Spend your early career, to the maximum extent possible, in well-run organizations surrounded by supportive, skilled teams, so that you can optimize for skill growth and (secondarily at first, but growing over time) for individually attributable impact/ownership.
Honorable mention: AppAmaGooBookSoft hire mere mortals, too, and mid-career salary expectations at them are $300k.
When I started out I had a horror of working in a large organisation. Worked for Ericsson for a year, but the size of it appalled me and I left. I've learned since that if you are smart and get shit done then you're probably best off climbing the ladders a big corp has, rather than churning out code for one small shop after another hoping they'll hit the big time
Interesting... I have always steered clear of such jobs because I felt I would be just a cog in the machine. It seems to me only a select few in those organizations ever shine (and most of them achieved their status before joining AppAmaGooBookSoft). Am I mistaken?
I know a variety of folks there, and their experiences range from "cog in machine" to "really couldn't imagine working anywhere else", and there are a lot of machines you can be cogs in that don't pay $300k (ask the former Japanese salaryman).
The main reason I mention it is so that everyone knows to aim for a package (compensation, skills growth, interestingness of work, life happiness, whatever) which compares to a clearly achievable outcome which tens of thousands of people of similar skill levels get offered every year.
> which compares to a clearly achievable outcome which tens of thousands of people of similar skill levels get offered every year
Are you asserting that those five turn over a majority of their mid-career engineers annually? That's the only way I see the tens of thousands number being accurate.
As for "mere mortals", I think most of us realize these companies hire them. Hell, I've been interviewing for my company a lot recently and a number of the people from those companies have been underwhelming at best (some to the point of causing me to wonder how they got hired there and I didn't). The issue is that many of us have soured on the random bullshit in their processes and have decided to stop throwing ourselves at it. I think it is a disservice to the up-and-coming not to acknowledge that and for them to realize it is "realistic" in a similar way that hitting a number in roulette is.
That's the only way I see the tens of thousands number being accurate.
What's your over/under for how many engineers AppAmaGooBookSoft will hire this year? Mine is 50k. I did a back of the envelope calculation for this last year but can't find it.
90% retention rates imply a 5 year survivorship of ~60%; feel free to take any of several thousand HNers out to coffee if you want to confirm what competent, worksmanlike execution means your 6th year pay package looks like.
(I work at Google but don't speak for them; I have access to internal retention data but I'm not looking at it or using it here.)
I think 90% retention is (probably?) an underestimate. People tend to look at measurements of tenure, see a short number, and assume Google et al burn people out/have revolving doors. Instead, that's really a function of the still explosive growth we're going through (for better or worse; I say worse but who listens to me?)
The five combined have a total headcount of roughly 660k, meaning they would need to be hiring annually roughly 7.5% of their total just in software engineers. At that level I don't buy it.
Since the number is dominated by Amazon, who has a huge logistics contingent, I'm not sure specifically about engineers. I'd say roughly half of that total is engineers that have something to do with software (not necessarily software engineers). That bumps your number to over 15% of the total engineering headcount. I'll be conservative and say 25% of the engineers are not software (with most being in Apple and Amazon). Now we're looking at 50k being 19% of the total software engineers.
You seem to be talking about hired at all levels, while I was talking about only senior hires. In that case, I am closer to you than I indicated. My (possibly wrong) impression is that the majority of hiring by these companies is new grads and juniors, since that is what their interview processes are heavily biased towards. I put the total number of senior hires at 10k - 15k.
As for total hires overall, I'll buy either your total hires or your retention rate, but not both. These companies are not growing headcount fast enough to be doing that much hiring at that retention rate in software engineers alone.
You seem to be agreeing with me, so I'm not sure if I understand you...
I was addressing Patrick's numbers (50k software engineers per year and >90% retention rate). Your link provides evidence that the latter number is incorrect, which was part of my point in both posts. In fact, it demonstrates that Patrick's 5-year scenario is the exception rather than the rule.
As someone who has worked for the 'Ama' part of that portmanteau for the last 2 years, and before that 5 smaller companies.
I would say it is a strange but not bad combination of being a cog + having autonomy. I feel like a cog in a very big machine, there are many other teams i interact with, but simultaneously I have more autonomy within my own business line than any other company I've worked in. I'm constantly asked to think of new ideas and ways we can improve our processes, architecture etc and have gotten to prioritise my own work on things that I thought were important.
I'm not sure if I'd say I'm 'shining', but I'm earning more money than I dreamed possible while learning from a lot of smart people, which lines up with pat's experience.
Spend your early career, to the maximum extent possible, in well-run organizations surrounded by supportive, skilled teams, so that you can optimize for skill growth and (secondarily at first, but growing over time) for individually attributable impact/ownership.
Honorable mention: AppAmaGooBookSoft hire mere mortals, too, and mid-career salary expectations at them are $300k.