After last year's 10% rise and bonus-structure change, Google's salary is very high now. Counting salary and bonus, not counting equity-grant, Google perhaps pays the highest in the software industry now.
If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.
So if your only concern is money, you can still try to see how Google could offer.
> If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.
Are you including e.g. Morgan Stanley and Knight Capital in your pool? Because Google's salaries would have had to rise a lot more than 10% to catch up to those guys, last I heard.
Coding questions are often not the toughest interview questions.
Tough questions could be some "soft" non-coding questions like: design questions (how to design a class hierarchy for a blog), behaviour questions (if your boss is wrong, what to do?), experience questions (why did you use tool X in your previous project Y? I think tool Z is better.)
Those questions are tough because your performance on those questions are very subjective. It depends highly on if the interviewer likes you or not.
Coding questions can be tough, but they are much more objective. Google's engineering interview mostly asks coding questions. Questions can be difficult, but at least, if you write great code, you will pass the interview.
In this sense, Google is not a very tough company for job interview.
In general, the degree of interview toughness depends on the job supply/demand ratio. When many people apply for positions at company X, the company has to apply a high-rejection rate, based on whatever (sometime very random) criteria.
To continue coding in your spare time, you must have a real exciting project to work on: to learn a new technology, or to build something you really love. Without that passion, you won't have the extra energy to do that and it won't necessary to be beneficial.
So try follow your passion. If your passion is to write a novel, play guitar, do that. If your passion is to build a new web app, do that. Don't code just for the sake of coding. You cannot lie to yourself.
One issue with "Forward exercise" tough: by forward-exercising and converting to "Restricted Stock Unit", you avoid the high tax risk, but you also need to pay a substantial amount of cash in advance and bet on the future value of the company. Let's say you get $10k options at strike price $20, you basically need to pay $200K in advance to forward exercise. If the company dies in the future without anexit, you basically lose your $200k.
So perhaps the best strategy is to:
1) Forward exercise in several batches as you are gaining confidence of the company (but before the world has much confidence of the company...yet), and try to exercise before the next valuation increase.
2) Delay exercise as late as possible (closer to exit or IPO). But this usually works only if you join a late-stage startup, whose fate is more predictable.
If you are a startup, try issue Restricted Stock Units, rather than Stock Options to poor and hard-working employees. That will make your company more employee-friendly.
If you are looking for a startup to join, prefer those who issue Stock Units (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, which are not necessarily startups anymore though).
The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via:
1) Founding a business or startup.
2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google).
3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds
4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery).
5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.
If you mean upper-middle class then 4 and 5 are out of the question
If you mean upper class (top 1%) even 3 is out of the question. 500K a year is upper-middle-class in jersey and middle-class in manhattan. And after all of those expenses, you would be lucky to save 100K of that after taxes
If you mean `rich` (i would define rich as having enough money not to need a paycheck from another company -- maybe 10M in the bank is a good threshold) then 1 and 2 are the only ways to go
One thing to note: taxes are a pain. Most people in that 200-500K range are stiffed by the AMT (why I had to pay AMT at 22 is beyond me)
Somehow over the last 10/20 years, the notion of "rich" has had a much bigger inflation than the rest of the world, this is particularly true in the US. If your definition of "rich" is not needing a paycheck, then 2M with 2% interests over inflation should be enough to live OK in most countries except maybe Switzerland, Denmark or Norway.
OK... I have two answers to that. First, when you are rich, it is easier to get a better return on investment. Because you can afford better advisors, and because you work with higher volumes, bringing the transaction costs down, and possibly accessing to expensive investment products other can't afford. There are many articles on the rich getting richer, I will not post another one here.
Then, second point... Let's say you just get the return as high as the inflation... You still have a 2M pie you can eat from :) That would mean for example 50000$ a year during 40 years, augmenting pair with the inflation. I don't know well in other countries, but for me that would be enough to let the state retirement come. That wouldn't be the millionaire life but quite enough to enjoy my life with what I'd like to do. But for now I rather work and code/design things that matters :)
"when you are rich, it is easier to get a better return on investment" <-- This argument is valid at a scale two orders of magnitude higher than what I am talking about. It's easy to lop people with 1M net worth in the same bucket as people with 10B net worth, but there's a very meaningful difference there (beyond whether or not you decide to get a third bugatti). A million-dollar portfolio is below the thresholds that many financial institutions would consider for an investment.
"Let's say you just get the return as high as the inflation... You still have a 2M pie you can eat from :)" <-- lets say you are 25 now and you live to be 80. Even if you can just match inflation, you have less than 40K per year to play with. In most suburbs of NYC, its hard to live on that (taxes on a house alone will eat away a quarter of that).
Your arguments would be valid if I decided to move to a third world country. I could go to India and live like a king for the rest of my life on less than 300K USD. But now you are comparing apples to oranges here: taking earnings from a place where earnings and costs are high, and exporting them to a place where costs are low.
NOTE: My goal isn't to pick a fight. You will understand when you get there that a million dollars just isn't that much (and not in a keeping-with-the-joneses sense)
I quite get you're arent't picking up a fight :) I understand your points and agree we are picking different environments for investment. As I said, in Europe when you get at 0 when your are 67 (max!) is then covered by state retirement.
Your point made me think about geo difference BTW. It is now clear to me how much the US needs more performance from you to ensure retirement. BTW feel free to tell me if you want to follow that thread per email... I'd be glad to.
What is someone (I assume we're talking an individual) is spending on to be left with only 100k? After taxes you should have earned something like $280k to $300k; $180k to $200k is a hell of a lot to spend a year.
I also imagine you are using a high standard for upper middle class. If you use even top 10%, you are talking professionals earning > $75,000 which most programmers hit at any company (at least in the Bay Area).
Ah ok I was under the presumption we were talking about a family here (because the numbers mean something completely different if we are talking about one person -- who doesnt need a large house -- versus a family -- who needs more space and has other expenses)
The stories of Google, Facebook, and Twitter show that VC has values. We want more investments to start-ups, rather than the opposite. Let the market decide itself: the money will flow where the value is, eventually. I think success is hard either way: faming or mining, it is better than not trying.
If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.
So if your only concern is money, you can still try to see how Google could offer.