An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.
It doesn't. That said, in companies like Google, an eng has a lot of flexibility to choose the team they want to work on - so eventually many people find the thing which they really like. And good money on top of it is the icing on the cake.
Also, I linked money since the parent comment talked about finding interesting ans similar paying role as Google's.
Correct, but you can accept/decline the offer based on team placement. You don't have to accept and then see what your options are.
(For complicated reasons I actually spent about May through July of last summer with an offer open, and talked to 5 or 6 different teams through that process... and at the end of the process when I called to decline, I was told that headcount had shifted for Q3, the team I'd most recently spoken to had lost their open headcount, but there were other teams that had now had open headcount and might be interested in talking.)
Many of which have the same type of interview processes?
Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code.
If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Russian nesting doll problem in ~15 minutes, you're going to have a hard time getting into many of the big tech companies unless you went to a university that teaches using this style.
I've seen the sort of problem that required dynamic programing combined with a binary search for the algorithmically optimal solution in a phone screen!
I lucked into an easier interview loop, crushed it, and got hired and performed well at one of these types of big companies.
But I dread jumping ships because of this daunting interview hoop we jump through.
I've already tried to leave and got smacked around in the two interviews I went through because of nerves. I knew the problems, I knew how to solve them, but for some reason I just didn't perform well and couldn't really cross the finish line.
I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file.
These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't.
I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].
Being able to ace a top-k company interview is an ego boost that reduces stress levels day to day.
> I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].
Leetcode, SPOJ, and others are how I landed my current job. What was most helpful for me was actually going back and reimplementing all of the fundamental datastructures and algorithms. E.g. binary search tree, skip lists, BFS, DFS, different sorting algorithms, etc. From then, it was also helpful to remember where these were being used in the real systems I interact with.
Solving the interview problems is typically not my problem. In every round of my Google and Facebook interviews, I knew the optimal solution--confirmed by looking up the solutions after the interview. However, I happened to choke under the interview pressure and turned into a fool. Test anxiety--interview anxiety in this case--is a real thing.
What I am going to do in the next round of interviews is apply for dozens of companies I just don't care about, fail a bunch of interviews to get used to the pressure again, and then re-apply to the companies I actually care about.
