VirusNewbie

How did they make a killing with post IPO stock if they weren't getting big grants? Their stock went up 50% over a 15 year period. Not great.

yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.

how are these long term commitments structured? Can the big companies default on them? pay a small penalty? I think that probably makes a large difference.

Amazon and MS were never really in the same league as Google and Apple.

I don't really believe NVIDIA pays near as well as the latter two companies either (per level, not accounting stock appreciation), though obviously if you joined in 2022 you're doing fantastic. But if you joined two years ago? You'd make less than you would have made at Apple or Google.

OpenAI and Anthropic are obviously standout companies that are top tier bar none, but they also hire a lot less, and even more sparringly from new grads.

So I don't really believe the premise that 'middling grads' just go get jobs at Apple like it's a consolation prize, making 220k a year starting or whatever it is.

Early Microsoft (well, and current micorsoft) did not/does not shower their employees with massive stock grants.

Google was one of the first tech companies to pay so well that people switched industries to get into tech both to work alongside brilliant people from various backgrounds and to make a lot of money.

Before Google, it was very rare for an independent contributor/software engineer in tech to retire early if you didn't hit the startup lottery. Sure, people who joined Microsoft pre-IPO did well, but it's not the same as now where a good 10-15 year run at a FAANG allows many to retire early (if they choose).

How sad. :(

My brain chemistry tells me i'm better than most people and deserve more. Is that...selfish?

Is that effective surveillance? I know SMS is plain text, but anything interesting is probably on iMessage, or RCS, or SSL web, no?

100% amazon. real world experience is worth 10x more than degrees.

I have jetski/antigravity in one tmux pane and nvim in the other at all times.

Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.

The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?

rouble is, they have zero engineering or leetcode experience.

Sounds like they want the perks of working at FAANG, and not that they want the job, right?

This happened to my wife at a small PR firm. She told them she doesn't have a laptop (she didn't really have a functional one) and they just bought her a personal one as a 'signing bonus' and they have her bring it in.

It's a bit unusual, it's a yellow flag for sure, but it depends on how desperate you are for a job. If that's the worst thing about the company, it's not so bad, I've definitely worked for worse.

I'd tell them "i don't have a laptop, just a desktop" and see what they say? If they seem like they're going to not hire you for that, I agree with what other folks said, buy a cheap chromebook.

I'm sorry to say but it sounds like you cannot afford dogs. They will likely be better off somewhere else with someone who has some financial means.

You need to figure out how to rent a room, or even a garage or ADU from someone. It is going to be drastically easier without the dogs. Maybe you can find someone you know who will take the dogs so you can still visit?

You then need to find ANY job. Drive uber for 30 hours a week, study and practice coding/AI skills/resume building for 20 hours a week, etc.

I find it highly unlikely you're going to go from living on the streets to a high paid dev job. Instead, you need to make a realistic three year plan.

You cannot keep your dogs and expect to do this, you tried, it was a noble effort, but you gotta give them up man. It's just too hard to find cheap places to rent. You need a home base to stay healthy enough to sleep, study, and learn the new skills you need.

Did you read the SRE handbook before applying?

Yes, but it wasn't really necessary. Google isn't trying to hire SREs, they're trying to hire SWEs and specialists who they can turn into SREs, if that makes sense. Though I'm sure SRE experience elsewhere helps, they are still expecting SWE level coding/algorithms etc.

How do you decide who gets alerts

SREs will be assigned to a team that has a rapidly growing service or essential service (or both), and they will be the primary team that takes the alerts, while the developers have a slower SLO (though still oncall rotations for them).

I'm a SWE SRE at Google. That means we had to do a SWE interview with an emphasis on system design.

So I'm expected to be able to do both operations for oncall, but also do RCA and implement fixes and changes to make the systems our team is responsible for more reliable.

We're able to throttle the release cadence of binaries, so we work together with dev teams (SWEs who develop features) to come up with appropriate monitoring, metrics, mitigation, and scaling capabilities.

Some SREs are not SWE SREs, they usually have a specialty related to the team they're on, such as networking, low level linux internals, etc. They're still expected to be able to write production level python/Go code.

They are more likely to send a bug to the devs rather than fix it themselves, where as I will often (but not always) just go right in and send a CL to the devs fixing or optimizing something.

I do all the time now, buying stuff for my wife! Sweaters, lingerie, etc. because it's usually from brands she's been browsing and they target me.

I'm talking about recruiters that you talked to throughout an interview loop, not randos.

I agree that the online hackerrank quizes where it isn't even a video call is dumb because so many people cheat and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage.

Lots I agree with here, but...

I would promptly remove them from my LinkedIn connections afterwards because I'm exhausted of pointless connections and recruiters.

Why would you do something like this, it's just counter productive. I've had numerous recruiters reach out weeks or months later to say "hey another team is interested", or even when they have moved on to other jobs.

Stop being so bitter you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

My point is you and I are still working for money because we want things/security etc.. I really don't get the sense that people who have tens or hundres of millions of dollars are doing it cause they need more money. It's other things that motivate people. I run into people in my workplace that just enjoy it, even though they're sitting on 20M.

All those engineers making 20M a year at Anthropic and OpenAI are going to back down to normal super high comp of 700k a year after their starter grants run out, and yes many will quit but the people who stay aren't moving the needle on their finances that much.

Err, maybe some of those, but there's a reason Apple is using GCP and TPUs for training their custom gemini model.

How much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?

Google is competing with nvidia (TPU), AWS (GCP), Netflix (youtube), Tesla (waymo self driving), OpenAI (Gemini), Microsoft (Workspace), Apple (Android)....

they have so much that they're renting capacity to Anthropic & Google

they could not make use of it! That's why they're renting, they don't have access to good distributed training software, so the heterogenous cluster they made was bad for training and they don't have enough demand for inference.

Arguably, when compared with either OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, SpaceX/xAI now own the most compute,

lol wut. You think they have more compute than Google?

are the most financially liquid,

You think they have the most cashflow?

the largest corpus of high quality training data.

What? You think they have higher quality training data than Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI?

We may very well be a couple of months away from a Grok release that goes toe-to-toe w/ other American frontier models, IMHO.

Training on what? They rented both of their data centers away!!!

Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.

Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).

So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?

Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.

Anthropic has been very strategic about playing all the big cloud providers off each other. They're also in desperate need of inference, and I don't think AWS has the capacity to scale up as fast as they want. AWS may also be trying to 'force' them to use Graviton, and I don't think Anthropic is as big of a fan.

~1600 TPS is not 'high scale'.

It's optionality that only has an upside financially, while the downside is just having to do more interviews.

Let's say you're worth 300k on the open market as a senior software engineer. If you get a job that pays 200k a year + 400k in stock over four years, you're making ~300k.

Except if after the first year, the stock goes up 30%, you're making 330k the second year + whatever cash raise you get. Then if it goes up another 10%, and so on... etc.

If, however the stock falls after the first year, presumably you can go out and find another 300k a year job at a different company.

Because I get way more money.