I can tell you all the market for devs is white hot at the moment. I mean it was never cold, but right now seems to be insane.
If the work-from-home thing has given you thoughts about what you like, now is the time to go. I see very few firms insisting on onsite work though, having interviewed with quite a few over the last few weeks. Even guys that I know would rather have people in the office and would pay them very well are feeling forced to let people work from home at least a couple of days.
Salary wise it seems like it's breaking upwards too, though of course all I have is my own offers and the word of some recruiters. There's also just a lot of firms out there who are happy to create roles for people they like, or discuss new ventures with new people.
Also, don't forget if you're going to look, absolutely everyone is interviewing remotely. You can sit at home at interviews all day until you find the job for you, something you might not be able to once more firms go back in the office.
This. The WeWorkRemotely posting silicon valley type companies are getting flooded and are quite picky currently. But once you apply to a few jobs elsewhere that have recruiters, you get flooded with small to medium size companies looking for devs. And the market is so hot that companies which previously had longer interview processes are condensing down to 1-2 interviews, because if they take any longer all their applicants have already taken offers elsewhere. For most devs, no matter what you're making someone else would pay you more, and they're willing to do it remotely.
Don't wait on your company to make a remote work plan once they've got you all back in the office. Start looking around now while they don't have a monopoly on your time. That doesn't necessarily mean taking interviews during work hours -- my previous job was 10-6 eastern, and east coast companies would happily interview me at 9, while west coast ones interviewed me at 7. Once your current company has you back in the office, they have a much stronger grasp on you, and they know it. That's why they want everyone back in the office before they talk about remote work.
But if you're not going to a company that is itself 100% remote, I'd still be wary about being the stranger that they only see online. I went with a job where I was only an hour away from the office but could still work remotely, and plan to be there once every couple months, so I still get some face time.
Are you seeing the salaries at these smaller companies keeping up? When I was changing jobs just before the pandemic I also saw a ton of interest from small/med companies, but none with competitive offers. Big, publicly traded tech companies were able to offer more than double total compensation in some cases, and that's with equity you can actually sell for cash.
It probably depends where you are on your career path. For me, those silicon valley startups were offering less than my target salary and I was going to try to negotiate up. For the small company I ended up at, I gave my target salary range and they exceeded it by 10k. I wasn't shooting for big publicly traded companies, and I don't know how they're acting currently. From friends I do know that some are seriously considering changing their remote work policy obviously.
I'm seeing a lot of colleagues leaving for substantial raises. But I've also noticed that we've been hiring a lot of entry-level folks. Not sure if we can extrapolate that industry-wide, but I suspect we can.
There are a lot of cities in the USA with an underpaid, but experienced workforce. While you might not find these offers to be competitive, someone from Springfield making $65k would absolutely jump at a $95k offer, even if that's still pretty well below the median national salary.
Weworkremotely just seem to be targeted at "web"-devs judging by filter categories (fullstack, backend, frontend). Is those positions maybe easier to do remotely?
Every time a recruiter (especially internal) reaches out to me lately about "remote until after Covid" I politely tell them I have no intention of ever being forced back into an office every week and good luck with their search. Hopefully they'll realize quickly enough.
Agreed on the salary uptick now. I'm not actively looking, but I'll entertain interesting companies. I've had a lot more companies say "yeah, we can do that" when I tell them I want at least $200k base (8 YOE, full stack developer) than before.
RSUs (that are contractually part of your on hire compensation) in a publicly traded company are as good as cash. Just sell immediately when they vest.
Im not seeing a lot of remote/hybrid offers in the midatlantic area (from my little checking around my area).
It's a lot more "we're remote right now and haven't determined our remote strategy" which like my current place generally means we'll expect you back, but might be a little more lenient on why you need to do a special WFH day.
I've done both full remote and full open office. I think being close enough to go in and get together to determine project path and then going remote to work on it seems to be the way to go. It doesn't look like my current employer believes the same way - even though they are doing very well right now and we're all remote.
That's why people are looking for a new job that will specifically let them work remote. Like anything else, it's easier to get the change you want from a new company than your current one, and you work that out as part of the interview and offer. With the jobs in such demand, companies that wouldn't normally hire remote people will.
Levels says E-7’s at Facebook get a nearly $1,000,000 compensation package
A) Is this annual? As in their unvested RSUs are nearly 4x this amount
B) This is not accounting for stock price appreciation?
or do I have it entirely wrong. Two years ago on Blind I could tell people were discussing their compensation packages in wildly differing ways. It was impossible to tell if people were discussing if they signed an offer that computed a particular dollar value that was only relevant a single year and they just liked to brag about it, or if they were discussing their annual tax filings from employment, or even something else. I feel like this discrepancy translates onto Levels as well.
Base + bonus + annual refresher should be in the 700s annually. Likely the way this gets to $1M is with stocks going up and stacked refreshers (getting a couple annual refreshers while the initial grant is still vesting).
As someone who recently interviewed (although not at Facebook) the number is the _annual compensation package at the time they signed their offer_ (it includes base salary + annual stock grant + bonus). If someone got $1,000,000 in annual compensation 2 years ago, the stock portion per year will likely be larger now due to appreciation of the stock. These numbers are crazy high and before I interviewed this time around I was somewhat skeptic of how real these numbers were outside of a few outliers but now I'm pretty sure it's pretty common.
Super nice that trillion dollar companies are being extremely competitive with compensation now
Wages have stagnated for 30 years and, to me, progress is not achieved until a house in the same area as the economic center can be owned outright in 5 years or less just like the baby boomers experienced
This seems to accomplish that, but lets throw in paying off all other encumbrances like student debt as well
Can I get an ELI5 on how to even start looking around? I'm someone that contracted via word of mouth for years, and I have zero recruiter relationships. My resume is probably very strong (principle engineer / architect level, strong mentor, JVM/distributed backend, nodejs react typescript frontend) but I haven't updated it for years. I know a lot of recruiters are lousy so I don't want to just cold-call one at random.
First of all, find out where the jobs are. Some board for your niche or something like that. For me it's efinancialcareers. Now efinancial is still a black hole if you try to use it to apply through, but what you're really after is the recruiter details.
You then phone up the rec, or you write to him on LinkedIn. A lot of them are crap at responding, but that's how it is. Phone a few, and convince them that you are the real deal for whatever it is he recruits for.
They'll all want an updated CV. They need it to be able to proceed, nobody will place you without one. Good news is it isn't that hard, just highlight the relevant bits for reach recruiter.
The rec will then say "I've got a job at X, Y, and Z. X is a this kind of co, Y is looking for blah..."
When they have some of those details it means they actually have something. Otherwise it's just a generic company that they will find later. By find, I mean they will forget you by the time the job comes. One guy told me straight up the ad I responded to was not a specific job, it was a honeypot to lure candidates.
So now the companies get your CVs, and they decide whether to interview. If the recruiter is good, they will interview you maybe 3/4 times. Companies often screw up their own internal hiring process and ask for CVs when they aren't ready. But the other companies should be willing to interview you. This is where you find out if the rec is crap, because a fair few of them will just not tell you anything about what happened to your CV.
It's still a numbers game. I've got over 20 recruiters listed on my Trello, most of them did nothing useful for me.
It's probably worth cultivating some relationships with the recruiters. You learn a lot about what the market is doing for free from them.
The forced year of remote has led to both a lot of companies opening up permanent remote work, and a lot of people to change jobs (because their current company doesn't support them remotely well, or because without the social component normalizing their work they've come to question it more). Further, with just the economy reopening, a lot of businesses are opening headcount that they've been sitting on the past year, reluctant to hire due to COVID uncertainties. Taken together, there is a lot of churn. There's a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of competition for roles.
Stocks (and therefore RSUs) are up. I joined a FANG in 2019 with $500k RSUs. Now I have $740k in unvested RSUs, including $600k remaining from the initial grant.
It is here in Australia. I've spoken to a lot of people who are hiring (EY, Accenture and some small-caps) and they all say the same thing - super hard, and expensive to get tech people right now.
I don't work in this space currently, but have colleagues and former colleagues that do. So many companies still have people running around with clipboards or doing routine calculations in Excel or handing loan applications by hand or managing contracts by printing them out and filing them or having someone sit at a monitor and watch for an alert so they can tell someone else or manually processing reward point changes or fax out hotel booking confirmations.
This is ludicrous to people steeped in tech, but I have had former colleagues or classmates or even myself work on all of those in the past year and a bit.
The fact that nothing has really changed seems to mean it is still cheaper to hire a minimum wage earner with zero benefits than to hire or contract software engineers to service your software and/or hardware that automates the job.
How is it for Product Managers and Product Owners? I've seen a slight bump in the past few weeks, but (anecdotally from my monitoring) the number of listings was still higher under Trump in 2019:
If the work-from-home thing has given you thoughts about what you like, now is the time to go. I see very few firms insisting on onsite work though, having interviewed with quite a few over the last few weeks. Even guys that I know would rather have people in the office and would pay them very well are feeling forced to let people work from home at least a couple of days.
Salary wise it seems like it's breaking upwards too, though of course all I have is my own offers and the word of some recruiters. There's also just a lot of firms out there who are happy to create roles for people they like, or discuss new ventures with new people.
Also, don't forget if you're going to look, absolutely everyone is interviewing remotely. You can sit at home at interviews all day until you find the job for you, something you might not be able to once more firms go back in the office.