C/C++ engineer in the bay area, 6-8 yrs experience: ~165k median. 9-12 yrs experience (which I'll jump up to in another year): 175k median. Sounds like I have some work to do at the negotiating table. :/

Status Update

Going to go ahead with plans and start life as drop out and see where it leads me.
Talked to close friend that lives in California and will probably be able to start out as intern if interview goes ok. Later it may lead to full-time employment because people just don't really care in Cali.

Going to play live poker while interning and hopefully pokerstars makes it back into California as an added bonus.

In the meantime i'm going to just be studying NodeJS/Javascript with working on my C++ project that communicates by web sockets. Its really a cool project that i'll make open source and post on here if I survive in California. Deals with cryptocurrency and lots of goodies from npm packages.

Thanks for the replies they meant a lot.

uh... sorry to break it to you, but Cali cares a lot about degrees.

UCLA, UC Berkeley (or any UC).
USC
Stanford
CalTech
PolyTech

Just to name a few of the top 50 schools in that state (totally ignoring the people who move to Cali).

"I dropped out of community college because I wasn't learning anything" will sound awesome sandwiched between people with MSc's from those schools.

That thing seems a little high and not very fine grained to me. They're trying to sell you a job hunt service so it makes sense they'd want to err on the up side.

The place friend works at is full stack and uses pretty much everything to contract out for pretty big names.
Has all the benefits and pays extremely well, so if I were to get hired there; it would be extremely nice. I'm going to say nicer than where I last interned and that was with gym, chefs on call and perks that I never used.

I don't have anything against community college but will clarify that I go to a pretty nice university but isn't ranked as high; like the ones you list. The CS professors are top of the line though but i'm done with school for now, rather self teach like I do daily.

Anyway, going to have fun gambling with life for a change and now just preparation time period begins.
New name for name change is a female name as extra luck.

If you were in your first couple of years I would say go for it. As is, I think you are making a mistake -- even if it works out. The risk/reward ratio is too low considering you only have one semester left. Hope it works out for you.

this is clearly going to happen a lot.

Yeah, could be, was mostly considering jj's post saying it checks out for him.

Also, they are doing this analysis based on offers and better candidates will have more offers and appear disproportionately more often in the sample, while some of the worse candidates may not appear in the sample at all.

That's just one data point though. And I was around median - which is what I expect for a start up that's not really a start up anymore.

iosys, are you a Canadian or American citizen? For some reason I think you're Canadian.

Not having a degree limits your visa options.

Born in Canada and later became US Citizen because parents moved to US as one is professor.

I have citizenship with US and Canada because Canada lets you keep your citizenship.

If you are able to be very productive and career growing for 3 years, then having a degree or not really doesn't matter.

Just don't **** up from now until then.

It's definitely -EV to not finish the degree (I'd guess from both life and money) but whatever. Not nearly as big of a deal if you have US citizenship.

looked up rubymine

$200 a year subscription fee? The ****?

I thought sublime was out of its mind for asking $80 for a one-time purchase

They must have up the price because I have all the products (the toolbox combo for like $146.99). Some huge discount there but had previously paid for some of the products and next year it only costs $149 as well /brag.

Seems worth getting all product pack because after 3 years the savings is better and if this is your field then worth it.

They make the best IDEs and listen to the community.

Also if you pay for a year but stop paying the next year; you get an offline download of the IDE(s) when first purchasing.
Not the greatest but it is something.

Probably could get by without the most fancy IDE if didn't have the cash.

I bought a sublime key so I don't have to deal with a nag screen every 5 saves.

atom is alternative that is free too

vim is still free afaik

while i love vim and use it every day, and while vim has ctags and some other plugins that help provide a real-time view of code structure, the setup if a real pain ime, and even then it doesn't give you everything rubymine does.

rubymine (i believe) actually does code execution in the background to introspect structure, so that a get an eclipse/VS experience where you can look up all references for a method, jump to definition, etc, and it's based on more than just string matching.

if i'm wrong and there is a way to set that up in vim, i'd love to hear about it.

Interesting article. It's pretty long, but seems pretty reasonable and doesn't make hyperbolic claims one way or another.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/17/silic...to-an-end.html

No more Uber Ice Cream?

Don't buy it. The rich have silly amounts of money and nowhere to put it.

Yah the latest fear, about tech boom winding down is just speculation, made by people that have low credentials or are hired by someone that could gain from certain believers.

Silicon Valley could go years at the current pace of spending with no results and be fine.
If anything I look forward to a year or two that just focuses on stability of the current tech and thus cheapening it for the mass public.

What really needs to happen is a better incorporation with today wearables/phones/laptops and schools/hospitals/transport/government

Need apple/google/microsoft to open up a universal communication bridge with wifi's alliance ironing out bugs for p2p communication.
Apps should be able to communicate and work with each other flawlessly in the coming years. People like choices and boilerplate apps that just provide functionality which can be done by one company is not what everyone wants; so jobs are not going to decrease or be outsourced to places with no design.

Just my opinion.