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Beijing Startup Offers Engineers $1M Salary Plus Options in Battle For Talent (financialpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Financial Post report: Beijing ByteDance Technology is the brainchild of entrepreneur Zhang Yiming. The company is best known for a mobile app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets. In five years, the app has become one of the most popular news services anywhere, with 120 million daily users. Toutiao is on pace to pull in about US$2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than US$20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX. In China, the Beijing company is controversial because of its recruiting. ByteDance hires top performers from such giants as Baidu and Tencent Holdings, sometimes raising salaries 50 per cent and tossing in stock options. "Our philosophy is to pay the top of the market to get the best," says the slight 34-year-old in an interview at the company's headquarters, his first with foreign media. "The company that wants to achieve the most, you need the best talent." Top performers can make US$1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with its hiring. Total compensation can exceed US$3 million.
I already make $50,000 working IT in Silicon Valley. Why would I want to move to Beijing?
It's well known that the productivity difference between someone just starting in software development and someone who is proficient in the art of development can be as much as a factor of 20. (Source: Mythical Man Month, and personal experience.) Yet somehow the difference in compensation (unless you win the lottery in some startup IPO) is more like a factor of 2.
This, unlike all other industries, where the difference in compensation correlates with the difference in productivity.
I hope this starts a trend. And I hope the trend also correlates with a trend towards weeding out unproductive--but politically connected--developers who seem to be managerial favorites but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
But I doubt it.
Chinese Overtime and most of pay is in locked stock also we can you right before it vests and you get 0
Given the enormous cratering in purchasing power of the US dollar over the past decade, this is more in line with where salaries for good tech people should be. And minimum wage should be $75/hour.
Tech companies are raping us.
Is that the new standard of company valuation measurement? Or do /. editors have an Elon Musk mention quota to meet every freaking day?
...in developing countries ???
Whenever I read about tech companies trying to attract "top talent", I'm reminded of a guy that I used to work with. Actually sat right next to - we worked together in one of those "collaborative" open office nightmares. This guy seemed to know everything. Every time somebody had a problem they couldn't figure out, they brought it to him. He taught me how to read Oracle explain plans, how to use Excel pivot tables, and how to write Emacs macros. Well, since I sat right next to him, we ended up getting to know each other pretty well over the course of a year - turns out this guy was a legitimate genius. He taught himself to program in elementary school, started college when he was 12, had a master's degree in CS, had published a couple of books about cryptography... he even spoke like four languages. I finally got around to asking him, "no offense but... why on Earth do you work HERE?" He seemed surprised by the question - turned out he had been out of work for a year before landing this (relatively unglamorous) job working on insurance software. He listed some of the places he had interviewed and been rejected for - all "brand name" places, all places that insist that they're trying to attract "top talent". Now, he was an older guy (mid 40's I think) and personality-wise a little bit like Milton from "Office Space", but it didn't take much time talking with him to know that he was exactly the type of "tech guy" you'd want in any position, but he had major trouble finding any work at all. The kicker? They downsized him after about a year... but they still kept me. No idea why.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
.. also we can you right before it vests...
You accidentally the whole stock option.
...you have a yearning need to contract lung cancer?
But google censors the shit out of it.
Only in China can you have a site like this which is not censored and the traffic totally killed by evil google.
fuck google
Been Humpin' on your mom all day!!!
I suppose these offers are for only Chinese citizens. As far as I know unless the company is listed a WFOE or is publicly listed outside of China, can a foreigner own a share of a domestic company.
Not that I'm bitter about my own choices (I am) and it is my own damn fault but... stuck at a transportation company in their IT department and HR believes we only have to compete with other transportation companies when it comes to wages and benefits.
I am constantly seeing DBA's and other highly skilled professionals come, get trained, stay 6-12 months, and then leave for better paid/less BS work places.
This guy has the right idea, pay more, but I can bet all his top performers are less than 32 in age.
I wish people would recognize talent where it is regardless of age... but we don't live in that fantasy land.
This time - and it's probably a fluke - Joe_Dragon is right. Can is a transitive verb. As in "We've got a bumper pea harvest, I think I'll can some". And it's short for shitcan, which means to dismiss or dispose of something or someone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The big difference is, in America almost all the compensation will be taken up by the PHBs in C$O titles and very little will be given to the developers and front line managers. In addition they developers will be called code monkeys by the C$Os derisively when they are having their three martini lunches in the corporate suite.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...bubble tea with your tech bubble?
And all three are exploited, making 100k-150K salaries. The best developer I ever met started at what is now a very large and well know company as a high school student. 20 years later the company has 5000 engineers. If it was a choice between him and 200 random engineers at the company, management wouldn't even debate it, everyone knows he's the smartest person they ever met. The frustrating part is in all three cases management knows they have people that are worth over a million a year and that these people are responsible for a significant part of the companies profit but they still treat these people worse than their average employee.
You can make an argument that football players, CEOs and bond traders are underpaid rather than overpaid because their salary seems a lot compared to minimum wage but if you look at at as a percentage of what they make for the people who pay them they're getting screwed.
For a startup with a few people you can make the case for IT people getting paid a tonne of cash, provided they can meet brutally tough performance goals.
Of course it's harder to justify this sort of thing for the average computer janitor when you can get someone in on a H1B to do it for a lot less.
Of course if you're a computer janitor you should support legislation like this
http://www.livemint.com/Politi...
Washington: A legislation has been introduced in the US House of Representatives which among other things calls for more than doubling the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000, making it difficult for firms to use the programme to replace American employees with foreign workers, including from India.
The High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017 introduced by California Congressman Zoe Lofgren prioritises market based allocation of visas to those companies willing to pay 200% of a wage calculated by survey, eliminates the category of lowest pay, and raises the salary level at which H1B dependent employer are exempt from non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements to greater than $130,000. This is more than double of the current H1B minimum wage of $60,000 which was established in 1989 and since then has remained unchanged.
It's probably fair to say this is effectively raising the de facto minimum wage for IT work.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Or it means your planning on canning them for long term storage.
Your example was poor but you are correct nonetheless.
Can is a transitive verb.
Why do they like Thanksgiving so much in Arkansas? They can pumpkin.
Unless you live in a very remote area and can't leave it for a personnal reason ( family, in love with the cold mountains of alaska, whatever ) , IT jobs are easier to find than a 7/11 store in thailand . So if these people stay, they are happy with the way things are. Not everyone is running after more and more money. Maybe they like their job, maybe they like their colleagues, maybe they just don't care because their life isn't defined by what they do between 9 to 5 monday to friday . And I understand that management increase the wage of the unhappy ones first, or keep the money for them altogether.
You lold me
It's typical for senior and principal SW engineers to make 300k+ a year at Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's normal to hit these levels when people are in their 30's. This is not rock star pay, but typical pay at these companies.
So if your rock star acquaintance is that talented and only making 100k-150k/year, it's because he/she has other major constraints. Refuses to move, can't work with others, crippling social anxiety, etc. Blaming this on "management" is short sighted because this person could leave their job. Good engineers are in very high demand in the US.
Remember, the people in the IT department at any company are seen as a cost center. Unless you are programming in a company that produces software you are seen as a liability not an asset.
I guess your mom was reading it out to you and censored the "short for shitcan" bit because it's not suitable language for a five-year-old.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
$640k is enough for anyone.
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Dream on, broham. FB & GOOG hire and promote mostly based on nepotism. Just like every other company controlled by the Stanford VC cabal.