These are all great tips. It is a really well-written article with great advice. I just come away from this with a crushing sense of depression driven by the following thoughts:
I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. 60 days or get out.
This absolutely effects every engineer. Even the most racist ones: that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation.
My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this.
I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose.
> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose.
This is a little myopic.
Those other fields you don't mention? They use things like education (did you graduate from an Ivy?), connections (do you know these people in your niche field?), certification (do you have the blessing of a known body / board?) or even insurance (you're covered for malpractice if anything goes wrong) as alternatives.
I value software development not requiring those things, and I understand the trade-offs. Yes, I'll have to do a 5-8 hour single day interview that I may need to prep for once every 3-5 years. For 300k+ a year? I'll find a way to deal with it.
>For 300k+ a year? I'll find a way to deal with it.
I would too even for half that but unfortunately, in Europe, lots of the fancy tech corps. are adopting the SV style mult-day take home project/on-site interview grind but only paying $65-85k/year.
I'm still thinking whether I can make it in this field till retirement(FIRE is out of the question at this pay) or if I should just change to something else while I still can.
Multi-day take home projects? Seriously? Just say no that unless they are going to compensate you at contractor rate of at least $120/hour. That is a ridiculous ask, and if all engineers just said no and walked away, they would get what they deserved, only the grovelers willing to say yes.
The all day interview thing is not new. When I finally landed an onsite interview with Bell Labs in 1984, it ran from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM with a break for lunch (that they provided). Every position I have interviewed with since then has been an all day affair.
Remember, interviewing is partly for skills, but mostly for attitude and personality. Are you going to fit with the team?
I pulled in a candidate back in 2000 that was clearly qualified for the job as far as skills, but in the interview, his demeanor was abrasive. He was so clearly superior to anyone else on the team, how could we have the temerity to question his abilities? It spiraled out of control and I had to escort him out of the interview after only two hours. It was awful.
I agree. Watching a friend struggle to land a corporate law job has been eye-opening. Maybe some consider it disrespectful of Google to ask computer science questions to an experienced engineer, but at least Google will interview you whether or not you have an ivy-league degree. Law firms are incredibly elitist and not the least bit meritocratic.
That's for a 10 year veteran in the UK. Programmers are treated like commodity. So much so that I left the UK 20 years ago and haven't managed to find anything comparable to contract rates in North America - certainly nothing comparable to SV or Toronto.
I gave the total compensation ~average for FANGs / large US tech companies as a mid-senior role, which I assumed is what the OP was going for from the tone of their comment.
If you're in a position in life where you need a stable salary (family, children, etc.), you'll do the same amount of prep for a FANG as for a start-up emulating a FANG. Why in the world would I put in effort prepping and take 1/3rd the total compensation is my perspective (yes, I understand the start-up lottery, and disregard it here).
$300K would be a contract rate for someone with 10 years of experience, with your own LLC and insurance.
It is pretty easy to find contract positions for $120 per hour, and higher responsibility/skill positions for $150 per hour. And the LLC and related insurance costs per year are trivial.
On the east coast, skilled software engineers (not programmers, necessarily) with 10+ years can expect at least $140K plus benefits as a full time employee, and it is pretty typical to see $160K.
In SV, SF, NYC, or Seattle, at a top-tier company, after 5 years or so of experience: $300k including equity and bonus is pretty normal. In the rest of the world, not so much.
> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this.
Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were not fighting to make our lives easier (by making H1B less draconion), only theirs, by reducing the supply of workers.
And while some of them will sugar coat this by pretending to care about H1B worker's conditions and all that, the truth is that as long as the US continues to be a more desirable place to live compared to many other countries, and as long as you need a job to live here, foreign workers will always tilt the equilibrium a bit towards lower wages compared to a domestic worker supply. The true solution would be if you made the path to permanent residence easy for skilled individuals so that they don't need to take these employment decision under duress.
The “US Tech Workers Union” doesn’t appear to be a union at all. It appears to be a subsidiary of the “Progressives For Immigration Reform” non-profit aimed fairly exclusively at the H-1b issue, and the only spokesperson I can see for it is the executive director of PFIR.
So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.
Funny to see this pop up because I happen to know who is behind this cluster of sites (i.e. https://ustechworkers.com/https://www.cfpup.org/) and it's basically one super right-wing guy and some wealthy donors. None of these is a real union or even a real community group. It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration. I always thought it was really shady.
> It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration
That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool.
Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?
To be clear the person I'm thinking of is not a professional lobbyist, he's a PE investor. I don't know/understand his motivation and have never met him personally, this is a "friend of a friend" scenario.
Follow the money, as always. It's a bit hard to find any solid policy suggestions in the links above amongst all the fearmongering, but I'd wager that whatever their stated aims, they're not really pushing for reduced immigration, but rather for reduced protections for skilled migrants.
The more power employers hold over their skilled migrant workers, the more money they can make (from not only their skilled migrant workers but also from the rest of their workforce, who are now competing with the latter.)
It isn't about worker supply or wages. It's about workers' relative abilities to stand up for something (anything) versus having to keep one's head down and build whatever evil thing management wants built.
As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.
It's no single thing because people's decisions are affected by the sum total of their life's balance sheet.
The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'.
As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for.
But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for.
This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.
Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? For the most part you can't change your cost of living. (Yes, you can move else where but the delta between how you you keep/earn is pretty much relative around the country)
Single people tend to be younger and less experienced. They tend to be represented in entry level positions, and get paid as such.
>Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living?
That appears to be the reality we've been living in for a couple/few decades. Airplanes, container ships, and the internet have made the world a much smaller place.
> As long as the "risk of having to leave the country"
So, immigration is generally speaking something that corporations are incentivized to want because they get more manipulatible and desperate employees?
Can we just demand that companies that hire immigrants cannot fire or lay off those immigrant employees for some minimum number of years unless they declare bankruptcy? It might decrease the number of immigrant employees corporations would hire but it would simultaneoulsy ensure a huge amount of safety for the immigrants that do get hired (and for their families).
Politically, it seems to be a big crappy case of playing the ends against the middle... The ends being:
1. All the shitty racists lobbying _against H1bs_ because "took er jerbs" on one side.
2. All the shitty FAANG capitalists lobbying _for_ it on the other because they want to keep engineering salaries controlled.
My quick bandaid bill would:
1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase.
2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first.
3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.
> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field.
These pressures are why I can barely bother landing a software role anymore.
I'm competing with people that have real pressure to study these algorithm brainteasers, switch into system architecture mode, and then switch into behavioral mode.
"Oh thats cute you spent 45 minutes a few times a week doing a brainteaser? I just did 600 of those in a month, and rehearsed what my quirky but culturally similar hobby is."
the what now?
This is out of control. Yes, I am competing with H1B's that have 60 days to figure it out, no, that doesn't make "immigrants" the problem, this is a symptom of a system broken in several ways, from public policy to tech private sector norms.
And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact.
What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar?
Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job.
You know what I'm good at?
- Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work...
- Parsing client requirements and finding what matters
- Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit...
- Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have...
Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...
> And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact.
Yes, that is what's so wrong about it. If the whiteboard leetcode monkeydance was somehow relevant to job performance, it'd be annoying but ok. Given the complete irrelevance, it is just a sign of a profoundly broken industry that doesn't understand what job performance is about.
It bugs me when people say "the bar is high". No, the bar isn't high, the bar is sideways and outside in the parking lot of the stadium.
Personally I have never and will never give a whiteboard algorithm trivial pursuit interview. Doing my small part to bring some sanity here (Silicon Valley). I read the resume and talk about the actual past job experience with the candidate. It works wonderfully well. Never made a bad hire.
I'm good at that too, have none of the obligations you do and am just as put off by it.
The market values my skills, but I have to do this stuff on my own now. You can make more than big tech will pay you by building in the crypto assets sector by yourself. In the recent past it was just side-gig consulting at an hourly rate or trying to do bug bounties.
Now you can just hang out on Telegram or Wechat and learn what people need, get paid completely in Tether from people all around the world. Invest in that ecosystem, or get dollars, whatever you want. No, wait times for anything.
Developing crypto assets is ONE thing and not necessarily the most lucrative - this part is actually very crowded because it is too easy
EVM is good to know for an ongoing career, but more practically building wallets, exchanges, algorithms, trade routing systems, data visualizations, ad space on a website that provides utility, ad space on a bot that shows pricing data to a chat room, a better gui that happens to take a cut of transactions when people use it —- these are all options
It wouldn't be so bad if Indians and Chinese could actually immigrate. They have to stay in this precarious H1B state indefinitely, since getting a green card is effectively impossible for people from those countries.
Hell, I'm Canadian and I also bucket into the India group since I was born there. Doesn't seem to matter that I was less than a year old when my parents immigrated to Canada either.
yea, its more of a quirk of where you were born rather than nationality though both are almost often the same. I have an Indian friend who was born in Iran because his dad was working there when he was born. He lived in Iran less than a year but got his green card in less than 3 months.
> I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here.
Well, I highly doubt American companies are pushing for this treatment. They benefit the most from getting whoever they want to hire however they want to hire them.
So, you must be implying that this "treatment" is coming from a non-corporate entity?
> that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation.
This argument is strange, because you are implying that it is the corporations that are kicking people out. But, I am not sure that aligns with their incentives.
So, if the corporations are not the ones kicking the desirable people out then why would losing that person force them to put a hard ceiling on others potential compensation?
I am not sure I follow the logic.
> I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field.
I 100% agre. It is broken. But, I also think we are not being honest as to why. If we think logically (and game-theoretically) then it is easy to assume that these corporations have a huge incentive to engage in this behavior. Could it be that they have a sea of choice beyond anything the tech industry has ever had before?
The H1B makes it more difficult to change jobs or negotiate salary. Any interruption to employment is a huge risk to staying in the country. Thus those employees are more likely to accept lower offers and stay in those jobs longer.
E.g. a citizen can decline an offer in order to negotiate it up, but if the clock is ticking on your h1b, then you wouldn't want to get called on that bluff.
The limitations don't seem to dissuade H1b applicants, so companies like that they have more control over those employees without decreasing total supply.
On that last part a Jr. CS question that you maybe not even use in real life for some CS jobs. People forget that not everyone is writing awesome ML things or other awesome things you read about in newspapers. Most of the people are writing CRUD code, do some data transformation , automate so simple office process, etc. Never had much use there of Big-O knowledge....
Does not mean I never used much of this knowledge I have needed at some points. But by that tine I had to refresh the knowledge again...
I can't believe this is how the country I live in treats people who bring their high-demand skills here. 60 days or get out.
This absolutely effects every engineer. Even the most racist ones: that there is a bedrock of people they are allowed to treat this way puts a hard ceiling on your own compensation.
My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this.
I can't believe this is how interviewing works in this field. Everyone in every other respectable field (and ones that pay as well or better, and have worse consequences for hiring a "bad fit") seems entitled to some baseline level of respect and recognition for their experience and work. Having some smarmy piece of shit ask questions from Jr.-year computer science should be justifiable grounds for a broken nose.