What does it take to get rich?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > What does it take to get rich?

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

This would probably work better as a post in BFC than D&D imo.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 14:42

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 22:07

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Why would make this sort of thread in D&D

Have you never posted here before?

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 15:03

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

luxury handset posted:

the only way to get rich is by loving a lot of people over, and it's a broadly unreachable fantasy that's only accessible to utter sociopaths or people related to and inheritors of sociopath wealth

I don't think this is true for the kind of rich OP is talking about unless you're using an awfully broad definition of sociopath that likely includes most humans

He's talking about 'FIRE' rich, which usually means just rich enough to have a middle-class lifestyle without working, not rich enough to afford penthouse apartments in Manhattan, jetset around the world constantly, etc. Basically it's what most people are probably aiming for in retirement, except earlier.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 15:51

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

If you can get good at solving leetcode problems, you can probably get into at least the tier of companies below FB/Google, like Amazon and MS. And at that level, saving money to move is less of an issue since they'll cover it.

For any individual person who has the aptitude for this kind of work and wants to make a decent income, going into it is not bad advice. But it's obviously not a societal solution for people having lower incomes since we only need so many programmers around.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 17:36

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

Saying you can acquire wealth in a democratic way is like saying you can buy elections in a democratic way.

Which is to say, no you loving can't, the democratic acquisition of wealth precludes one person having more of it than other people...

Democracy is not you with your big rich person brain dictating how to spend the money you got by dictating to your employees how much of their surplus production they should give to you because you own the company.

What if a co-op is phenomenally successful? Does it have to be democratic at the level of a nation state or the entire world?

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 20:18

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ytlaya posted:

You have a distorted perception because you've either coasted down the path to those jobs or gotten unusually lucky at some point along the way. As another poster mentioned, it generally isn't possible unless someone has gone to the right schools or just got extremely lucky.

Nah, you're greatly exaggerating the difficulty here. I'm working in Google's Munich office and hardly anyone has gone to top 10 or 20 CS schools. Even back in the bay area people who had gone to Stanford or wherever were, while not rare at all, not the norm. There were seemingly a shitton of people who had gone to UCSD though.

People from top schools are definitely disproportionately represented, especially as new grad developers, but they're nowhere close to a majority.

quote:

If someone has the aptitude to become a half-decent programmer (which is honestly pretty rare and difficult to self-teach past college-age) they're still not going to be able to get the kind of jobs you're thinking of.

Wait, are we talking about getting these jobs in general, or self-teaching to get them? Because self-teaching is definitely the tremendously more difficult route compared to just getting a CS degree (or hell, even a bootcamp). The kind of person who'd do well self-teaching their way through these concepts would probably have majored in math or CS at college anyway.

quote:

This reminds me of a college friend who was convinced that his skill and attitude got him his first good job instead of the internship at a hedge fund he got through nepotism during his sophomore year. When almost everyone you know and work with comes from a similar background, those common factors become invisible and you start to convince yourself that difference in aptitude, personality, etc are what actually mattered.

This is dumb. We're talking about coding jobs, not jobs as political aides or as an actor or something that's hyper reliant on networking.

Yes obviously some jobs are still got through blatant nepotism, and having former coworkers put in a good word for you can be very useful, but at least at the big companies connections mostly just get you an interview, then you have to pass the coding interviews. If all it took was nepotism I would've gotten my brother at job at Google by now, but they don't seem to give a poo poo about our relationship.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 21:31

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

You don't have to like coding to be good at it. The same kind of gunners who go into med school for the money exist for programming too (and if you're capable of getting into Google or similar companies, it's a way better deal financially than becoming a doctor). If you're intelligent and extremely self disciplined you can just push through it, though that sounds fairly miserable to me. But hey, same thing's true for doctoring, working 70 hour weeks doing something you don't give a poo poo about has gotta suck.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2019 22:03

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Venomous posted:

Did they go to German CS schools, and if so, which ones?

The ones I interview at least fall largely into three broad categories: from Germany, from Eastern Europe, from the Middle East. For Germany, there's a fair number who go to TUM, which is the local technical university, and then a bunch from random other parts of Germany. From what I understand, TUM is fairly elite, though that's much less of a distinction in Germany than in the US, school quality in general is more even here. The only other school that's stood out to me is some candidates coming from the German University in Cairo.

Oh, I guess I know a bunch of current engineers who went to the CS school in Lübeck, they had gotten acquihired as Nik software (Snapseed).

Liquid Communism posted:

You're going to need an order of magnitude more money than you'll make as a software developer for Facebook then.

Devs aren't gods anymore, they're trivial to outsource to India for gruntwork.

loving

Are you coming from Slashdot circa 2005 or something

Cicero fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Nov 6, 2019

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 07:49

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Liquid Communism posted:

Nah, I'm coming from a tech company who struggles with offshore teams writing tooling without ever checking it against use-cases for the people it's actually intended for.

That's exactly (part of) why it's actually non-trivial, and big tech companies pay devs in the US silly amounts of money instead of firing them all to hire a bunch of contractors in India or Ukraine

If outsourcing to cheaper places was easy, Google wouldn't have its biggest Euro eng office in loving Zurich of all places

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 08:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ytlaya posted:

That doesn't mean it's remotely plausible for the vast majority of programmers to get those jobs, though. There's a selection bias where you're mostly just seeing the people who got jobs and not the people who didn't. I referenced the finance guy because he has the same sort of distorted perception, due to his data set just consisting of "people who got those jobs."

Obviously I don't have objective data on exactly how many hardness points it is to get into Google or Amazon. But my own experience, what I've read being one of the most active posters and mods on CS-related subreddits that are known for being filled with Big N gunners, and the experience of my social network, is that getting into one of these types of companies is eminently doable if you're a competent coder willing to move to an expensive city and sink a lot of time into learning to solve whiteboarding riddles. Getting into a particular company at a particular time definitely involves a lot of luck of the interview draw, but if you're targeting the whole set of companies over a period of years, yes a disciplined coder can probably get in.

Of course, as someone else noted earlier, a lot of programmers who could simply don't want to, for a variety of reasons, which is totally fine.

quote:

Also, you're kinda proving my point regarding the US (it's entirely possible that the employment situation is substantially different in Germany, so I won't speak to that). UCSD is very highly ranked even if it isn't absolutely "top tier" and most people won't have access to that kind of institution. When you're in an "elite" career like that you get a distorted sense of what's normal and lose track of the fact that schools in the top 40-50 are still pretty damned elite and inaccessible to most Americans.

Stronger institutions are definitely disproportionately represented. I was just disagreeing with whoever said (was it you?) that it was flatly not possible if you didn't go to a target school or weren't extremely lucky. That's bullshit.

Also, it's hard to disentangle the usefulness of the school itself just on your resume from the things a top tier school is associated with, like the other benefits being affluent gives you, or that people who go to those types of schools are generally more ambitious.

quote:

I'm not denying that you need some baseline level of skill. Programming is probably actually better than most jobs when it comes to at least requiring some actual skill, and the couple people I've known who worked at Google were definitely very good programmers. Someone who is genuinely talented at programming can probably always get a very good job. I'm saying that "people employed at these companies have this level of skill/experience" does not imply that having that level of skill/experience makes it reasonably possible for anyone to get those jobs.

Of course in aggregate, there are only so many of these jobs to go around. But for any one individual competent and experienced programmer right now, yes these jobs are generally 'gettable'. Getting past the resume filter to the phone interview stage at one of [Google/Facebook/Amazon/Netflix/Microsoft/Apple/Airbnb/etc.] is not as hard as you think, and if you can do the leetcode thing you should be able to eventually get one of those jobs.

quote:

I also think that more talent is required than is obvious to many people who have that talent (and this probably includes you - if you work at Google, you're probably a good programmer, so don't misinterpret this as me claiming that these companies are full of talentless nepotism cases). When I took an intro compsci course in college with a bunch of people who were generally pretty high achievers and probably better overall than your average student, like half the class did very poorly and I had an extremely easy time of it. I'm now 34 and have been working as a programmer for like 10 years now, and I can guarantee you that I am absolutely garbage and I'm not just being modest when I say that. Actual good programmers reach a level of skill higher than mine within the space of about a year. So I actually think that more talent is involved with the sort of programming job that pays really well than a lot of people do (though it's a very specialized sort of talent that doesn't really apply well to other disciplines), but that's also why I think the idea of the vast majority of people ever working that kind of job is deeply unrealistic.

It's funny you say this because compared to so many of my peers at Google, I actually suck poo poo. Part of that is the generally high quality of programmers at Google (though the average one is no rockstar, just solid), but a big part is that I'm better at interviewing for programming jobs than actually programming, honestly. I always loved math-type riddles as a kid, I have a lot of experience in pressured solo/1v1 environments, so I do really well in coding interviews. Once I got into Google, I did...fine. But I'm probably slower than average to get promoted, and I've had similar thoughts to you when I compare myself to many of my peers. Some of those dudes are legitimately crazy good coders (one of the guys on the photos team was hideously underleveled when acquihired, came in at new grad level even though he was the primary author of the super popular Glide image loading library on Android), but even the median one seemed smarter than me.

If you wanted to, you could probably get a job at Amazon or MS if you dove into leetcode problems. Remember, they can't actually evaluate your real programming skill, they use the experience on your resume to start and then use whiteboarding problems to make sure you're intelligent in a programming context and didn't just make everything up on your resume (which some people absolutely do). I'm guessing you're not interested though.

quote:

All of this being said, I think that making some attempt to learn programming (just to see if it "clicks" for you) is still good advice on an individual level, but this is a separate thing from thinking that the vast majority of people could access the sort of job that pays six figures at tech companies, etc. I think that the sort of abilities I have are probably within reach of quite a few people (and pretty much anyone if taught properly as a child) and, in the current job market, can fairly reliably get you a job making some mid-5-figure salary. There are quite a few jobs who just want people who can fix bugs or make changes to simple user interfaces or whatever. But I think that sort of thing is a fundamentally different job than the sort of thing people usually consider the "tech industry" and isn't the sort of thing the OP is referring to.

Yeah I more or less agree. I just disagree with the notion that these jobs -- as a group -- are that elite. They're, like, moderately elite, from the perspective of a person who's already gainfully employed as a programmer, anyway. These companies often start out very selective, I have no doubt that early on, having gone to Stanford was a massive benefit to getting into Google. But Google and Amazon etc. are loving huge now, that level of selectiveness is long dead.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 22:14

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

No, you're horribly off. At first Google can afford to mostly just pick people from Stanford & co., they don't need that many engineers and they're hot as poo poo, growing like crazy. Getting into Google means a decent chance of getting filthy rich off an IPO.

In 2019 their demand for engineers to fill seats is vastly higher and, while still prestigious, they're not nearly as hot poo poo as they once were. Getting into Google now gets you very generous compensation, but it's not going to suddenly make you wildly rich. People who want that are going to take their chances with some hot startup, or maybe a boutique hedge fund.

Look at the data posted earlier. I don't actually trust the absolute percentages, but the trend I definitely trust, and you can see that Facebook had twice the percentage of employees from top tier universities compared to Google. Is it that Facebook pays that much better and can afford to be much more selective, or whatever it is you're suggesting? No, it's that they're younger and smaller (especially when that article was written).

You can just look at which universities Google has actively recruited at to confirm this, which has greatly broadened over time.

edit: I suspect what you're saying is probably more true for other industries, which don't have the same startup phenomenon that's become common in tech, where a long history of established success can actually work against you. And I don't dispute that having a top university on your resume remains a large advantage to getting past the resume filter stage. But the demand for these huge companies for devs is simply too high to be satisfied with just pulling from those demographics, the numbers just aren't there.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Nov 6, 2019

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 22:59

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 22:07

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I feel like for social media coming later may not be as big of a handicap, despite network effects, because there's seems to be this phenomenon where younger people want to be on a network/app that's cool, and as a network goes increasingly mainstream and gets more users well now mom and grandpa are on it, not really that cool anymore is it? So they look for the next thing.

Whereas for utility-type apps and services, like Google Maps, that's not really a thing. It doesn't matter if Google Maps isn't cool, people only care that it's useful.

AceOfFlames posted:

The best description of the tech hiring process I ever heard was "picture making a carpenter carve out a beautiful elaborate table in front of you to test him for a job cutting plywood sheets with a table saw".

There's a lot of truth to this, though I don't really see a way out. There are some definite advantages to whiteboarding algorithmic questions.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 13:32

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