Oh gosh, the good old army and it's effective measurements techniques. I remember wanting to be a military officer after undergrad and getting disqualified at MEPS for a nonsense issue (which I'll omit for privacy) and the guy next to be getting green lit to continue processing with the Marines with a ...wait for it... 11/100 on the ASVAB.
3-4 years ago I had such a bad experience interviewing with this company. The recruiter actively told me he was waiting to hear a response from someone else before extending me an offer, that eventually came in 40-60% below my expectation. Would love to work in this satellite communications field though if anyone has any other recommendations...
Early in my career, I wanted to try one of SF's sales bootcamps because my idiot uncle was making > 400k in BD @microsoft. I was in my early twenties and all I saw was him wining & dining and making a lot of money doing it. Well for some reason, the sales bootcamp camp called a BD rep from a startup I was working at, and it turned out this guy and I didn't see eye to eye so he tanks my reputation to the bootcamp and I didn't get to move forward. I ended up having a nice career in tech over the last 15 years, I'm currently a staff engineer and interviewing for roles from senior staff to CTO level of startups but some part of me always wonders what if I was able to successfully pivot into sales...
I married someone from an IIT/IIM background and I think the public should really meet them and reduce this hype. My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). I've met many of her friends from a similar background from IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IIM-A. Infact the IIT-JEET exam is not even "that" competitive, I think a lot of people get caught up in their own smoke and believe millions of indians take it every year - the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school. Overall, while I think my wife is a wonderful person, I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equilance of a UC Davis graduate - (Cal/Stanford alum myself, but going off reference points off my high school cohort).
fwiw I'm a backend engineer - primarily building out services in Java/Scala/Go. I would say the market probably isn't as good as someone with a Masters/PhD looking for ML engineering roles, but that would be anecdotal after chatting with friends.
non-FAANG - I'm familiar with Disney's salary levels, and would say I'm getting offers at a level below what I would expect (or 40k-60k below on base).
Sorry for the confusion, I'm trying to interview for only staff/senior staff level roles. This company just had a job listing for "Software Engineer" to build out a new initiative so I decided check it out. And yeah, not getting the 20% pay bump between job hops that I'm looking for.
It's extremely brutal. I'm a staff engineer and a tech lead of ~12 engineers, I've either been getting low ball offers, or ending the last round of interviews to get no offer. I've employed but have been looking for a job for ~6 months with terrible results. I graduated from a T5 school, have worked at a "unicorn" startup, and have an average of 3 years at every role. My conversion rate is a little better - 3 interviews for every 40-50 apps, but I've gotten 2 offers for 6 months of searching.
My most memorable was this tier 3 hedge fund trying to convince me to take a junior IC role for a new team that had also hired a manager and director from outside the company for a new endeavor/initiative, and the manager had been at his last 3 jobs for roughly over a year each, get out of here lol.
Congrats on the launch! I actually considered launching something tangential - though I never figured out who the customers would really be nor how I would pitch this to companies. Excited to see where this takes you!