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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.
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.
In my experience, the major difference between the most productive devs and the least productive devs isn't what they do. It is what they don't do. Experienced guys know where all the blind alleys are, where all the unneeded flexibility should be trimmed, and where all the bad requirements are that can be negotiated away.
Been in the business for 20 years. I spend a lot more time making other developers productive than I do actually coding myself. By applying my experience to all of their work streams rather than just my own, I make the entire project run much much smoother.
The trick is finding enough time to actually code myself to keep those skills up to date.