I joined Blind while doing a summer data engineering internship, and was introduced to a world of talking about/comparing total compensation (TC), how much working software sucks, and so on. I'm finishing up my last class for my degree in computer science. As someone who lives in a lower cost of living area, hearing about 500k TC blows my mind. As a new graduate with at least 2 years of software industry work experience, I would be happy to have anything around 70-80k base salary. While I am looking for my first job out of college, I'm not sure whether being on Blind is actually helpful for me - from what I've seen, most of the posts are about comparing TCs and being as rude as possible to one another. To be fair, I've only been on Blind for one month, but this is my honest opinion of it so far: it seems a lot like Reddit, but with more bragging and complaining. For my fellow women in Tech - is the talk about TC important at all? Furthermore, do you think that Blind actually helps/furthers you in your career?
Hi there! I’m also a woman in tech and live in a LCOL. I’ve found it helpful to see how many companies are out there and honestly has helped me find opportunities that I didn’t know existed. Take all the TC talk with a grain of salt, but also understand that you work for money and it’s good to know your worth and maximize the value of your time. You can always mute it when your happy with your job, then look at the posts more when your searching for a new opportunity. Good luck and congrats on graduating!
Thank you so much for this response! And thank you for the advice. :)
Blind is good for learning some of the inner workings of your company that you wouldn’t otherwise know about. Blind is also good for entertainment. Blind is also NOT good for many things. Constant TC complaints/bragging and rude trolls are among them. Take Blind with a grain of salt. There is some useful information and there is some toxic spew.
It’s helpful. Being unaware of what’s possible is not helping your progress and let me tell you, as soon as you start making that base and life hits you, you’re going to realize that you underestimated life and you’re going have a hard time making things work, saving for retirement, etc.
I appreciate the insight! From what I understand, the median salary in my area is around 85k. I don't intend to stay at that base, but I've also been informed that asking for 100k would just get employers to laugh at me. What is your suggestion to appropriately estimate life costs in this way?
So what if they laugh at you? That only tells you they are cheap bastards. The difference between 85k and 100k base is peanut money for pretty much every company.
I don’t recommend reading Blind when you are happy. It is only useful when you are considering changing teams, companies.
What's this about being a woman? Blind doesn't care about your gender, just your TC. If you want comparison points between companies, use it. If you want to know actual reasonable pay, throw it out the window since no one posts their resume + location + YoE + LC count alongside TC, which all have a huge impact, much more that any controversial factors. First piece of Blind wisdom though: as a data engineer, you will be making much less than your SWE counterparts.
The data engineering part is good to know - in actuality, the internship was actually a machine learning internship where the majority of what I was doing was creating our data pipeline so we could run models on it. That led me to realize that I liked data engineering, and making machine learning actually possible. It's funny because I've worked two SWE internships as well, and the insight I got from meetups and such was that data engineering was higher paid. It does also seem that this area tends to have much less defined roles, and most data engineering jobs here are as software engineers that also know data engineering, not the other way around.
Why being a woman makes TC discussion unimportant? You don’t want to be part of the statistic that makes women look underpaid. Of course, there are other (more) important things in life, but there are different forums for that. Being rude to each other and complaining- yes, a lot of this going on here...
Nobody cares about the guys getting shafted at there company
Not a woman but honestly I’d get off of here until you’re looking for specific info on the interview process or expected comp at one or more companies (and there are better resources for both). Keep in mind there is also a lot of wrong or skewed data and info here due to trolling, selection basis, and various other factors. It’s a corrosive and often flat out stupid environment and often full of antipathy towards women. Some of us try to contribute useful info where we can but I often question why I spend time on here myself. It is useful to what the upper bounds of what is possible so you can strive for that. But also realize it can be debilitating and depressing for some. YMMV.
Completely agree with this, it's not representative of tech workers in general as most are good people who would rather spend time with family and friends than on blind blaming their inadequacies on women and foreigners.
Lol... blind is very representative of tech workers.
Blind is a toxic wasteland for women.
I'm a woman in tech and I realized that the people on Blind are a sample of the male coworkers I might work with. A large portion of them are assholes. It helped me know the truth about it and be less starry eyed. I know that a manager being nice in front of you means nothing and I can read their bias. And you absofuckinglutely should ask for more TC. Blind also helped me on a personal level - I can read guys better after listening to their banter on an almost fully male forum. I have a lot more appreciation and respect for the "beta guy" with a good heart and low TC who is a sweet heart than someone with a 500k TC. I'm dating one such person now. Something I might not have considered earlier.
TC or GTFO
Sorry, total compensation. I just assumed it was a known acronym at this point since I've seen it all over Blind. I'll fix that in the post. Thanks!
Oh he knows what it is, he was asking for yours