I sometimes feel this way, then remember a single 3 day trip to a big Palo Alto “startup” and feel really good about my career choices.

I have never worked at a large company but from what I hear I think I would hate it.

My company is tiny, but one thing I am kind of starting to hate is the “cabin fever” effect.

My friend didn't especially like working for Google, though I'm not sure that the reasons didn't have more to do with the commute than the office. He has Crohn's or something like that and couldn't even appreciate the food.

What ultimately put me down the path of pursuing this sort of thing was realizing just how much money programmers make at these companies. Maybe working at a FAANG doesn't sound like the most fun thing in the world, but would $300k+ a year change your mind? It certainly made me start thinking. Even at the larger non-FAANGs, seems like it's not that hard to get $250k+.

I'm sure my view is also warped quite a bit by living in SF though - 10 years ago, the amount I make right now is easily something I would have considered "enough". But that was before the median house price in San Mateo/Santa Clara counties (which encompass the SF border down to San Jose) hit $1.3-1.5 million.

The house I grew up in around here, I think my parents bought for $200-$250k in the early 80s (and sold in ~2005). Zillow now thinks it's worth $2.1 million (inflation accounts for ~2.5x increase, the rest = lol bay area real estate). Boomers had it so easy.

It's really hard for me to gauge what price of living in SF/Palo Alto/etc is like. i.e. how much is "left over" after paying all the stuff you have to have (food / shelter / transport).

If I made 250k/year here I'd be very wealthy. My 2700 sqft house cost us $215k 10 years ago, might be worth $225-250k now. With the salary I make now we paid it off in about 10 years. I am guessing that if you live in a million dollar house you're not making 5x the payments I made per month, so you're paying it off over a really long time period? Or does the extra 100k you make all go into paying for the house?

Heh, as a renter who moved into my rent-controlled place in 2010...I also cannot really answer that question super well, since I think having rent under $2k makes me an outlier now. That enables me to sock a good amount of money away, but my living situation + not having kids yet definitely makes me one of the lucky ones in that area.

What is your guys experience with companies that include a signing bonus as part of the offer letter?

My current job had a signing bonus, it wasn't a wild amount or anything and I think it came with the caveat that if I left in under a year I had to return a prorated amount. idk, seems good?

OK, but we paid $2500/mo for 10 years and now we own the house outright and now I don't have to pay that so my effective take-home is $30k more (well, except that we're putting a lot money towards my son's college savings)

The reason we moved to Austin is that I was living in Dallas and took a job where I could work either in the bay area or in Austin, for the same salary. I took a trip to CA to look at houses, easiest decision of my career.

Do these FAANGs pay a lot differently in other parts of the country? Seems like the play would be to get one of those jobs in a cheaper city than SF.

Work and live at FAANG. They have food, showers, nap rooms. $$$$

I've been using Notepad++ on one computer and Vim on another. Notepad++ might be pulling ahead as my favorite.

The reason I ask is that, without the signing bonus, the offer would be too low for me to accept. With the signing bonus, it puts the total compensation right at the lower limit of what I would accept. Would you accept an offer like that?

if it's at the lower limit of what you would accept, then by definition, you should accept it, the only caveat being that it doesn't apply to your next year's salary, so you'd have to get promoted or otherwise get a raise to get back to where you think you ought to be. and thus it seems clear what the company's motivation is for offering signing bonus instead of a higher base salary.

Only if I figured I'd likely leave after a year or two.

That's kinda how I feel. If they were willing to pay the combined signing bonus + base salary every year they would have just offered that instead. Would you include some wording in your response to their offer indicating that you would be expecting some sort of raise next year to bring you more in line?

If I ended up with no raise after the 1st year then I would be kinda forced to move imo.

That's kind of my point though and it's something I have been thinking about a lot lately. I feel like the opportunity cost of working somewhere in a smaller market is crazy right now while dev demand is so high. Like I'm missing out on something big. But I have a life here. Idk.

no. i think that's implicit, and it's also as much on you as it is on them for that to happen. i'd take the offer if i thought they were underappraising me but the year 1 money was still good enough, but not otherwise.

The problem with working in a smaller market though is that it's hard to find something interesting my opinion. And if you end up at a place that you hate, you won't have that many other options to look at.

Unless I move to a FANG, my plan is to work here in the Bay Area and save as much money as I can and then move to a lower COL city. You can live really cheap and save a ton of money if you don't splurge on bars and restaurants. I'm not managing my spending well, yet my post tax savings is close to 50% and that's after 401k deduction. Pretty sure I can really up it to 75% if I tried.

If you can luck box a rent control unit like goofyballer did, you can even increase your savings rate even more.

Skip Notepad++ and go straight to VS Code or get good at Vim.

Why is this true in javascript? (aside from the possible "javascript sucks")

let x = [0, 6];
let y = x + 4;
console.log(y);

output is: 0,64

Does anyone know how much being remote affects your salary? Like if you work a job located in SF or Sea, but I live in middle of nowhere midwest, do they consider my COL in my salary?

For people who do phone screens, what kind of questions do you ask?

I have shadowed several coding phone screens and I have been simply amazed. All the questions we have asked as basic problems that require OOP programming. Create a class and structure your code cleanly and you should pass. But a lot of people just don't know how to do that. Basic polymorphism is something people just don't do.

I was expecting to do something relatively medium like this

But thinking of that, I feel like that might be too hard and won't test basic CS concepts and design.

I have seen my colleagues asked people to do stuff like create a minesweeper board, which is pretty straight forward but can easily be expandable. I might ask them to do a tic-tac toe game. Or an address book where you create a program to keep track of people's contacts (phone number, name etc).

COL for sure affects, but I'm not sure by how much. I just don't think those jobs are as common many people think. I imagine the competition for those kind of jobs are fierce.

I knew a guy who left to work at Udacity but is working remotely in Maine from a cabin. He mentioned that COL was adjusted.

It's just coercing them both to strings. Output is identical to:

let x = [0, 6];
let y = 4;
console.log(x.toString() + y.toString());

You see the chaos dynamic typing has wrought?

Oh yeah, that was a dumb question. I was just stuck thinking of addition instead of concatenation for "+".