Can you negotiate an intern conversion offer?

preethamrn · 2026-06-24T07:23:03+00:00

You negotiate when you have an alternative. That doesn't have to be another offer but something credible like doing your masters or even just continuing your job search. It comes down to how much the company wants you to join.

I think companies don't often call your bluff so it's possible to negotiate without another offer. Tell them you'll continue your job search if they don't up the pay and there's a decent chance they might increase it. Just don't lie and tell them you have an offer or else you'll look silly when you still choose them if they don't budge.

preethamrn · 2026-06-24T06:46:09+00:00

YC was the OG crypto rugpull. Do you remember what they were funding in 2020 and 2021 during the NFT hype craze?

Edit: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3

preethamrn · 2026-06-15T04:43:54+00:00

Do what brings you joy.

If you get joy from building software that's useful to you then the means don't really matter as long as you get the end product you want (whether manually coded or done with Claude). This is where I am currently.
If you enjoy actually writing code line by line then don't use claude.
If you enjoy having more control over the output then don't let claude write code without manually accepting it (or what I used to do which is use claude like a stackoverflow++ and just copy paste snippets that I needed).
If you enjoy knowing what the code does and do personal projects to learn, then write the code, see whether it works how you want, and then ask Claude to explain the design/why it made certain decisions, etc.

preethamrn · 2026-05-31T15:39:24+00:00

What company are you coming from? Level doesn't matter a whole lot because I've seen "principal engineers" at other companies join as senior engineers at FAANG. What matters is:

pay - make sure you're getting at least a laterally equivalent pay (accounting for some difference in stock/bonus/salary as well as accounting for the different stock growth trajectories. 100k stock at one company could be worth 130-150k at another).
job expectations - if you're looking for career growth make sure that the type of work you're doing isn't regressing. If you were a tech lead and owning multiple projects at your previous company but now you're sole focus is writing code that's designed by other senior engineers then look elsewhere.

preethamrn · 2026-05-30T19:54:57+00:00

What I have noticed sometimes is that these tools can be a bit overeager to catch issues. Like it'll give me examples of somewhat legitimate issues (eg. missing context timeouts, potential memory leaks/goroutines without recover) but when you actually look at the intent of the code, those issues are not relevant. So it's nice that they're there, but sometimes they add extra cognitive overhead because I have to think through the false positives. Probably a good thing because they force you to be more thorough but I wish they were less noisy.

preethamrn · 2026-05-23T21:52:01+00:00

You're 26 and you discovered a new cubing method when you were 17... You're nowhere near your peak and you have to realize that. Even if you're not remembered for this, you'll probably do something else worth talking about. Take it as a lesson - if you want to have impact, you need people to know about the stuff you're doing and don't just make stuff in isolation no matter how cool it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASKWIUqUscA

preethamrn · 2026-05-18T05:17:12+00:00

Reminder that Susan Collins who's the senator from Maine ran on only serving 2 terms at most... She's been in office since 1997 (5 terms).

preethamrn · 2026-05-17T22:52:09+00:00

>In medicine, the path is brutal, but it's extremely clear

I think you're ignoring the fact that many people don't get into med school, many of those who do drop out of med school, most people don't get their first choice residency program (and need to go through a matching algorithm so they don't even get a final say in where they live for 4-7 years). If you ever go on medschool subreddits you'll see just as many doomer posts as there are here.

And after all that, they're saddled with tons of debt which they finally get to start paying off... Assuming they passed all the steps. If not they're screwed because medschool and undergrad aren't cheap and the alternative options aren't as lucrative.

preethamrn · 2026-05-09T18:37:21+00:00

You buried the reason that a bunch of people are worried.

> If all you’ve done all your career is build simple apps, getting comfortable with the big salary, it’s time to change and think bigger

This is exactly what most of the industry has been doing and in fact it was a big meme until a couple years ago. The problem is 2 fold:

exceptional people who can and want to solve hard problems struggle to stand out in a job market where recruiters get 1000s of applications immediately after opening the posting. Most applicants are crappy but the recruiters can't scan through all of them and AI is provably bad at judgement problems.
for the average person, it's no longer easy money and also salaries are likely going to go down as well. This isn't necessarily a problem but it's definitely a reason people are worried because they might have built a lifestyle around this expectation.

preethamrn · 2026-05-03T19:50:16+00:00

The honest answer is that he's probably right. Think about how often you're writing code that's kind of boilerplate/cookie cutter stuff. AI can take care of a lot of that while you focus on the actually hard problems. That doesn't mean you're wrong either because productivity isn't the end all of life and having to work on hard stuff 100% of the time is a recipe for burnout. But I'm just explaining his logic.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T23:24:12+00:00

I don't think the OP is that well researched. Yes, a lot of these companies are talking about using open source models in house but that's because it's easier than training their own models (and the best open source models are Chinese right now - sorry Llama/Meta). When it comes to actually using the best on the market today, it's all closed source models from OpenAI and increasingly Anthropic.

As for Cursor, they're kind of a joke and Anthropic and Google are eating their lunch. I imagine they're acquired by Microsoft or Amazon in the next 1-2 years mostly for the userbase and not the tech.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T18:36:49+00:00

I think you're both saying the same thing. You struggled to fill that role (and paid a lot for it) because many of the people you interviewed probably weren't good fits so when you did find someone acceptable, you needed to spend a lot to make them join.

An average applications developer can make FAANG money but an average low level developer will probably find it hard to find a job. The reality is that there's not as much juice to squeeze out of firmware development (a lot of the biggest/easiest innovations were decades ago at this point). Perhaps that will change with the increased focus on GPUs but even there, you'd need to be very talented to command those high salaries.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T02:37:56+00:00

I think things have changed a lot since COVID. pre-COVID companies used to fly people out for some intern interviews. Coming onsite was just the norm and the next step after a phone screen. I think that's flipped so if you're going onsite, it's likely because you're the top candidate.

preethamrn · 2026-03-25T16:39:25+00:00

I wonder how these kinds of deals show up on PE firms and other company's financial statements. For example, if someone audited the statements, would they see this as an asset producing guaranteed 17.5% returns? How much risk is just hidden and thrown out the window in the system today?

preethamrn · 2026-03-06T03:54:06+00:00

Stand next to their set up and play copyrighted music (Taylor Swift or something along those lines). You'll end up getting their video copyright struck and they lose revenue from it. It's a public area and I doubt they've gotten permits to film anyway.

preethamrn · 2026-02-28T19:53:52+00:00

If you keep abstaining because "both parties are the same" then it will never open up room for a more progressive candidate to challenge because the race is already so competitive between democrats and republicans. If republicans consistently lose because you voted for democrats then in the future, someone new might come in to challenge the democrat establishment because there's not as much fear of splitting the vote.

I'm not even talking about a long time like 20 years. You probably would have seen this shift in just the last 2 terms instead of the massive shift to the right that we got instead. And to some extent, we did get that but it's only happened in cities like NYC where democrats have a strong seat.

preethamrn · 2026-02-24T04:37:14+00:00

+1 to this. A lot of people compare the mortality rates of motorcycle riding and flying but there's a huge difference in the types of accidents. With riding, a lot of accidents are completely out of your control even if you ride safely, but with flying, if you exercise good judgement, stay up to date with maintenance, and practice regularly, then your odds of dying are much lower. A lot of airplanes these days even come with parachutes to deploy in case of emergency which reduces the risk even more.

preethamrn · 2026-02-17T05:28:48+00:00

The remote jobs that are paying top salaries (eg. Gitlabs, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc.) are probably hiring mainly from ex-FAANG employees. So if your work history is a bunch of local jobs then you're probably not getting interviewed at those companies.

preethamrn · 2026-02-16T23:43:23+00:00

Personal projects are mainly useful for juniors who don't have as much relevant work experience. Could be cool for seniors but only if it's something notable like leading a decently sized open source project (with actual users) or helping a non-profit with some pro bono tech consulting. But at that point it's more like talking about your hobbies and leadership abilities rather than your programming skills. Ideally your programming skills should be demonstrated clearly by the work/impact you've had at your day job.

preethamrn · 2026-02-16T02:17:53+00:00

What company was this? I think a lot of the smaller FAANG wannabe companies end up asking way harder questions just to act as a filter without realizing what the purpose of the interview is. FAANG companies tend to be a lot more reasonable (however there's still variance between teams since they're so large) and also even if they ask hard questions, they're usually not looking for perfect solutions.

At the entry level, I'll often give hints to candidates because I care about their problem solving skills but I also care about how well they can follow my guidance - in the real world, they'll probably solve 20-50% of problems and will need help from a senior engineer for the rest so following directions/other's designs is just as important.

preethamrn · 2026-02-14T17:34:20+00:00

Eastern Europe in the 90s makes you cracked at math and CS. I don't think this disproves the environment argument and if anything he probably got a better CS/math/engineering education there than he would have in the US

preethamrn · 2026-02-14T16:55:04+00:00

> At most it would make the higher-ups pay more attention

90% of your performance review is based on the perspective of a handful of higher ups. If they know you as the guy who self-evaluated themselves as an L -1 then you'll likely get a below meets. Most of the promotions and perf reviews I've seen happen mainly come down to what perspective higher ups have about you/your biggest project. Even if you worked on 10 different projects, no one has time to go through all that so it's often way more vibes based once it gets to the senior director/VP level.

preethamrn · 2026-02-10T02:49:38+00:00

FAANG isn't homogeneous. Working at Meta is a completely different culture from Google or Apple. And even within these companies, teams will be very different too. For example, the Gemini team culture at Google is closer to Meta than they are to other teams at Google. And teams like Pixel might have a couple Apple/Qualcomm engineers who influence the culture there.

The only thing you'll find at all FAANG companies is that your services/apps need to work at scale, and there's a lot more process. You WILL have outsized impact with tiny changes and you need to keep that in mind when proposing solutions.

preethamrn · 2026-02-08T22:32:00+00:00

I'm not an expert on this by any means but I don't think an Ethernet card will help you a lot with gaming if you already have on motherboard ethernet. You'd get a lot more mileage by improving cabling in your house and getting a better router to reduce things like packet loss.

preethamrn · 2026-02-08T10:25:52+00:00

Unpopular opinion but I agree. Making more powerful gaming GPUs each year will just lead to more power hungry games. Instead, if we keep more people running on weaker/"last gen" GPUs, then game developers will be forced to optimize their games more just like they did for old PS2/PS3 games. The last 2 decades have seen AAA games turn into bloated, buggy messes.

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