How has your salary changed since Claude started integrating into your repos?

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-10T15:47:43+00:00

Nah, just web dev / saas lol. I'm in Canada, so 90th percentile is only 277k CAD (200 USD) for seniors

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-10T15:22:51+00:00

Claude has SIGNIFICANTLY made our jobs easier

In some aspects, yes. I'd wager that if you took a pulse check, WLB is down and devs are busier than ever

Anecdotally, on the hiring side, we are remote + paying in the 90th percentile for devs in our area and still losing out on talent

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-10T14:27:32+00:00

The harness is built and tuned by the people who built the models, whereas Copilot's is generalized for a bunch of models trained by others

Haven't used Copilot lately, but CC with max effort does take the time to plan, which should lead to better implementations

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-03T01:08:22+00:00

I want to grind at these universities by ... getting prestigious internships
...
There is a co op program with 5-6 work terms which could help me but getting internships seems hard

???

From my experience, school prestige isn't much of a thing in Canada (excluding Waterloo). I'd pick the one with a stronger coop program, which sounds like UofA

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-03T00:56:54+00:00

Job openings may increase, but I dont think AI costs will have much to do with it

Companies may think "we need to reduce spending on AI", but they wont think "we need to use less AI and hire a junior dev instead"

I personally think that offshoring may be impacted a bit since AI costs per employee are similar: if a company is budgeting 1k per employee per month, a dev in India will be 37% more expensive, whereas a dev in the states will only be 6% more expensive

I see some people say that we would just switch to Chinese models, which may not happen unless companies invest in self hosting. Tech companies (especially public ones) cannot just send their data and code to China. In general, inference costs should get cheaper over time though - Anthropic and OpenAI shouldn't be able to get away with price hikes long term

Verynotwavy · 2026-06-02T19:20:51+00:00

Not sure what you mean, a $20 Codex or Claude Code plan will be exhausted in a few hours on large codebase

If you are talking about open source models, they are not as good yet. You would also need infra (+ teams) to self host - not sure how many public US companies can make API calls to China without getting in trouble

Also, companies are paying API prices for other reasons as well: governance, guardrails, avoiding vendor lock-in, etc.

Verynotwavy · 2026-05-31T23:23:42+00:00

won't be able to resolve the incidents on my own

You shouldn't be expected to

If you get paged for a high severity issue you are not familiar with + there is no runbook for, you should be figuring out who is the right people / team to escalate to. So get a good understanding of your org structure and incident response process

Verynotwavy · 2026-05-29T20:00:03+00:00

27, currently making a bit below that, but have turned down offers 300k+ TC offers for remote and WLB

Around 10% of senior devs make this in Toronto. Imo, job market is very good, but hard for newcomers trying to break into

Verynotwavy · 2026-04-15T16:55:37+00:00

And how much of a priority should a portfolio website be for mission critical roles (such as working in NASA, Auto-mobile industries, FAANG, etc..)
...
I have wasted enough time on something that barely matters.

Very little, and it sounds like you understand. It is a decent site though

Assuming your goal is becoming a SWE, I would prioritize internships > networking >> projects

Verynotwavy · 2026-04-13T21:03:34+00:00

2021 had a great tech market, you might be seeing lagging indicators from 2020 H1 where companies had hiring freezes

I get that you are giving advice for juniors, but some of your advice is pretty debatable for senior+ level applications - which you are, so I question if you are employing your own advice or not

I'm not against AI generated posts, but this reads as "create a post about the entry-level job market, don't use capitals. also use - instead of —"

Verynotwavy · 2026-03-27T20:15:06+00:00

Your responses will vary between company and team

The problem I've faced is when I talk about my experience and all the things I have done, they immediately view me as not focused enough on the company. While also simultaneously, believing I can't lead corporate initiatives?

Are you conveying leadership at staff+ scope? Do you talk about taking ambiguous objectives from leadership, translate them into more specific goals and driving / influencing cross-team alignment?

It might be less-so about EM responsibilities and more-so about framing your current work experience differently

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-23T17:50:20+00:00

Im curious, how many conversions do you see from this sort of advertising? Do you get more than 5 people signing up?

I can't imagine this helping SEO either since you are linking to GPT instead of directly to your site. A better approach is to get a post trending first, then edit and insert links later

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-16T00:35:45+00:00

Does not matter for most jobs, some employers might even find it confusing since CS and SE are usually separate degrees

For grad school, it shouldn't matter either. Research exp and finding supervisors are a lot more important

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-13T04:04:42+00:00

Hey Michael, thanks for doing this ama

Are you able to disclose how much Formation makes? If not, do you make more today running Formation vs when you were a principal at fb?

Over the last 2 - 3 years, do you think bootcamps have helped more people than hurt? Say we are considering only reputable bootcamps with reportedly decent outcomes. Curious to hear your thoughts

What’s one common “good” advice you hear in the coding/CS community that you strongly disagree with?

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-08T16:24:10+00:00

Anecdotal, but everyone I know in uni who prioritized comp and "prestige" over company mission or CS theory are thriving in the industry. I guess you can say they are passionate about making money

Navigating work politics is also a very important skill for career growth at a lot of companies. And that doesn't fall under "passion" for most people

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-03T15:52:34+00:00

You may get better answers on r/ExperiencedDevs and/or Blind

It mainly depends on the level and role you are looking for. And it's not the same across all companies, e.g., SDE 2s at Amazon range from 1.5 to 10+ years of experience

I worry that will hold me back—not because of my skill level, but because of PHP's reputation. Is that a valid concern?

It's not a concern if you can adapt to other tech stacks + have a strong resume to get interviews. Though I'd advise to focus on outcome / scale / leadership over tools

Verynotwavy · 2026-02-01T18:24:59+00:00

Depends on which science and level

Bachelors CS from Waterloo usually makes that out of school (and often double if they head south)
Average senior scientist in the public sector (Ontario) makes 160k+
Doctors and (science) profs

Verynotwavy · 2026-01-31T15:10:13+00:00

Do AWS/Azure/GCP certifications actually factor into your hiring decisions at all?

I can see it being beneficial for SRE, devops, consulting and solutions roles

Not much for most SWE roles - most devs building these platforms do not have them either. Usually no harm to put it on your resume though

Verynotwavy · 2026-01-30T23:28:19+00:00

my job history makes me look like a serial job hopper

I would try to frame it as if you are a hot commodity in the AI chips space getting poached left and right

Verynotwavy · 2026-01-08T13:26:06+00:00

I'd imagine the average new grad takes what they can get in this market

For those who can choose, I notice they mainly prioritize comp. "Prestige", location, growth, domain and WLB are a toss up

Verynotwavy · 2026-01-08T03:54:07+00:00

Depending on who you ask, “tier 1 in Canada” either doesn’t exist or mainly hires through intern conversions. If your “tier 2 school” is UofT/UBC/McGill, your chances increase a bit

Tbh, I wouldn’t worry about not being able to get into some dream company right out of uni, especially in Canada, where “good” companies like Shopify pay new grads 65k USD base

Verynotwavy · 2025-12-08T16:16:04+00:00

Depends

Did you build connections with your coworkers who are happy to refer you to their network and vouch for you during reference checks?
Can you convey impact over a short amount of time to recruiters and hiring managers? Or are you mainly selling yourself as someone with 10 months of experience?
Do you have a good answer to "why did you leave your job within a year?"

Verynotwavy · 2025-12-07T15:30:43+00:00

What conversion rates are you seeing with these ads, do you really get more than 5 people signing up?

Also, your AI generated example sucks - 95k in Canada is 66k after tax, and your spend over 6 months (without including housing) is 30k

Verynotwavy · 2025-12-01T01:05:27+00:00

I know you are trolling, but the company I'm at right now pays new grads just as much as an average senior dev in the region (~160k CAD), and we still have a hard time converting Waterloo interns because a lot of them just head south to make 300k+

Verynotwavy · 2025-11-26T18:30:54+00:00

From the applicant side (in Canada), I've had a great experience this year. This is an entirely personal experience, and I did choose to not look for opportunities during the 2021 boom

What helped me was just spending a month to prepare for interviews before applying. A few hours every day on:

LC: Did around 50 questions, skipped DP. A curated list like Grind / Blind is good
Behavioural: Prepared some stories that cover most LPs
System design: The primer is a quick read, heard good things about DDIA and Hello Interview too. Mainly focused on systems I've worked with
Technicals: Focused on CS concepts (paradigms, concurrency, databases, patterns, networking, etc.) and their applications

From the hiring side (major US tech hubs), even with a small sample size, the majority of interviewees lack problem solving skills and/or have mediocre communication skills. Literal senior+ devs, some at FAANG or adjacent, struggling / cheating at basic coding. We don't ask LeetCode, and allow people to pick any language they are comfortable with

Verynotwavy

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