msort

Software engineers surely can make more or less in Financial Industries.

Please read my original comment, which was comparing Google with other software companies.

After last year's 10% rise and bonus-structure change, Google's salary is very high now. Counting salary and bonus, not counting equity-grant, Google perhaps pays the highest in the software industry now.

If counting cash + equity, adjusting for risk, only a few companies (FB etc.) now can beat Google in terms of expected income.

So if your only concern is money, you can still try to see how Google could offer.

A good read about the last internet bubble and Commerce One.

Coding questions are often not the toughest interview questions.

Tough questions could be some "soft" non-coding questions like: design questions (how to design a class hierarchy for a blog), behaviour questions (if your boss is wrong, what to do?), experience questions (why did you use tool X in your previous project Y? I think tool Z is better.)

Those questions are tough because your performance on those questions are very subjective. It depends highly on if the interviewer likes you or not.

Coding questions can be tough, but they are much more objective. Google's engineering interview mostly asks coding questions. Questions can be difficult, but at least, if you write great code, you will pass the interview.

In this sense, Google is not a very tough company for job interview.

In general, the degree of interview toughness depends on the job supply/demand ratio. When many people apply for positions at company X, the company has to apply a high-rejection rate, based on whatever (sometime very random) criteria.

To continue coding in your spare time, you must have a real exciting project to work on: to learn a new technology, or to build something you really love. Without that passion, you won't have the extra energy to do that and it won't necessary to be beneficial.

So try follow your passion. If your passion is to write a novel, play guitar, do that. If your passion is to build a new web app, do that. Don't code just for the sake of coding. You cannot lie to yourself.

Great writing.

One issue with "Forward exercise" tough: by forward-exercising and converting to "Restricted Stock Unit", you avoid the high tax risk, but you also need to pay a substantial amount of cash in advance and bet on the future value of the company. Let's say you get $10k options at strike price $20, you basically need to pay $200K in advance to forward exercise. If the company dies in the future without anexit, you basically lose your $200k.

So perhaps the best strategy is to: 1) Forward exercise in several batches as you are gaining confidence of the company (but before the world has much confidence of the company...yet), and try to exercise before the next valuation increase.

2) Delay exercise as late as possible (closer to exit or IPO). But this usually works only if you join a late-stage startup, whose fate is more predictable.

If you are a startup, try issue Restricted Stock Units, rather than Stock Options to poor and hard-working employees. That will make your company more employee-friendly.

If you are looking for a startup to join, prefer those who issue Stock Units (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, which are not necessarily startups anymore though).

A excellent idea executed beautifully matters.

Perhaps startups should spend much time experimenting with, pivoting with, possible ideas before focusing on one single idea 100%.

Searching for the beautiful idea using a breadth-first rather than a depth-first approach.

The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via: 1) Founding a business or startup. 2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google). 3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds 4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery). 5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.

Good example to show every area of Internet needs innovation.

Bookmarking is as old as the first web browser. It's great that a great team is trying to save communities and innovate in this area.

The stories of Google, Facebook, and Twitter show that VC has values. We want more investments to start-ups, rather than the opposite. Let the market decide itself: the money will flow where the value is, eventually. I think success is hard either way: faming or mining, it is better than not trying.

I really wish Larry read news.ycombinator.com.