I'm an immigrant from Eastern Europe living in NY. Primarily a backend engineer with 13 YoE and $185K TC, which is basically my base. One thing about YoE is that it's wildly different for everyone. An engineer working with PHP for 5 years is day/night different from engineer doing C for the same period of time. My goal is to understand what I really worth, because I know there are many folks making $400k+ with my YoE. Can someone with ~400k TC test my technical skills? Not leetcode type of questions (which is something I work on), but just general stuff that you actually work with on a daily basis. We could do an audio-only call or just chat. Whatever works best. My goal is to double my TC by joining a FANG company and I want to have a deep understanding of my existing skillset, as well as how it compares to existing FANG engineers.
I make close to that. Leetcode is really what matters. Your experience matters to an extent but honestly it barely matters. We've hired so many firmware guys who now work on backend with zero backend experience. They just nailed their leetcode and system design questions in interview. Detach yourself from your experience and skillset. Focus on leetcode. In general improve your soft skills.
Do you think leetcode is better than hackerrank? I happened to start on the former but like the puzzles there and I'm prepping for an interview
Its probably fine. I haven't used it but as long as you are learning algorithms and data structures and new techniques to solving problems. Leetcode is good because most questions come from FAANG interviews.
Please post an article as an outcome of this deep dive. Good luck!
Not trying to be a dick here, but 400k TC for 13 yoe seems on the low end here
Hey man, totally get it. That’s why I’m trying to understand what I’m doing wrong. Like, is it really just leetcode or folks there way smarter than me? Is it luck or they were smarter about career trajectory? Thanks for your comment, btw.
Bullshit. Google hires 13 yoe as L5s. TC of L5s nowadays is around 300k -350k unless you have crazy counter offers. And almost nobody gets L6 interviews. In amazon 400k is principal. Makes up less than 1% of devs. Snapchat may offer 400k, but the rsus risk is too high to take it at face value.
Your PHP vs C theory is flawed. Algos, distributed systems and story telling are all that matter for determining your present value. Design in detail a system that does top search suggestions/autocomplete that works on google/amazon scale. That’s worth about 🌳 fiddy if you can LeetCode. If you can’t do that, but can find the longest palindrome subsequence and the longest palindrome substring in under 30 minutes each, then you’re worth about 250.
First I admire anybody who is trying to aim higher. I understand that with 13 YoE your feel you should be making more than what you’re right now. However, the high comp has little to do with your actual YoE than what you’re worth in the market. Your 13 YoE may not be worth $400K in the market. They might be worth less than someone’s 5 YoE because they built something amazing and patented/Open sourced it. So please don’t focus on the length of your experience alone. Another important aspect is that there are two types of roles you might take on after 10+ YoE. In one role you’re a super specialized developer with exemplary skills in writing code or you’re an architect who has experience building highly complex large scale systems. You have to be either one of these to be super valuable in the industry to be paid exceptionally well. Sure a lot of people in here brag about high TC but if you dig a bit deep in to what they’ve done through their careers you’ll note that they are not ordinary run off the mill engineers.
Wtf you talking, of course most are very ordinary LC monkeys.
After 10 yoe, why not go into management? There are more than 2 options.
Uhh...dude. That’s what LC and company is for. Nobody will waste their time quizzing you. Especially when we’re pretty busy earning our 400+ TC.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
3607
ByteDance is officially fucked
AMA
Yesterday
2341
I’m a professional coaster AMA
Tech Industry
4h
696
I wish I were East Asian instead of Vietnamese (Southeast Asian)
Tech Industry
5h
1820
Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
Tech Industry
6h
522
Biden Signs ‘TikTok Ban’ Into Law
You better provide some incentive to the person trying to help you double your TC!