Dan Luu Profile picture
Oct 12, 2021 9 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Despite the market already seeming bonkers high then, it has gone way up since then.

E.g., a friend of mine who was "senior" at Google (there 4 years with no promo) now makes $750k/yr and got a level bump for changing jobs after FB and another company got into a bidding war.
I've found it interesting to watch companies that don't value retention hemorrhage key employees by not keeping up with the market when people are close to burnout and primed to leave, causing predictable & 💰 disasters.

(, , etc.)
Another thing I've found interesting to watch is how quickly companies have responded.

At the forefront, there are companies like FB, which are either causing the increase in market rate or responding so quickly that the difference can't be observed externally.
Then you have companies that are months behind, where it takes months of complaints from hiring managers to get the org that controls comp to adjust comp targets.

And then in the tail, there are the companies that still haven't responded to market changes.
Hiring managers at those companies are having a very bad time while the company debates whether they should do something "next quarter" or "sometime in 2022" (e.g., I know of someone trying to hire a non-trendy specialist who had a double digit number of offers turned down).
As with , the companies are the still struggling to mount a response to market changes well over a year after things really picked up are sending a strong signal to candidates that the comp determination process at the company is severely broken.
BTW, that wasn't an isolated case. Lots of people are reporting getting 50% to 100% raises by interviewing and getting a level bump or two.

It's always been easier to get a bump by interviewing than via the internal process, but the sheer rate of these today is unprecedented. "It's no big secret th..."What is L+2? Is that ...
I was around for the tail end of the dotcom boom, and while there are specific ways that market seemed more overheated then, e.g., new grads getting $100k/yr job offers after a 30-minute on campus interview, on balance, the market seems much hotter at the moment.
Offer numbers from someone with 5 years of experience, currently making $300k/yr. They consider offers of $500k/yr so low that they're not even worth mentioning.

I shopped around a bit and have found similar, in that large companies are willing to offer me >= 2x what I'm making. Amazon (L6, senior): 660K p...

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More from @danluu

Dec 5, 2022
I feel like this is true for lots of kinds of conversations and not just tech interviews.

People are correctly pointing out that, if you dig into the logic of basically anything, it falls apart, but that's also generally true of actual humans, even experts.
Sure, is ridiculous, but have you tried asking an expert coach on almost any topic why you should do X?

E.g., try listening to one of the top paddling coaches in the world explain *why* (the what is good, the why is nonsense)
Why do you let the boat "run" between strokes? The explanation is because the boat is moving at top speed when you remove the paddle from the water, so putting the paddle back in slows you down.

But of course this is backwards. The boat decelerates when you're not pulling,
Read 6 tweets
Nov 20, 2022
What are examples of items/categories where you're really getting your money's worth at the high end, not necessarily in terms of utility, but in terms of the difficulty of producing the item more cheaply?

I find the contrast between these vs. "brand" items fascinating.
An example of a category that doesn't qualify but where some items qualify would be high-end fashion, where you're quite often mostly paying for the brand (e.g., an expensive Theory shirt) but there are plenty of items where you're paying for the item (e.g., a $5k Kiton suit).
An example of a category would be high-performance cars (with the notable exception of a few very niche brands like Ferrari, which are famous for having very high margins).

Even if you look at brands that laypeople consider to be "brand" purchases, like BMW,
Read 4 tweets
Nov 16, 2022
Lots of people in my mentions saying things like "Elon is cleaning house! Lazy bums are getting what they deserve!", as if Twitter employees are getting a much deserved comeuppance.

Since people don't seem to understand what the bums at are getting, here's a short primer:
If you look at the people most responsible for Twitter's state, leadership, they had golden parachutes worth tens of millions of dollars

We can debate whether or not they deserve the money, but if you think someone is a lazy bum, cursing them to receive a $10M+ payout seems odd
If we're talking about engineers, Twitter has historically underpaid long-tenured employees relative to BigCo market rate.

The median raise the staff+ people I'm talking to are getting in their new offers is six figures.

Read 5 tweets
Nov 16, 2022
One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng is that Twitter was doing a lot of interesting (and high ROI) engineering work that, at younger companies, is mostly outsourced to "the cloud" or open source projects

A few examples off the top of my head:
Twitter is, of course, mostly on prem.

The now gutted HWENG group was so good at designing low power servers that, in a meeting with Intel folks, discussing reference designs vs. what Twitter was doing, the Intel folks couldn't believe the power envelope Twitter achieved.
Twitter was operating long before gRPC existed, so they built Finagle. kostyukov.net/posts/finagle-… has some nice explanations and there's been a lot of innovation in Finagle since then.

Twitter still gets a lot of mileage out of owning its RPC layer

Read 19 tweets
Nov 14, 2022
Nice thread about the misconception that major tech companies run systems that can run without intervention because they're automated

The example comes from Google, which is more automated compared than most major companies (MS, etc.), but still quite manual in an absolute sense t.co/diqwJ3RHZH
One thing that's been interesting about recent events is seeing how people imagine big companies operate, e.g., people saying that Twitter is uniquely bad for not having a good cold boot procedure.

Multiple $1T companies didn't or don't have a real cold boot procedure. @ matthew_d_green Pour one out for Twitter’s cold boot pla[QT previous screenshot]  @ahidalgosre Alright. Fine. I’m
One of them is one of the most respected eng orgs on the planet and SREs there wonder if it would take weeks to come back up or months.

As someone who thinks a lot about risks, this isn't how I want the world to be, but it is how the world actually is.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 14, 2022
An interesting thing about this claim is that not only is the implication wrong, Twitter probably has better evidence of its wrongness than any other company in its size class could have.
There are very few companies that have a better distributed tracing setup w.r.t. getting actionable insights on the backend and the ones that have a better setup are much larger (Google, FB, etc.)

Twitter client tracing also punches above its weight.

Of course, the key people who did that work left or got laid off, but it's clear from the data that, if you're looking at why Twitter is so slow in, e.g., India, Uganda, etc., esp. on slow devices, tail latency comes from the network due to unreasonably large payloads + client.
Read 4 tweets

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