Anyone else get discouraged seeing others total comp being way higher than yours with fewer YoE in the same industry?
3 YoE SWE/Data Science 63k TC. Get rejected at every company even with referrals. When discussing comp HR falls around 110k range in NYC. Graduating with a Master's degree from a Top 10 school in Computer Science next year.
No there will always be somebody better than you and now you have a new datapoint when you negotiate your salary or raise
Your salary seems in line with BS + YoE for a DS. The crazy ass DS salaries are for PhDs + experience, in FAANG and top tier unicorns. Adjusted for age, DS make way less than SWE.
63k is in line with 3 YoE as a DS?
3 YOE before or after masters?
Before working at Google, I viewed higher TC as aspirational rather than discouraging. When you're at the bottom of the bell curve, you can only move up. Don't get too discouraged! It took me 6 months to find a job after graduating. I was rejected from a ton of interviews. Then I finally got a SWE offer, for only $50k. I felt super low about myself. But then I ended up kicking ass at that job, realized that I didn't suck, and that literally any other SWE job would pay me more. I studied for interviews, and got a job at Google next.
How did you get an interview at google?
I think it's because I had a top 10% score in an international programming competition on my resume
YoE doesn't account for how hard they work. When I was at 3 YoE I was making 100k, mainly because the "3 YoE" is professional years and not counting the fact that I started learning on my own when I was 13. It also wasn't counting the fact that I had no life outside of work and put basically all my free time into learning new things for work. It's rarely a good idea to compare yourself to others, especially when you're comparing something as arbitrary as "YoE"
And how do you represent on your resume that you work 80 hours a week at your job? When HR sees your resume all they see is "started 3 years ago"
I wouldn't explicitly put that on my resume, but working 80 hours a week allowed me to have very large impact on the company I worked for at the time, and framing your resume as a list of impacts you had on a company is a lot better than just listing the tasks you did
Offer three sticks of burning incense to THE TECHLEAD. Then you will find your way
Hard to gauge things just off of yoe and or tc. Some people with lots of yoe are shit or vice versa. Also hard to say how your job, workload or deliverables compare to some that just quote tc numbers...you might not even want that stress lol. DS is a little different from SWE as far career leveling from the little I know. I think they want all that masters phd stuff for high tc. I could be wrong though.
I started with a consulting company who pay minimal (60k), but it gave me the chance cuz I didn't study CS. Put a bunch of effort to learn regardless the fact that no companies wanted to interview me lol. After that, I bombed many interviews before I get my next job. My point is, you can do it. Just keep trying.
Who u refer to as others? A lot of people are bluffing at Blind abt their TC
Everyone is on a different path in life. Even if you are the same age, even if you went to the same school, for same degree. All you see on this app is people who only focus on work and a paycheck. All you focus on at work is the skills of people doing the immediate thing your team needs. I have skills at work my co-workers don't and vice versa, and sometimes it's just a matter of different interests. Just do better than yesterday, and especially if you are early career, focus on the immediate next step to get that cheddar. Use the app as leverage, now you know what's possible, but don't dwell on what others have, just use the information to your advantage. At 3yoe you don't know shit, and neither do the people posting with entry level TC, they just know data structures/algos/systems design interview questions, but there's so much more to being successful in this industry.
You should also emphasize that successful leetcode completion doesn't mean you can actually solve real world business problems.
I tried to get that point across with "don't know shit"