Ask HN: How much do you make at Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Netflix/Google/Microsoft?

The algorithms stuff is useful. More useful than it seems. It comes up often in many engineering jobs. Perhaps more importantly at your stage in life, it will get you an internship.

Do internships. If you miss the one you really want, think hard about why, then try again. Internships are the best place to start into my next piece of advice.

Specialize in something valuable while you're in school or once you start into your career. Jobs I might look for if I were entering the work force today:

- Image processing or other noisy data handling.

- Robotics, especially something requiring interdisciplinary skills like control theory.

- Deep learning techniques are all the rage; you'll be much more useful if you understand how they work and can build novel topologies. Being taken seriously here will likely require a portfolio (maybe graduate work).

- Systems programming is an unending hellscape of horrible problems. Some people seem to enjoy it.

- If you have a knack for it, security. It takes a certain deviousness to think of new ways to misuse things. It takes a wizard to do something like Meltdown and Spectre.

It doesn't really matter what you become a domain expert in as long as it's valuable. It does matter that you don't treat "domain expert" as a fixed target.

In terms of extracurricular work, find an open source project that's got engagement from companies with lots of senior people (Kubernetes would be a good example, it has many very talented people working on it). Fix open bugs. Fix the onboarding experience. Start with trivial things and go from there. Don't get dismayed when you end up with hundreds of review comments, that's how you learn.

Regarding compensation, the split is approximate. The cash is both salary and an annual bonus paid out in January. The stock is actual stock, not options, so every month some number of Google shares show up in my brokerage.

Senior (one level below Staff) is deemed "career level," and if you just want to build stuff it's a good place to stop. Staff involves a much more substantial leadership and coordination component, and that requires both the skill and desire to take on that sort of work.

Grew up interested in computers, learned a little BASIC.

Took two intro CS courses during undergrad at an Ivy League school, but majored in the humanities.

Years later, attended a bootcamp.

None of this took place in MA.

Apple, probably

Sounds like that was a positive step, wasn't it? Getting rid of the system that allowed the company to comment on your review?

Here's what (I think) is important to know to help you -

Role

Your years of experience

Size/function of org, assuming you don't want to name the companies

Public, or Private (and what stage)

Base

RSU or Options w/ offer

Annual Bonus potential

I'm sure you don't want to entirely out yourself, but some of that info will help you get better answers.

A Developer will make anywhere between £35k and £50k depending on experience (this matches with what I saw when I was looking for a job a year ago)

Is this you personal experience?

I know for a fact that almost no one I interviewed with bothered to look at github. Some even admitted that asking for github is just a formality and that they don't have time or resources to evaluate it objectively.

I also concur that getting a referral from an any employee that you might meet is the better than just blindly sending in your resume, though not as good as a strong referral (i.e. someone you've had direct experience working with before). You will get more attention from the HR side and the employee referring you will have a better idea of what teams will be relevant than the HR people will.

Considering how many times we've warned you before about posting comments that break the HN guidelines, I should probably ban your account for this. But we'll give you another chance. Please don't break the guidelines again, if you want to keep commenting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why European developers earn significantly less than virtually all their American counterparts, even in high cost of living areas (like Scandinavia)

I do understand you specified you work for a startup, but even at one of the many established regional consultancies dev salaries tend to cap out at around $90K IME.

Is it the lack of lucrative VC funding, the prevailing sense of egalitarianism at all costs, the abundance of (comparatively) well paid middle managers, all of the above or something else entirely?

edit : changed wording

As an example: would you tell a colleague "on the same level" as you that you're making $300k, when he is making $50 or $100k? That's either 1) an excellent way to get fired, because now everyone wants $300k, or 2) an excellent way to piss off your colleagues. They will start looking for a new gig immediately.

I agree though that we would, on average, be better off if all of us agreed to share salaries publicly.

First: because it is socially unacceptable.

In the US culture, talking about one's salary is taboo. It is rather as if someone were to post naked pictures. Sure, you are an enlightened person and you probably wouldn't hold it against them. Much. But you'd find it a bit weird. Americans try hard to hold to the illusion of a classless society and treating everyone equally, and hiding salary is an important way to do this. It also allows people to not feel cheated, if they don't realize that others are making more than they are.

Secondly: because my company might not like it.

US labor law actually REQUIRES that employees be permitted to discuss their salary with each other, which is why companies do not forbid discussing it, and to be clear: my company does NOT have any policy against discussing salary. But it is to the company's advantage to be a bit vague about salaries. Cynically one could say that this permits them to pay each individual the minimum they can get away with without having to deal with a sense that this is unfair. As a representative of my company, they would probably prefer that I talk about work conditions and company culture rather than specific numbers about the salary we pay.

If I were a more suspicious person I’d chalk it up to a cabal of employers trying to suppress wages...

* Avoiding jealousy from people that might know the poster * Avoiding becoming a target for scammers or kidnappers

Also why does HN not support basic formatting?