How engineering salaries could get dinged by the COVID crisis
You are reading Compiler, a software engineering newsletter by Triplebyte editor Daniel Bean that delivers regular reportings and rantings on the industry's top news, trends, and interesting players.
Welcome back to the newsletter! I’ve written before about how software engineering jobs are well-positioned to weather an economic downturn. But as the COVID crisis continues to force tech companies of all sizes to adjust their operations and make cutbacks, could we soon see some salary erosion in these famously high-paid gigs?
To get a read on this, I spoke this week with Zaheer Mohiuddin and Zuhayeer Musa, the co-founders of salary research and comparison site Levels.fyi. The pair, who come from engineering backgrounds themselves, told me they are paying particularly close attention to the expanding world of remote software engineering roles and how its progression may impact compensation across the board.
Zaheer: With the few anecdotes that I've seen with larger companies, the cost of living differences in salary is negligible compared to the actual differences in cost of living. At least from the examples I'm seeing around Google and Uber having presences in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s cost of living is much lower [than Silicon Valley], and we've seen salaries still remain high. So I think it is kind of in the favor of candidates and cases like that.
But overall, this is something we'll have to wait to see where it goes as more of it rolls out. Will companies even get into more incentivizing with significantly higher packages for engineers who come and work at HQ? Maybe.
Zuhayeer: And one other thing Zaheer and I found quite interesting while thinking about this growth of remote work is that I think benefits start to play a bigger role in your package. What does insurance look like? What do child care benefits potentially look like? And can you negotiate these at a higher level because salary competition might not be something you can move as much if it’s market-defined?
I think companies already do this when employees go up the individual contributor (IC) track and start to negotiate things into their offer letter that would become part of their total rewards but not necessarily part of their cash or monetary compensation.
Along this line, actually, something else that we've been thinking about is how this move to remote actually affects the speed of career development in new talent. Whether it's the watercooler conversations that you would normally have or just the benefit of being able to ask someone in person about something work-related. It's a very different experience than having to ping someone on slack or whatever. Again, we don't have enough data for this yet, but I think an interesting trend to watch out for is how will this affect new engineers starting out at this time? Will they be able to progress at the same rate as engineers that were able to start off in person?
To read the rest of my conversation with Zaheer and Zuhayeer, check out my “Salary Update: Will Company Cutbacks and the Growth of Remote Affect Engineering Pay?” blog at Triplebyte.
News and Conversations
Maybe you can code, but can you pass the “Falafel Test” in an interview? The Next Web
Google announced new developer features at the “Hey Google” Smart Home Summit this week. XDA Developers
Build an app, win a Tesla. Monday.com
How Khan Academy transitioned to React native. Khan Engineering
A new iOS privacy feature caught Big Tech sites peeking at what’s copied to your clipboard. Gizmodo
You can now build Linux apps with Flutter. ZDNet
From Triplebyte
YouTube tutorials, LeetCode exercises, or textbooks? What study materials are most effective for prepping for technical interviews? The answer is more than likely some mix of all of the above, writes engineer Joseph Pacheco. Of course, the exact makeup of your interview prep “portfolio” can depend on your learning style and how advanced you are in your particular field. Read more about how to make sense of interview study materials over at Triplebyte.
What kind of battle are we up against when it comes to bias in machine learning models? A new blog by Triplebyte science and data writer Jen Ciarochi gives a thorough look inside the yucky — but not unsolvable — problem. “Think of ‘Racist Robots’ as a preventable future dystopian scenario.” You can read her full article here.
Some companies hiring engineers on Triplebyte right now:
Director of Platform Engineering at Praxis Labs in New York City
Growth Engineer at Triplebyte in San Francisco (Come work with me!)
Check out Triplebyte’s Actively Hiring page to find more companies that are looking for software engineering talent right now!
Tech Update of the Week
The Android 11 beta hit the “Platform Stability” milestone. If you’re working hard to bring your app up to the latest Android compatibility, you’ll be happy to hear that Google’s penultimate Android 11 beta (released this week) includes the finalized versions of the APIs and other behaviors expected to ship in the full release at the end of the summer. As explained in a write-up at VentureBeat:
Platform Stability means that Android 11 app-facing surfaces and behaviors are now final, including SDK and NDK APIs, system behaviors, and restrictions on non-SDK interfaces that may affect apps. App compatibility means that your app runs properly on a specific version of Android, in this case the latest one. Developers should install their production app on a device or emulator running Android 11, test all the user flows and features, and make sure none of Android 11’s changes break anything.
In other words, it’s time to get testing!
XDA Developers also has a good blog that shows everything else that’s changed in this week’s Android 11 beta 2 (mostly design stuff).
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