Well this was an entertaining take on the job market.
tl;dr he's salty other people ended up better off doing the same work for other companies, based on views of tech compensation that are very divorced from reality:
> I look at my own place in the world compared to people who just started at Apple or Microsoft 20 years ago then never left, and now they have made eight figures just over the past 4 years while my life path has lead me to… practically nothing. Then the tech inequality continues to compound. Imagine joining a company where the teenage interns have already made a couple million off their passive stock grants and other employees have been making $2MM to $6MM per year over the past 5 years there, while you’re starting over with nothing again for the 5th company in a row so what’s the point in even trying
Nevermind that there aren't really any interns making a couple million off stock grants, and this part:
> Do we just sit here and die in our overpriced studio apartments where rent increases 7% every year while other ICs doing the same work at better companies are buying 5 vacation houses from doing the same work?
Also love the part where he implies he's too smart to pass coding interviews:
> According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.
This guy is definitely giving delulu vibes but I think there's some truth to the idea that there are inequities in the market. People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. It's worth talking about because I honestly don't understand why bay area engineers are paid 3 times as much as their European counterparts or 6 times as much as their co-workers in India. Offshoring should work but it often doesn't.
I always wonder what happened to all those companies that went all in on Ukraine. I never worked for one but I heard many stories of US devs being replaced in droves by Ukraine devs.
> People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work.
Not sure what this means. Obviously we're comparing apples and oranges between different projects, but it's weird to suggest that foreign contractors aren't doing the same work as domestic employees. I'm pretty sure FAANG does use foreign contractors too, so they are often doing literally the same work.
These are product-oriented tech companies, while the contracting pertains to e.g. custom software development.
What follows is that these companies have enough revenue to afford FAANG salaries. And FAANG employees in foreign countries have their salaries computed by HR spreadsheets, with the goal of making a family-oriented employee quality of life on par in every country. According to levels.fyi, in Poland Google pays $96.7k to SWE L4. Sure, those salaries were often set when the particular office location was created, and inflation happened since, unevenly. So you might find even higher reported salary from tech companies that opened their Warsaw office somewhat recent.
So, even the entry level SWE earn more than custom software contractors. Beyond that, there's more. With their skillset, 10x employees could leave and form start-ups. To prevent that, the FAANG have a career ladder that make 10x employees earn 10x more every 10 years. Provided they jump the promo hoops.
Again, the tech companies afford that, because their revenue comes from tech products
That isn't to say that as an SWE in these companies you couldn't work on a CRUD database project for some internal website. Perhaps you can get promoted doing that, even though it has more in common with custom software development.
tl;dr he's salty other people ended up better off doing the same work for other companies, based on views of tech compensation that are very divorced from reality:
> I look at my own place in the world compared to people who just started at Apple or Microsoft 20 years ago then never left, and now they have made eight figures just over the past 4 years while my life path has lead me to… practically nothing. Then the tech inequality continues to compound. Imagine joining a company where the teenage interns have already made a couple million off their passive stock grants and other employees have been making $2MM to $6MM per year over the past 5 years there, while you’re starting over with nothing again for the 5th company in a row so what’s the point in even trying
Nevermind that there aren't really any interns making a couple million off stock grants, and this part:
> Do we just sit here and die in our overpriced studio apartments where rent increases 7% every year while other ICs doing the same work at better companies are buying 5 vacation houses from doing the same work?
Also love the part where he implies he's too smart to pass coding interviews:
> According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.