There are plenty of talented C++ programmers. They just don't want to be abused by trading firms or work in that culture. Even paying them more won't work, because no amount of money is worth that abuse.
I interviewed at a trading firm once, while I was working at Netflix (because Netflix encouraged us to interview for outside jobs at least once a year). The comp would have been double my Netflix salary.
But I would have had to work in their office in Manhattan, be in by 8:30am every day and not leave until after 5 at a miniumum. But that wasn't the part that scared me off. It was the fact that I would not be allowed to share my work internally. I would not even be allowed to brainstorm with people doing the same job in other areas of the business. I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.
Basically, they were so worried about secrecy of their trading algorithms and people sharing them with other companies, they didn't even let people share internally for fear that one person would learn too much about their business.
I decided to stick with my FAANG job because even the ridiculous money wasn't enough to make it worth the stress and isolation.
Basically, they were so worried about secrecy of their trading algorithms and people sharing them with other companies
Which means if you took the job they probably would have had you sign some obscene non-complete/non-solicit/non-disparage/non-roll-your-eyes-at-them agreement. Despite the dubious enforceability of these, especially in some jurisdictions, you would still likely experience a lot of stress and expense (i.e. lawyer-up) if your departure rubbed someone the wrong way. Your exit from the trading world could involve:
- demands to keep them informed of what you were doing
- private investigators checking in on what you are doing
- threatening legal letters
- or actually being sued
And that's if you did your very best to follow the non-compete agreement. If you were actually taking employment in a field remotely related to finance, you could have the DOJ/FBI knocking on your door to investigate trade-secrete theft.
EDIT: And another point about "double the comp". The comp structured so that 75% is a discretionary annual bonus payout (with claw backs), and your base salary is 25%. So you could actually end up making less money, depending on the whims of the markets and/or internal politics.
I feel like some people responding to you have been nowhere close to a finance role.
First, those 8-5 hrs are only stated by your contract. Everybody on HN complains that "unlimited" PTO obviously does not mean "unlimited". Same as your "strictly " 8-5 working hours. There is a high level of peer pressure to get things done immediately.
Working in a mid office role, I frequently had front office at moment's notice ask to implement complex deals while trying to understand their vague descriptions of said deal. Now I have to spend an hour with them to parse out what they want. Good luck trying to have a mutual conversation with the front office in a high stress situation. I had to once implement a completely new computational feature to the code base in two days just to accommodate a single deal. And don't dare think that you can get into flow...
So not only can some of these deals have long compute times, but then you have front office analysts pinging you every hour to see "how are things shaping up" and if you have something ready.
Not only do you have your own tasks set by your direct manager, but you have several analysts on your ass that could drop a complaint at any second. In the end, you have multiple bosses. If they are unhappy with how fast you are delivering, you can bet your direct report will one day hear about it. There goes your performance review and year end bonus.
Now not only do I have multiple people at work on my ass, my family is pissed that Dad has to work late this evening because he was given something to work on that needs to be delivered asap.
Don't get me started on the snark by the back office. Not only can get shit on by front office, but the level of unhelpfulness by the back office made shit roll down from all sides.
Just to clarify, you used the word "abuse" several times to describe a job where you would have to work in office between 8:30 to 5 and pull (I'm safely assuming) half a million dollars a year?
8:30 to 5 was required, but also never working at home was required, so what I was trying to (poorly) say is that they basically expected you to live in the office and never see your family. I'll update accordingly.
And the comp package I turned down was about $700k at the time, which was 10 years ago. Nowadays it would be a $1M+ job easy.
But not seeing my family is not worth any amount of money to me, since there are other jobs for a lot less that let me see my family and live plenty comfortably.
That's not abusive. That's a rational security posture. Defense contractor employees can't take their work home either. It's nice when you can't be pressured to work off hours.
This isn't true by the way. A lot of defense contractors employ WFH or full remote procedures because 99% of your work will be on things that are unclassified. Most modern development practices separate out the classified material from the actual day to day work because not only is it better for security but also because forcing everyone into a SCIF wastes a lot of time and money.
Let me get this straight... you turned down a nearly seven-figure income because you would be required to not work at home and you were asked to stick to the same office hours as cubible farm workers making a tenth of that income?
Income has logarithmic value. His options were to make 350k and be happy day to day or make twice that and be in an activity hostile environment. Lifestyle wise there is little meaningful difference between 350k and 700k when you don’t have much free time to spend it.
Sure in theory he would be able to retire sooner etc, but retirement isn’t such a big deal if you don’t hate your job. Also, savings compounds so saving 3x as much doesn’t mean working 1/3 as long especially when you consider social security benefits etc.
I work on a software used (not exclusively) by the USA armed forces.
I work from home for the most part. I can do that while travelling as well but I have some limitations on which countries I can do that from. But I'm not sure of the entire list.
Yeah, for that compensation? No question. I'd maybe try and stay a little while past 5. Not sure how many months (years?) I'd last there though, not knowing how 'intensive' the work culture is.
The comp he mentioned is almost 11x of what I make yearly. Of course I lack the skills for a c++ job, but if I worked there for a year I could go on a vacation for the next couple of years. insane.
> But not seeing my family is not worth any amount of money to me, since there are other jobs for a lot less that let me see my family and live plenty comfortably.
That is fine and, tbh, a very healthy attitude. But it is not abusive in any meaningful sense of the word because it is not a worthwhile tradeoff for you personally.
Most HFT shops aren’t pulling crazy hours like that. That’s a wild exaggeration. I worked far longer hours at a FAANG than I ever did as a dev on a low-latency trading desk. Nobody at the latter ever got in my face and screamed at me, either. And guess at which of the two I got an unnerving call from HR asking if I could comment as a witness about some sort of harassment/bullying complaint two coworkers were entangled in during my second week on the job.
Yeah for real, I there is so many tech people are sheltered now days that if anything difficult comes there way they can't handle it. 700k for an 8 hour a day job and claiming to be abused is ridiculous.
It's fine for someone to say they don't want the job but claiming abused is something else. People work months away from there families to provide for them and make 10% of that wage.
It's not an eight hour job, you're completely misreading it. It's eight hours required plus another eight each day of overtime. Which is abusive for a software engineer.
And those people that work months away from their families -- they're being abused too. You'll notice that the owners of oil rigs aren't out there with them, for example.
16h a day is more like m&a hours. I don't believe a second that a quant, let alone a dev, in a hedge fund does anywhere near that time. Having to work late on rare occasions is a completely different thing though, and is not "never seeing one's family". M&A guys never see their family, they do those hours consistently.
> I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.
I did. Myself and multiple other commenters all seem to be on the same page, that your original comment says the job required being in the office 8.5 hours per day, and does not allow work from home. Your follow up comments imply the expectations were an order of magnitude higher.
The part you highlighted says you cannot work from home. That’s unrelated to the number of hours they expected you to work.
I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in or around finance that while the contractual hours are X, the work requires 2X hours, thus being unable to take your laptop home requires 2X hours in the office.
Perhaps it would have been helpful to actually say that given that this is not a forum aimed at or primarily populated by people who work in or around finance. In a general context, "8:30 to 5 and you can't work from home" sounds like a description of the standard 20th century business schedule.
Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
OP could have spelled it out, but in any communication there is a level of shared knowledge.
When you read a comment that you understand to be complaining about making nearly a million dollars whilst working 9/5 in the office, a more charitable path would be to examine your own context and shared knowledge, rather than exclaim loudly that OP is a bad person.
When OP wrote they were required to work in the office 8.5 per day, I assumed that they were required to work in the office 8.5 hours per day. I agree with the other guy, if OP meant to claim they were required to work 16 hours in the office per day, they should've spelled that out and not relied on people to guess.
I understand that, yes. But that's not what the original comment says. If the complaint is that ~16 hours is expected, the comment shouldn't focus exclusively on the fact that 8.5 hours is required.
> Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
Not the person you're replying to, but I was not aware. I guess we have a different cultural backgrounds and some things that are obvious for most of this website are not for me.
Also this makes me even more confused. So OP actually expects being pressured into working overtime (irrelevant where - at home or in the office)? And that's not even their main issue?
What's the point of getting a double salary if you have to work twice as much? Can't they (as a great software developer with a strong work ethics and a good work-life balance they clearly have) just... refuse the overtime?
I do know that finance people tend to be insane workaholics, but I was not aware that "software engineer who happens to work for a finance company" is a fundamentally different kind of job from "software engineer in the tech industry", with a different culture and harsher expectations.
A blind spot, I suppose; I have spent my whole working life in the West Coast tech industry - though discussions on this site generally seem to share that cultural context.
Before covid, working from home wasn't really a thing at the company I work for. That meant I arrived at the office some time before 10, was there for around 8 hours, then left. That's what "not being allowed to work from home" means to most people.
Yes but I think you're missing the point. It's not the eight hours, it was the specific eight hours regardless of any other work you did plus all the overtime that couldn't be done at home. ie. The complete lack of seeing one's family.
how do you know for certain you'd be required to do overtime consistently? you've never worked in the field. I haven't either but I'm not assuming crazy stuff like being required to work 16h a day. your stance is completely unreasonable. There are other commenters who have worked in the field and said no one was expected to be in the office after normal working hours
I met a banking C++ engineer years ago who was the only one left locally and spent his time teaching C++ to fresh offshore engineers in the form of code reviews. He was kind of a manager, though also his manager was probably rational.
1. It makes no correction in how an irrational institution is run that first level managers are rational. It just means they are stressed.
2. I met him at a language meetup for another language, he wanted out but would have trouble making half his salary.
(If you wanted me to trust code written by interns and reviewed across distance and language barriers, C++ wouldn't be my first choice, assuming I got a job in banking management, how likely would it be that I could change anything about that?)
I think it's safe to say that software development drains the brain fairly quickly. We've all slept under our desks a couple times and worked crazy hours for a few weeks, but anything beyond that doesn't sound humane or even possible. I straight up have difficulty conversing with people after those stints. Brain just shuts off. Stare at wall. Then again, there's astronauts and brain surgeons. Apparently trading desks need freaks.
I read that as perhaps having to stay in the office unreasonably long at times when there's crunch towards some deadline, as opposed to going home and working remotely?
I feel like software development is one of the activities that are difficult to estimate. There's scope creep and sometimes all sorts of deadlines for compliance or feature rollouts and so on, so the actual workload can vary a lot.
Not saying that's okay and shouldn't be considered a planning issue, of course.
No, I'm talking about right now. Or as soon as possible. There is no need, in 2023 AD, to work as hard as in the 1900 just to survive. Absolutely no need. Food and shelter could be easily provided for everyone. And if we can't "easily" provided it, then we should strive to do so. We have to shift from old patterns of thinking to new ways, we have to realize that the only thing holding us down is an outdated view of the world, more and more obsolete.
You are only saying that because you come from a position of privilege, where your work is loosely correlated with your actual survival. I don't understand how you could think food and shelter could be provided for everyone, easily, withiur ignoring all the people who work super hard to provide you just that. Unless you just mean that it could be provided easily for some people, as long as the lower stratas keep working to produce what's needed.
1 to 10% of population works in agriculture. This can be lowered even further with robotics and AI (sure, not in 2023, but in 2030, if efforts are made). They will then give us food and society in exchange gives them everything: schooling, medical care, holidays in nice places, maybe even housing in nice places (near a beach or a mountain). But I think at that point most people would work in agriculture for fun and for wanting to do something, and I honestly believe ag-jobs will be subjected to lottery, for there would be too many applicants.
Once food is taken care of, a great pressure would ease off and people would find themselves with more money, which then might be exchanged to less work.
Same reasoning can be apply to housing or even to medical care. The people who build houses would get the best spots for new houses, or the rarest food, or social recognition and status. And so the medics, teachers, etc.
This can't and won't happen in a day. There are many gotchas and unforeseen problems. But we can start working on it and planning and taking small steps towards this goal. It doesn't have to be all or nothing: it can be, for example, 1 hour off the working day every 5 years, for example.
On the planet I live on 30% of global population works in agriculture. Automation is inevitable and is happening for decades. More often than not it does't mean smaller farmers are given nice houses on the beach for exchange of doing nothing, it works more like huge benefits go to single megacorporation, smaller farmers are pushed out of the market to poverty.
The parent comment's wording was funny, but I think the point was that 9-5 was just the start of the commitment. They would have been expected to stay late and work weekends in the office, alone, isolated on their work until it was done.
Any engineering job paying double Netflix comp is going to have very high expectations about hours worked and rate of delivery.
I've worked on a trading floor before, a very nice one (by repute) but it is still a dreadful place to work. Imagine you are expected to do intensive knowledge work with high stakes and executive / management board oversight in the middle of a kindergarten which includes broadcast/loudspeaker announcements every 30 minutes. People shout, people run about, people stand on desks... Bedlam.
Brings back bad memories of my time as a developer in finance (big bond shop on the west coast). Walls covered in TV screens showing CNBC on mute until some bigshot was on (Fed decision imminent!) and then some intern walked around turning up the volume on all the TVs until the bigshot had finished giving his opinion. Ticker displays running non-stop causing more visual noise. Traders and quants running around. Analysts chatting with their buddies at other firms on the phone. Impossible to get in the zone, very long hours and, worst of all, having to do it all wearing a dress shirt and tie.
It was certainly a memorable experience, but one I never wish to repeat.
So....basically my previous work environment as a military officer in a high-level operations center, except with MASSIVELY better compensation? How do I get one these jobs if my C++ skills are "meh" at best and I haven't done finance/economics stuff since I was an undergrad? The stress and scope of responsibilities are almost a non-issue.
Hit the C++ books; pay for some training (there's plenty online). Then study hard for the interview. It's not rocket science to get some of these jobs.
Historically Netflix only had one level of engineer (this changed last year) with a starting salary of $400k, so I'm guessing it was substantially more than half a million.
I've not seen double, but I've seen a 50% increase, at assuredly a much lower comp level than Netflix, so, far higher marginal-utility for that income, and still wished I hadn't done it about 2 months in.
Like, if you'd put a button in front of me and pressing it would undo it like it'd never happened, I'd have pressed it without hesitation. And they weren't even working me long hours or being outright mean to me or anything, the place and the work were just dreary as fuck and it was making me feel like shit even in my off hours.
I had another job by month 4, and took a pay hit (though not all the way down to my prior level) to get out fast.
Avoiding more bad is more heavily weighted than seeking more good in the brain generally but this heavily differs between people. For many, adding more bad is only offset by an rougly an order of magnitude more good.
This is me. There are lots of jobs that you literally could not pay me enough to do, because they'll make my life miserable. I'd rather be underpaid and enjoy working than make millions and hate life.
Abuse comes in many forms. Just because they're paying "well" doesn't mean it's not an abusive environment. In fact, they are paying so well precisely because it'd abusive.
I worked in a high frequency trading company before. They had similar concerns about secrecy but I loved it. Even today I think it was the best job ever. Now I moved to the States and thinking of going back down the high frequency trading route again. I learned so much about computers - probably more then in any uni. By the way, work life balance was way better then in any FAANG company (I worked for two FAANG companies afterwards). Nobody ever expected me to be in before 930am and nobody ever expected me after 6pm.
> Now I moved to the States and thinking of going back down the high frequency trading route again.... Nobody ever expected me to be in before 930am and nobody ever expected me after 6pm.
That's probably because you worked somewhere with decent employee protections, since it sounds like you worked outside of the USA.
I also worked in the space, with Morgan Stanley’s options market making desk. It was all very sane. I’ve heard some of the prop shops and hedge funds can be crazy but not all are like that.
You keep making these sort of statements on this thread while showing an obvious lack of knowledge about what is actually like working in the industry.
I kind of agree with you. Having worked at HFT and now FAANG, I found HFT more satisfying and challenging overall - although it did have its issues, which is why I left.
It's like a start up / small company culture with great compensation - you have a direct impact very easily and it's obvious when others aren't pulling their weight. The one I joined had 10 hours a day (8-6) in the contract, but no one worked more than 8 hours in the office and they actually had very flexible hours as long as you delivered.
FAANG pays well but it is plagued with big company issues which can be very frustrating to talented engineers who just want to get stuff done.
It's also a big problem that trading firms absolutely hate remote work because of their secrecy/security demands. I've been working remote for the past seven years. Sorry not sorry, but I'm never again going to work in a cube farm or an open office bullpen.
It's a pretty drastic assertion (and quite HN worthy) that a whole industry is abusing their developers, based on not even one job, but your impression of a job based on an interview. And assertions like "they expected us never to see our family", because you couldn't take your laptop home? Maybe if you had taken that job, you would have left the office at 5 pm, 95% of the time. Maybe not, of course, but you don't actually know.
I've been working in HFT for nearly ten years, in multiple different roles. I've met well over a hundred developers in the business, have at least a dozen I'd call friends, who are spread over nearly as many companies at this point in time. Most folks have had overwhelmingly positive experiences in the industry. Like anything there are exceptions, but I've seen no evidence of a systemic problem in the field. I know a few people who left my firm to go to Facebook and found it more stressful there, for instance. Certainly, I've worked with very very experienced ex-gamedevs, who would say unequivocally that developer abuse is a far bigger systemic issue in game dev than in finance.
Obviously it's fine to post your take but it should be tempered by the relative amount of experience you have.
The pay & the taxes, mainly. It is more fun owning one of those German cars than helping write their software.
> Maybe it's because I'm looking for fresh graduate jobs...
If you are just starting out, observe that the point of a job is to make money. Give serious thought to finding a job that pays well. Most people you see are working solely because that makes them money, although optimising $/hr is usually not something people regret.
I'm not American. I think almost all European cities are a lot smaller and a lot less dense than Singapore is. And they have equivalent public transport, amenities, etc.
Make no mistakes, I don't have any illusions about cultural differences and am perfectly aware of grass-greener-on-other-side syndrome. I just don't want to be stuck in a 700 km^2 island all my life.
> It was the fact that I would not be allowed to share my work internally. I would not even be allowed to brainstorm with people doing the same job in other areas of the business.
This is what Apple does as well. So not all FAANGs are equal here.
My understanding is that Apple will let you collaborate after what you're working on is public. They just don't want people accidentally sharing unreleased stuff with people who aren't cleared to know about it.
I've been told by folks who work on infra there that they need to file requests to even talk to the previous owners of code if that person has moved to a diff role. So I don't think it's just for unannounced products.
Once something is released, there's general access given for that particular software/hw but it still needs to be requested. In a weird way, it creates some internal excitement on "secret" releases but obviously makes development much more difficult.
You didn't take a job because it's 8.30 to 5 and because of some undefined 'abuse'? That's what you've written?
Maybe it really isn't for you. On the other hand I've worked in this industry for 30 years, and done those hours, and longer, for 30 years, and enjoyed more or less every minute of it. I've flown all over the world, and been to various events and conferences that I would not have had a chance to do in another career.
I'm not clear what 'abuse' you think you're going to get. We are in a fortunate position in life actually, that we're developers that can change jobs on a whim and there's a large marketplace for our skills.
My advice to you is that you should actually have taken the role, gained some experience of a different industry (the first 6 months will be low responsibility), and if it's not for you, leave.
> It was the fact that I would not be allowed to share my work internally
I've only heard of one company that's as mad as that and they start with 'G'.
I worked for the G company I'm assuming you're referring to :) I left because of the insane paranoid culture.
I do however share the same sentiment as the parent poster - I interviewed for XTX for a c++ role when I quit and during one of the interviews I asked about on-call rota and out of hours work.
The answer I got: "oh, it's not too bad. We have a weekly rota, you can expect to get called maybe 3 or 4 times... a night".
I noped the fuck out of that.
Others like Citadel and Jump were similar stories. Many have made offers but a combination of insane out of hours requirements and non compete clauses means I've told them all to shove it, and took an "underpaying" role to achieve some kind of balance in my life.
That was 6 years ago and it was indeed tough back then, we were rewriting a huge trading system from Java -> C++ while trying to keep our edge. However, we succeeded and things have changed considerably since. We also have a dev working in Singapore now which makes support significantly better.
We were at least honest in the interview process regarding hours, there are companies where you would only find that out after starting. There were people who were willing to go through that pain and I think they would agree they were well rewarded but I understand some people want different things from their careers.
Indeed, I was very grateful for the honesty, because the roles otherwise seemed very exciting.
However, the moment someone would've announced that this was the reality of the situation I'd have walked out the door, because that is NOT normal under any circumstance.
Parent poster explained this very poorly, but it's not as simple as "office hours are x to y".
You are responsible for a trading system that's turning over hundreds of millions a day. If you're not in the office by 8am or whatever, that's not a "hey you were a bit late this morning" - it's a major "wake up the CEO the engineer on call is not present and we're not trading"! It's BAD. your train ran late? Doesn't matter, you're responsible. Your boiler exploded? Leave your house flooded, work comes first.
It's EXTREME pressure all around. I've done overnight support for a fairly infamous quant fund and I'm still on medication 5 years later because of the anxiety disorder I developed whilst working there. To this date the Blackberry ringtone triggers a PTSD response and I get physically sick if I hear it.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience, that sounds rough. I do know that support roles in the finance industry hit _hard_ and the difference between one person's work environment can be the complete opposite of someone else in the same position in a different company, or even in the same company but a different team.
I spoke with someone recently who is in sales for a large finance behemoth we've all heard about and even that person was like "Goldman is the worst, I'd never go there."
But, most developers in quant roles, or close to quant roles (trading infrastructure, research support, etc) do not experience anything like this. On call is rare for these positions and they have regular work schedules with normal hours. Plus the compensation is multiples of what someone in an overnight support role will get paid. You probably know all this.
I'm a developer in a quant role, and basically every job I've looked at in this market has similar requirements. See my other comment in this thread about the absurd support burden at XTX markets.
I was at Man AHL for 5 years after leaving GR and that is a pretty laid back company in comparison. I was not on a trade critical team per se, but some of our system were used for pre-flight checks. As such, if there was an issue the on call person got called at 5 am to sort it out. If not resolved within an hour or so, the cio/cro got called and had to decide whether to trade regardless or not. Thankfully not a common issue but definitely at least a call or two every time you did support.
>Basically, they were so worried about secrecy of their trading algorithms and people sharing them with other companies, they didn't even let people share internally for fear that one person would learn too much about their business.
That's probably actually required though.
There's a book called 73 Rules of Spycraft by Allens Dulles and these are obviously relevant for financial trading:
Rule 2, 3 and 4, are I think, the relevant ones in this case. Especially 4:
>No matter how brilliant a given individual, no matter how great his goodwill, if he is lacking in security, he will eventually prove more of a liability than asset.
These firms are in the business of finding and exploiting opportunities in the markets, before too many people know about them and the opportunity disappears. One person who knows too much could be an existential threat to the firm.
As someone who is a huge proponent of Free Software an an open culture and also who now runs a trading firm now, I completely agree with you. The industry is incredibly frustrating, especially to engineers and scientists. Because, by our very nature, we want to share our ideas and collaborate, because the best work is done together. There are no secrets internally at my company. Because I believe, in the long run, and open culture will win.
But you aren't wrong about the industry in general. It's crazy frustrating.
Netflix separated pay and performance. Your performance was evaluated all year, and if you weren't a top performer, you were let go. In the spring we would do 360 reviews, where anyone could write a review of anyone else, to give candid feedback (although giving candid feedback was encouraged all year, but this gave you a formal outlet to do it).
In the fall, your pay was evaluated (and kicked in at the new year). You were paid on the assumption that you were a top performer (otherwise you would have already been let go), so they would adjust you to "how much would we have to pay them to get them in the door today". They needed data for that calculation.
One source of data was how much they had to offer new hires to get in the door. A second source was industry salary surveys. And a third source was your offer letters from other companies, if you chose to share them. If you get a huge offer elsewhere, they would maybe match it, or maybe tell you that you're better off going to that other offer.
It also served another purpose. It gave you a chance to look at that other offer (assuming you could get one) and really thing about whether you still liked your job at Netflix enough to stay. They wanted people to be happy about continuing to work there, and were supportive of you leaving if you weren't happy, because they know you do your best work when you enjoy it.
FWIW, my raises at Netflix were typically 20%+, and so were a lot of people, because they economy was on fire at the time.
No, not at all. You didn't have to be a top performer at Netflix, you had to be a top performer industrywide. Netflix basically tried to keep only people who would be rated as top performers at other companies.
Think of it like a sports team (which is how Netflix always described it). They wanted the best people in the league.
Didn't it make you feel as though there was a target on your back constantly? What happens if something in your personal life results in you having a bad quarter?
Yeah that sounds like a nightmare. Then again, I'm only a solid B+ (grading scale, not language) engineer and I'm happy with that. I'll let the gunners take the target-on-back jobs.
Btw, can Netflix please put some of that capital in to better programming, or at least in to adding a "Delete + never show me this or anything like this every again" button. Platform is a pile at this point. No offense
Did you use that 700K offer for increasing the salary at Netflix?
I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well? Who decides whether you are a top performer or not - only the manager, or the peers as well? Do they use stack ranking? How is the performance deduced, e.g. by nbr of commits? Thanks!
I took the offer to them and got a nice raise, but not to $700k. :) In part because the offers weren't comparable. Finance is usually a modest base and a huge bonus, Netflix is straight cash.
> I've heard about the culture of fear at Netflix - was this your experience as well?
At first yes. But you quickly realize that in most cases only the underperformers were let go. In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go and they would sometimes even offer the other person their job back (but they usually already had another one).
> Who decides whether you are a top performer or not - only the manager, or the peers as well?
You manager has final and single say on both hiring and firing. But they always ask for input from others as a matter of course.
> Do they use stack ranking?
Absolutely not. Stack ranking is the opposite of what Netflix believes. They operate on the assumption that if everyone were stacked ranked, everyone would be in top rank. Stack ranking is evil and a terrible way to run a company if you use it for determining compensation or firing.
> How is the performance deduced, e.g. by nbr of commits? Thanks!
Haha no, no metrics like that. It's much more holistic. Are you getting good work done, are you making a positive difference. Managers are pretty in tune with the work getting done. Most come from engineering backgrounds and at least understand the work being done by those that report to them. They also can see all the feedback in the annual feedback session. It becomes pretty obvious who is not performing.
> In cases where good performers were let go, it was usually by a bad manager, and then that manager would get let go
I guess this is rare - the detection of such cases, since the bad manager's manager has to be aware. Also, the holistic evaluation makes things hard to argue - subjective opinions prevail.
Netflix would increase the salary of employees if they had higher offers. This idea is supported by Reed Hastings and IIRC was mentioned in https://www.norulesrules.com/. To get a raise, you are encouraged to get a job offer with that salary to prove you're worth it.
I know people here have a lot of issues with the word "abuse", but that is true. I only had a few days in my life where I was productive in the office for that long. Just after three days in a row of 8:30AM to 6PM would burn me out and I would be sleep-deprived and useless for the rest of the week, so why am I forced to suffer? They are paying one lemon a year so I HAVE to be in the office? It's just amazingly stupid, but that's American school of management for you.
I did crazy things when I was younger, and I would NOT subject myself to those now, so yeah - abuse.
It's a bit melodramatic.I work on a trading floor in Hong Kong from 9 to 7 which is less than most colleagues and allows me to take my kid to school in the morning and see her plenty in the evening (my dad had a small store and he'd do 8 to 8... 8:30 to 5 is really not normal neither in France or Hong Kong where I worked).
I can remote work, or remote connect to solve a hard problem, there's ofc a way to change these. As for sharing code internally, yeah, I fight for it and I get it (I m a Java dev and we need to reverse a lot of old C++ that the OGs gatekeep, takes lots of escalation to breach the "need to know" BS).
I think you can largely lower your salary to get a more junior position with no stress: I was a team lead working 6 to 11 in a startup jungling with timezone between mexico and Indonesia, and I joined the investment bank as a junior idiot for a cool 20% increase. And I refuse promotion, why do you think you d be forced to take the money and the pressure ?
I wouldn't really call it abuse, as long as all those expectations are clear up front. If they cannot function without those expectations being met by their developers, and are willing to pay a significantly higher salary to compensate for the inconvinence in comparison to other jobs, it just is what it is.
You forget the abuse. In most jobs software engineers are the revenue generators. In the trading industry software engineers are just something that stands between the traders and their bonus. And the traders can get really rude.
That is _not_ what he said at all, and many others have said as much. He said he was going to be _abused_. Really? Abused? Only someone with an extreme level of privilege and disconnect could use that word in that context.
And he complaints about abuse while working for... AMAZON. Seriously? The irony is palpable here.
I have yet to hear the stories about Citadel firing workers because they took a bathroom break.
when i interviewed for netflix i had to study their ridiculous culture document and found out it was a cult. i heard terrible stories of people being insulted openly. and you have to deal with endless leetcode bullshit interviews at FAANG which have nothing to do with your job and which disregards the years of experience you’ve built up all in the name of interviewing efficiency.
FAANG people don’t understand performance or latency anyway. they are focused on other things typically.
> There are plenty of talented C++ programmers. They just don't want to be abused by trading firms or work in that culture. Even paying them more won't work, because no amount of money is worth that abuse.
With all due respect you don't know what you are talking about. This doesn't represent my 15+ year experience in that domain.
> But I would have had to work in their office in Manhattan, be in by 8:30am every day and not leave until after 5 at a miniumum.
Must have been a back office job because that's not early enough for trading hours.
> They just don't want to be abused by trading firms or work in that culture.
Tell that to the hippie pinko commies. I love trading firms and their culture. What I don't like is IBM style artificial pushing of "company values" and the kind of dystopian "sensitivity training" right out of an orwell novel.
I interviewed at a trading firm once, while I was working at Netflix (because Netflix encouraged us to interview for outside jobs at least once a year). The comp would have been double my Netflix salary.
But I would have had to work in their office in Manhattan, be in by 8:30am every day and not leave until after 5 at a miniumum. But that wasn't the part that scared me off. It was the fact that I would not be allowed to share my work internally. I would not even be allowed to brainstorm with people doing the same job in other areas of the business. I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.
Basically, they were so worried about secrecy of their trading algorithms and people sharing them with other companies, they didn't even let people share internally for fear that one person would learn too much about their business.
I decided to stick with my FAANG job because even the ridiculous money wasn't enough to make it worth the stress and isolation.