online IQ/EQ test before doing a phone interview. It immediately screens for a minimum level of effort on the part of candidates.

2) Then, there's a video conference interview. This is meant to grill the candidate based on what they put on their resume. It's odd how often people lie about their technical expertise on their CVs and expect not to be questioned about it.

3) Followed by a timed remote programming project. A toy self-contained dev project completed within a day.

4) Onsite interviews which are a batch of character/technical interviews with different people.

5) Another timed onsite programming project this time spanning multiple days.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Ithaqua posted:

Well, I wouldn't loop through the characters in a string and build a new string in production code, I'd use .Reverse(). If I had someone do it that way in an interview, it would lead to some chatting about LINQ, lambdas, etc. I'd follow up with "given a List<int>, get everything greater than 5" or something like that.

To be honest, that's a pretty odd answer to give during an interview.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Bag of Carpets posted:

I've heard many people talk about certain programming jobs as "soul-crushing" or that you need to "sell your soul" in order to do coding for some companies / organizations. Why do I hear this so frequently? Those who have experience, what would you say makes the difference between a job that you're passionate about versus one that you hate? "This is only OK but I'm making a 6-figure salary" is something that I've also heard - is anyone really enjoying what they're doing?

2 general things I've noticed since I've started working :-

1) Developers working in support of a business (e.g. developer at a bank/big business) tend to be less happy than developers writing code that is sold (e.g. developer at a software company). You can be a poo poo-hot coder writing great code but if it doesn't actually bring in money (as opposed to at best reducing costs), you're going to be treated as a cost-center.

2) Perks and a "fun" working environment might mean something when you're fresh out of college but not so much when you're later in your career. At the end of the day, money matters. I don't give a poo poo about catered lunches, in-hour masseuses if I don't get paid proportionally to the money I bring to the company. I've seen a lot of friends working at flagship tech companies such as Google leave to join start-ups for a chance at equity. People are generally happier when they are rewarded based on what they bring to the table.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Pram posted:

Yes I realize programming certs are useless but I was mostly curious if it has any value as resume fodder. Probably not though I'm guessing.

Tech companies are going to sneer at it. Most developers I know see certs as something a sysadmin or tech support would do.

I don't necessarily agree with it - if you actually learn something from it, why not. From a cost-benefit analysis however, you're probably better off writing FOSS code.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Someone got a hold of my group's email address and we're treated to email resumes on a daily basis.

Highlights:
* Candidates are all H1B holders based in the US looking for contract work (note: we're based in the Carribean and we're an investment fund).
* Resumes are 5+ pages with their summary bullets taking up half a page by itself
* Resumes list every single specialization under the sun with their skillset listing every single version/iteration of the language/speciality
* Bullet points include "Involved in requirement analysis" and "Involved in the bug fixing"
* To top it off, the email ends with a faux unsubscribe link stating, "if you do not wish to receive my resume in *sic* future, please hit the reply button, type "remove" in subject..."

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

A lot of this is dependent on your location - IIRC, you live in Cali? I think 150K is mean/median for general devs there with your level of experience. So considering there're absolute shite developers included in that stat, you could/should aim for more. My impression is that people in tech companies tend to top out at 200-250K by career end.

If you're in finance IT, the average person who's worked for 6 years would have hit VP and be making 150-180K min as base and X% as base. There's a lot more variation in the industry since there's a huge gulf in coding competency - if you're Google/Amazon material, I'd argue you could make double whatever the tech industry's offering since you'd be significantly above the average in capability.

CoL is another factor as well - if you're living in NY or CA, you might as well divide the numbers by 2 to give a better comparison with living in some place like PA.

All this being said, the question is what kind of lifestyle do you want? I've met a bunch of Google and Microsoft employees that could write their own tickets but chose to stay on with middling salaries because they're happy with their QoL.

The other point is what do you want to do long term? Code, transition to management, or become a software architect? That probably has a bigger impact on your long term salary trajectory than min maxing your next job.

shrike82 fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jul 30, 2011

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I took a half year off to travel between graduating college and starting my first job. Easily the best time of my life.

When I switched between my first and second job, I ended up only having 2 weeks of vacation which I regret. If/when I leave my second job, I'm tempted to take a year off. Has anyone done that?

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I've noticed that UK posters ITT seem to throw out 10-20K GBP as standard starting salaries across the pond. Is that for real? That seems ridiculously low to me.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

tef posted:

then again you have to compare cost of living too. I mean I pay so much for healthcare in the uk :3:

Except all the major tech companies in the US give workers essentially free gold-plated private healthcare. And the salary disparity... that's 400-500%. Crazy.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

MrMoo posted:

I knew Reuters significantly dropped their entry grade to $40k in Times Square, New York a while back. That was quite impressive. When I started in London a developer was at £21k.

LOL, and Bloomberg devs start at 105-110K these days.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

There's a lot of dross out there when it comes to developer-candidates.

I think the going rate at my firm is 400-500 flagged resumes to an offer.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

nachos posted:

For anyone here who's given job offers in the 90-100k salary range before, how often do you expect a counter to your initial offer from a candidate?

Why would the offered salary matter for counteroffers? If you have a reason to ask for more, go ahead.

I worked with a headhunter to look for my 2nd job out of college. One of the offers was for a bit more than your range which seemed reasonable to me. The headhunter told me to make a counteroffer that was >25% higher. HR grumbled but accepted in the end.

Didn't take the offer though.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

csammis posted:

The internship field is astonishingly full of seekers. I had no idea how crazy it is until I went to a career fair at my alma mater last month reppin' R&D at my company. We had first-year freshmen - people who had started college six weeks ago - handing us resumes. A few colleagues of mine have had similar experiences at other schools.

I really don't remember that kind of pressure when I was in school. Are academic advisors saying "get an internship or die trying" instead of "hello welcome to State Tech home of the Fighting Animals" these days?

I get the opposite impression.

The tech companies seem to be fighting to offer the best salaries/perks to the small pool of competent CS kids.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I've been helping my team with resume vetting.

Setting aside how 3/4 of applicants are mainland Chinese/Indians (tough for them to stand out), it amazes me how people with great looking resumes bomb our IQ test. This is pre-contact with anyone on our team; we have them take an online 3rd party IQ test.

An inexplicable number of people coming from top CS/engineering schools/with a good work pedigree getting sub-50 percentile for the test. W T F.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Doc Hawkins posted:

Have you taken it?

99 percentile, everyone in the team scored above a 90 and we're from the top-5 schools.

shrughes posted:

An IQ test? Why the gently caress wouldn't you give somebody a coding test? Millions of congenitally bad programmers can pass an IQ test.

Duh, we do coding tests post-contact. The IQ test is a good way to pre-filter before we have any contact with candidates. I was a bit surprised at first at the use of it as a resume filter; but we've tried lowering/ignoring the standard and seen low-score candidates consistently bombing f2f interviews and the coding tests.

shrike82 fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jan 20, 2012

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Are there any credible salary websites? I used to use Glassdoor but their salary ranges were substantially lower than actual offers made for literally every single company I interviewed with (not to mention they didn't have useful information on non-cash comp).

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I'm honestly amazed that CS graduates ITT have never heard of modular exponentiation (or modular arithmetic). It speaks to how lovely the curriculum is at a lot of programs.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

pigdog posted:

Put it this way. You're a manager with a vacancy for a developer in an average software company, say doing web apps or Android stuff. You create a phone interview script and include that multiplication question. There are two candidates for the job, one passing that particular test, one not. You already have plenty of smart people working for you.

How much more would you be willing to pay the "better" candidate compared to the other? What's the pricetag on whatever that question is supposed to prove?

It's not a matter of price tag - I'd reject the one who'd say "I'd ask a math expert".

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I think we're through the looking glass if you consider a guy who knows basic modular arithmetic as indicative of someone making 300K.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I disagree with calling someone a "fantastic coder" if they can't handle algorithms or data structures.

Seriously, I'm just having a hard time even imagining a coding job which doesn't require some level of knowledge of algorithms or data structures. What would software they write even look like?

shrike82 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Mar 19, 2012

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

There's a huge continuum between "excruciating, CS-graduate level detail" and " I remember next to nothing about trees". Absolutely no one in the thread has argued that the former is necessary.

Also, not knowing something as fundamental to CS data structures as trees is a big ding in my view.

I'm really curious about the nature of the development work you do, Ithaqua.

shrike82 fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Mar 19, 2012

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Heh, whether algorithms and data structures are intrinsic to good software development = unimportant.

It never ceases to amaze me how many lovely developers are out there in the wild.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

So speaks the guy looking for a job. I guess when your interview comes up and you can't answer a modular arithmetic question, you can tell the interviewer you're not a goon.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

necrobobsledder posted:

ETL stuff

Eh, ETL "stuff" relies heavily on algorithms. Just off the top of my head, when matching for duplicate data during the transform phase, you use stuff like Hamming distance, bigram frequency etc.

Even if you're not writing custom implementations of them, commercial ETL products like Informatica offer them. How would you be able to make a judgment about when/how to use them if you weren't familiar to some level with the underlying algorithms.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Otto Skorzeny posted:

How should I account for cost of living vs. salary? I don't think a straight division of salary by cost of living index is accurate...

What's the offer and where would you be based?

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Otto Skorzeny posted:

How is $68k for about an hour east of NYC? Just got an offer.

I recall you mentioning it being embedded work? Seems on the low end for a fresh grad these days but if you like the firm and the nature of the work, I wouldn't worry too much about comp.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

kitten smoothie posted:

I work on a team of 20 people. So a one hour team meeting means you've soaked 40 hours of productivity. If everyone in the room is a software developer making $75K then that means that one hour meeting cost you almost $1500. I bet it wasn't worth it.

I really think this metric of counting the cost of time by salary is stupid and leads to dumb behavior. I don't think you should judge meetings (or any use of time for that matter) by this.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Maluco Marinero posted:

There's nothing that inherently different between an established company and a startup's management, but the length of iterations is what changes, because a startup doesn't know what it's return on investment with any accuracy yet so it makes sense to limit the size of that investment.

There're a lot of differences between managing ongoing operations of an established company and building out a start-up so I'm curious about your statement.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Safe and Secure! posted:

Are there (m)any development jobs/areas where a master's degree would greatly benefit my employment prospects? I want to get an MS at some point, and whether I should be looking into a CS or statistics or maybe even math MS. I am interested in all these fields, so I figure that the one most likely to help me in the most in the long run would be the best choice.

Some companies pay MS degree holders a higher starting salary (or bump them up 1 "rank" to start with) over BS degree holders. I started with a salary 15K higher than my BS counterparts.

I'm not sure if you'd have a "better" chance of getting a job though.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Cicero posted:

I've been working at Amazon since graduation and most of the time I just kind of feel like a dunce who's gonna be fired any minute now

To be fair, Amazon is terrible with employee turnover - both push and pull.

shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

I'm involved in recruiting and we ask for transcripts to provide another data point on candidates.
I'd ignore shrughes when it comes to anything related to hiring.

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shrike82
Jun 11, 2005

Gazpacho posted:

With regard to the bay area job market, being local is also important. Very, very, very important. Employers have an unbelievable pool of local talent before they have to think about relocating someone.

Not really. I don't even live in the States and I've been contacted through my alumni network or recruiters for positions in the area.
Demand is so great that they're desperate for half-decent candidates from anywhere in the world.

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