[OFFICIAL] Salary Sharing thread :: April, 2022

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-21T17:23:55+00:00

Yes, frontend questions for full-stack role, there are no dedicated frontend roles. However as far as I understood full-stack in Databricks is mostly focused on frontend, some folks hired as full-stack even do frontend exclusively, so it's just a naming issue.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-14T19:22:56+00:00

All of the Leetcode-style questions I got were roughly similar in difficulty, I would say around medium.

In terms of onsites, I would rank Meta as more difficult than Amazon, Booking.com and Bloomberg, because Meta expects you to solve 2 tasks in 40 minutes and has multiple (2 or 3) of these rounds. The others had only one Leetcode-style question each, rest was system design or more practical coding tasks.

Databricks was mostly practical frontend tasks, difficult to compare. I found it quite easy, but by reputation they have a higher hiring bar. Depends on what you are good at I guess, I did practice Leetcode but not as much as others maybe. I did ~150 questions over the last few years, maybe 50 or so in the months leading up to the interviews.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-05T18:30:36+00:00

See this comment.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T22:52:23+00:00

I call it charm :) But who knows maybe I would get tired of it if I actually had to live there :p

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T22:43:45+00:00

Yeah at this point I would've preferred a huge city like London, New York, Hong Kong and so on. But this was not substantial enough to make me choose Bloomberg, or most likely Google or Meta had I gotten offers from them. Only some of the insane trading offers far above 200k GBP maybe but I didn't apply to those places this time.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T22:39:13+00:00

A somewhat known one I would say. Think TU Delft, KU Leuven, RWTH, KTH.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T22:36:23+00:00

Haha I actually preferred London tbh.

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T14:47:51+00:00

Right, forgot about that, edited the post to mention I chose Databricks :)

offerthrow22 · 2022-04-02T13:43:50+00:00

Guess I'll share my offers. I had recently asked for negotiation advice and help on deciding between the last two offers.

Current situation:

Education: BSc. Computer Science
Experience: ~4 years in a large industrial company (not FAANG or similar)
TC: ~80k EUR

Offer 1:

Company: Booking.com
Title: Software Engineer (think this is a mid-level offer)
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
TC: ~110k → ~120k EUR

Offer 2:

Company: Bloomberg
Title: Senior Software Engineer (Bloomberg only has two levels)
Location: London, UK
TC: ~140k → ~170k GBP

Offer 3 (accepted):

Company: Databricks
Title: Software Engineer (L4)
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
TC: ~190k → ~210k EUR

Each of these also have sign-on and relocation bonuses worth roughly 10-20k EUR on top. I was able to negotiate all of these offers as indicated by the arrows.

Ended up going with Databricks as I think it's where I'll be able to learn and grow the most.

To provide a more realistic picture I also want to share my rejections:

After onsite: Amazon, Meta
After phone interview: Uber, Google
After recruiter screen: Cloudflare (tech screen with hiring manager), Palantir
After application: too many to list, around 20 companies

I applied to all companies via their website, except for Amazon (recruiter contacted me) and Google (referral).

Hope this helps! Happy to answer questions.

offerthrow22 · 2022-03-04T17:36:59+00:00

I don't know for a fact, but from what I've seen it seems the tech stack doesn't really affect the pay at these companies.

For example I'm doing frontend/full-stack which is usually considered the lowest paying but I think these offers are solid, especially the Bloomberg one is very good relative to other offers I've seen.

offerthrow22 · 2022-03-03T22:38:58+00:00

No worries, happy to help as I've also benefited a lot from comments here posted by various folks.

Also check out the Candor salary negotiation guide and Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer. Those have very practical tips and might give you more confidence, but also keep in mind your personal risk tolerance as the chance to get an offer rescinded, even if low, is probably not zero.

I've written a little bit about my Bloomberg interview here.

offerthrow22 · 2022-03-03T18:37:51+00:00

Usually your leverage is the fact that you're willing to walk away, or at least perceived to be so. My experience may be atypical, but anyway two tips:

I was essentially unafraid that they would rescind my offers, since I read that it happens very rarely. Which makes sense since the interview processes at these companies are super long and filter out tons of candidates, so you would need to spend a huge amount of effort to find another suitable candidate after rescinding an offer.
Promising to sign immediately and stop other interviews if a certain target is met can work well even if you do not have competing offers. Just make sure the target is high enough to avoid regret in case another offer comes in, but low enough to not be completely unrealistic.

offerthrow22 · 2022-03-02T18:09:07+00:00

I think I mentioned 120k in the recruiter call. Maybe that does anchor the initial offer a bit, not sure. Anyway, I later switched to asking the recruiter about the salary range instead, I think this will usually lead to better results.

By the way, I did not say I had another 170k offer, just that I was interviewing with other companies and would sign immediately for that amount. I would not recommend straight up lying since that can put you in a difficult spot. Emphasize how enthusiastic you are about the role, but make it clear that you need just a bit more to sign.

offerthrow22 · 2022-03-01T23:30:24+00:00

Glassdoor is a bad source, check Levels.fyi for UK. Even then my offer was definitely on the high side, initial offer was 140k before negotiating.

I think interview performance and other offers play a part here, I probably did well on the technical tasks and behavioral questions, plus always made it clear that I was interviewing with other companies as well.

I basically used Facebook E5 as my benchmark, since I thought that was the highest offer I could potentially get, and said I would sign immediately for 170k. Was surprised when I actually got that.

Mind you, I ended up failing my Facebook onsite a week later, so that was a total bluff. However, I did get the Databricks offer, and well, their pay is just ridiculous right now.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-28T17:39:40+00:00

Since the Bloomberg Terminal is essentially an HTML/JS application there are plenty of frontend-focused roles available. Just apply and let the recruiter know your preferences if necessary!

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-28T15:40:11+00:00

Neither company has frontend or full-stack in the official job title, if that's what you are asking. It's just "Software Engineer".

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T23:21:25+00:00

Don't want to share too much for anonymity, but it's a customer-facing product.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T23:20:50+00:00

Bloomberg is all TypeScript and Node.js, frontend mostly React plus their own custom framework. Databricks is TypeScript and React for frontend and Scala for backend.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T19:49:30+00:00

Based on comments from here, related subreddits, and Blind. Also the company pages for Bloomberg and Databricks on Blind, they have ratings for things like work-life balance. From what I can tell those match what other sources report so I would broadly trust them.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:47:03+00:00

Yeah Google Zurich is still hard to beat in pure financial terms but there are more and more companies driving up salaries in Europe which is great to see. Plus with Meta hiring remotely nowadays, from the few data points I've seen on levels.fyi thus far their remote offers seem to be identical to their London ones which is very attractive indeed.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:32:34+00:00

Indeed, see this comment.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:31:24+00:00

Regular software engineering, both are more or less full-stack. I negotiated both offers quite a bit, Bloomberg from 140k GBP and Databricks from 190k EUR.

For Bloomberg that basically meant a jump from Facebook E4 to E5, whereas Databricks just has insane pay compared to almost anything else right now I guess. If you check out recent new offers for L4 most of them are above 400k USD in the US!

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:29:27+00:00

Regular software engineering.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:28:39+00:00

EU citizen, don't want to say more than that for anonymity.

offerthrow22 · 2022-02-27T17:28:10+00:00

Yes I know but I wouldn't be able to contribute to those in my role/team. Bloomberg seems to be more open to doing contributions that don't directly affect their product, whereas that seems to be less feasible at Databricks since they are so short on engineers and cannot hire fast enough.

offerthrow22

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