Coding Blocks - The Great Resignation

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

We're living through the tail end, maybe?, of the Great Resignation, so we dig into how that might impact software engineering careers while Allen is very somber, Joe's years are ... different, and Michael compares Apples to Apples.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 180. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcasts. By now, I hope we're there. Or, well, I guess not or. You can also visit us at codingblocks.net, where you can find our show notes, examples, discussions, and much more. And you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at codingblocks.net. And follow us on, you know what?

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This episode is sponsored by Mergerfy. Save time by automating your pull request and securing the code merge using a merge queue. All right. So tonight we're talking about the great resignation, which is a kind of phenomenon that we're going to find here. But basically, a bunch of people have changed jobs over the last couple of years in interesting ways. So we're going to talk about that, what uh why we think you mean you know the experts think it happened and kind of what it means for the future of developer jobs first couple reviews i'm curious about these quote interesting ways that they that they that they resigned in did you have stories like that at the ready for us like

did i say interesting ways somebody parachuted in to like drop off their resignation like i'm out yeah so we'll have some uh resources above just like people quitting on camera in spectacular ways oh nice okay so i'm interesting uh interesting reasons why why they quit not okay ways they quit sorry all right well right. Well, uh, you know what? We'd like to say thank you to those who left us a review. So from iTunes, we got Chuck rugged. So thank you, Chuck. Or was Chuck rugged? Oh, Oh, that's a good point. It could be, don't know. We'll have to find out later. You could leave, you could always leave a comment on this particular episode at CodyBlocks.net slash

episode 180 and let us know whether it was rugged or rugged. Yeah. I want to know. We need to know. If you get to pick, I know which one I'd pick. The sand. So what is the great resonation? Have you all heard this term first off?

Yes. I think I have. Okay. Yeah, I hear it on the radio and stuff, the news sometimes. So I've definitely heard about it for a couple of months. And I got kind of interested in it because I heard from someone that there are a couple industries, you know, people quit more, more often than others. And I was interesting, interested when I heard that software development was the highest rate. Yeah. Across the different sectors that they looked at.

Now, is that the highest just because of the great resignation that happened during the pandemic? Or is that just a general, you know, truth? So I'm talking about great resignation. Okay. And the great resignation wasn't just software, right? truth. I'm talking about Great Resignation. The Great Resignation wasn't just software, right? We're talking across all industries

in the US. That's why I was curious to know if maybe with software development always a high attrition rate versus during normal life? What did we refer to life before the pandemic? Like normal stuff? Things?

Pre-pandemic. Yeah, whatever that life was like. Guess what? We have answers to all those. We're going to have to do some digging in the articles here. But the Harvard Business Review has got a really great article with a couple of stats on stories. We got a bunch of links that we'll have in the show notes down in the resources we like section. But to answer your question, so just really quickly, when I'm talking about the Great Resignation, I'm talking about a specific period in time that started – I forget when. I should have pulled up that chart before we started, but Wikipedia has an interesting chart on it that makes it kind of easy to see.

But you'll see right at the beginning of the pandemic, when the US shut down, there was a huge spike in layoffs. And so a lot of people went out of work and unemployment spiked. And then kind of after that, you see the jobs start coming back and then you see all these people quitting and sometimes they had new jobs to go to so they didn't actually affect the employment rates and sometimes they just quit uh which is you know kind of interesting so let me find out that time period okay here we here we go. So I'm looking at a chart on Wikipedia. Doesn't really say the month, but basically early 2020. There's a huge dip and then a huge increase. And I say huge increase.

Ultimately, we're talking about the rates of people quitting got up to 3%, which doesn't sound very high. But when you think about it being on average like 2% in the last five years before, that's like 50% increase. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. It was millions of jobs. Yeah, we're talking about the workforce, right? The entire workforce, right?

This is the U.S. workforce though. Right. This numbers, this graph that I'm talking about is specifically U.S., but this phenomenon was not specific to the U.S. In fact, let me see. I got a list here. Europe, China, India, and Australia also had some kind of similar phenomenons, just not to the extent, not the rates that we did. Yeah, and so there's some interesting things about it. So one thing that's interesting is that we saw that there was a lot of worker demand and labor shortages.

If you remember, you know, or I'm sure you saw this like early on in the pandemic, you pass by places that were just desperate for workers or places like a mcdonald's or something would be closed and they'd have a you know please come to work kind of sign because people just weren't showing up and so that's you know kind of funky makes you think that maybe those people have better jobs to go to or maybe they just decided it wasn't worth it for whatever reason oh yeah i don't know about in your area in in your neck of the woods, but there are areas around me that have been closed. Thinking of restaurants and whatnot, where the dining rooms have been closed since this started,

since the pandemic was declared in early 2020. Yeah, still are closed, right? There's many of them around us. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like, you know, so for two plus years now, some of these places have been closed like that. And I don't know if it's because of the worker demand not being there or if it's, you know, other reasons.

But yeah, I mean, I guess now that you bring it up, I'm like, oh, it's probably worker demand yeah i guess is what i would guess maybe and so i will say that um the uh depending on different articles and how they slice it up um the hospitality industry uh had the uh generally agreed upon the highest rates of people quitting without swapping so it always was like they didn't quit one job in hospitality and take another job in hospitality. But when I, okay, so what is,

uh, you know, forgive my ignorance here when we say hospitality industry though, cause I think of like hotel type industry or catering or yeah. Yeah. So the official definition is broad category that includes, uh, lodging food.

Okay. So restaurants are in that. Yep. Uh, lodgings, food and drink services, event planning, theme parks,

travel, and tourism hotels, tourism agencies, restaurants, and bars. Yepels, tourism agencies, restaurants, and bars. Yep. So those people quit and didn't come back. They quit, got a job in a different

industry. Maybe. It's hard to really say. Oh, okay. So they could have quit and just not gone back to work, period. Yes. And there's definitely a lot of people did that because the second point here I got that's kind of interesting is that this is a period of high unemployment. So even though I said there was high worker demand, there were a lot of people out there. And if you remember the way unemployment is measured, it gets really tactical into very detailed specifics.

But you can kind of think of it generally as people that want a job. They can't get a job. How do you measure want? That's tough, but it, you know, there's just some fancy statistics and gathering methods. Okay. Again, I'm going to have a whole bunch of like ignorant questions that I'm going to ask because at least in the U S though, the unemployment is calculated based solely on those that are collecting unemployment insurance, right?

No, no. I thought it was. No, the, um, there's the federal, oh gosh. based solely on those that are collecting unemployment insurance, right? No. No? I thought it was. No, there's the federal – oh, gosh, you're going to make me do some work here. There's someone that basically – there's an agency that publishes a report every month on unemployment, and it's not specifically the unemployment benefits. Well, how do they know who's unemployed then? I thought that was the whole way that they knew was like, if you were collecting the benefits, then they would know that you are unemployed. And so that's where they could track the number. And then, but then the

problem with the unemployment benefits was there could be reasons why you no longer qualify and you roll off. And so therefore you could technically still be out of a job and might want a job, but yet they're not tracking you and you don't count towards their numbers. And then there's also people who, you know, don't qualify for it and didn't aren't trying or don't care to have a job either way, you know. So I thought there was like two groups of people that like might not be counted. Well, we also have to remember during this this pandemic, right, there was the stimulus checks and there were people that were actually making more not working than they would have been working 40 hours a week. And so that might be part of the high,

just, hey, I'm not going to work right now, right? Well, I'm not even getting into that. I'm just trying to understand like the number. The unemployment. And I thought that it was tracked based on unemployment. So Joe's telling me I'm wrong. So the real answer is several pages. They do publish, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes

a monthly basically report on this. But it comes from a bunch of different sources. So unemployment factors in like the unemployment benefits in the U.S. Also there's some surveys that they factor in where they go out and actually call or do some sort of census, you know, statistics gathering. There's a bunch of other,

I mean, it's, it's like pages, but we'll have it in the show notes. But basically the, here's, they've got the outline. This is on the actual Bureau of labor statistics uh website saying the basic concepts

are um they try to identify people who have jobs and are employed people who are jobless looking for a job and available for work and say the labor force is made of the employed and unemployed and people who are sorry these are just the. This is not how it's actually measured, but these are the kind of the actors. So there's people with jobs, people who want jobs, both of them altogether. And then people who are not employed, but don't want to be employed and they're not part of the labor force. Right. elderly, you know, retired people, for example, might fall into that ladder one or like, um, you know,

a stay at home spouse might fall into that ladder category. Yeah. And they, yeah, they talk about like people being on maternity leave or paternity leave or, um, you know, striking being part of a labor dispute.

Like it gets, it gets really down to the weeds. Hmm. Learn something new. So we were in high worker demand with labor shortages and high unemployment at the same time. Yeah. So right there, there's a couple things you can kind of infer.

Maybe those jobs that were, quote-unquote, high in demand didn't pay enough or weren't flexible enough or weren't interesting enough. Or maybe people were scared of the pandemic or, you know, just decided to do other things, had savings to fall back onto, were holding out for something better. Maybe they just took longer to get another job. I mean, I definitely read stories during the beginning of, you know, well, maybe not even beginning, but, you know, within like, let's call it the first half of this thing where, you know, for some people, it was a matter of not wanting to take the risk of going back to work or because like maybe their work environment, you know, they just didn't feel like it was safe for their family. And so, you know, when they did the calculus, they were like, you know what, it's just not worth it for me to go in and take that risk and risk bringing it back to my family.

And then there were also people that had, after being forced to reevaluate finances and whatnot, realized, you know what, I can not go back to work and it's actually going to save me money because maybe cost of of child care and things like that you know um so there were there were uh you know personal reasons that they would that they you know decide and come to that would say like hey you know what i i don't have to go back to work but in that case though they're like not counting in this unemployment rate because they decided that they don't want to go back to work in that, at least in that latter example. But it's the way that, you know, like no matter how you slice it,

the way we measure unemployment is far from perfect. Right. So you, people argue all the time that it's really higher or it's really lower, you know? And it's hard to say your, your next stat is actually pretty interesting yeah this is interesting so um employees between 30 years old and 45 years old had the greatest increase in

resignation rates with an average increase from pre-pandemic of 20 from 2020 to 2021 so people in 30 30 to 45 years old were more likely to quit. And when they say quit here, it's quit or change jobs. So it's interesting. Leave Microsoft, go to Google. Leave Google, go to Apple. Leave Apple, go to Spotify. Oh, or they, okay. Anything.

They went to McDonald's. Could be cross-sector. Yep. It could be could be uh the low uh the resignation rates actually dropped for people in their 20s i didn't see a number for that or at least i didn't write it down so most people in their 20s held on to their jobs yeah so i wonder if there's some assumptions there yeah i wonder if there's a stat there that like they were incentivized to stay like the employers were like, we now have a younger

workforce and we would like to keep it that way. Yeah, or maybe they didn't have a month's bills in the bank or something. Maybe they had less money in savings than older workers. Yeah, that's a very good point. Starting out, you got school debt, whatever. Yeah. Older workers are maybe like, you know know what i don't have to take this crap i got more connections in the industry more places to hop like newer person they're just kind of maybe feel lucky to have a job right i don't know uh so i mentioned uh tech and actually health care too uh led the trend um we were at 4.5 overall at 3.6% for healthcare. You think like most of the US was

50% increase on people quitting. We were double. It's a lot. I know a lot of people just anecdotally that changed jobs during the pandemic way more than the last couple of years. I don't know how you all feel, but it definitely felt high to me.

Yeah. I definitely saw several people move no doubt yep and um i'm inservient about it people said the stagnant wages working conditions um were the the leading causes for why people said they left i mean i wouldn't be surprised especially in our industry when a lot of the big companies facebook um they were one of the ones that led the way with saying, hey, we're going to be remote from now on. Right. And so you'd see a lot of people saying, oh, I don't have to go to an office and I'll never have to go to an office. I'm going to go ahead and go apply for Facebook or meta or whatever you want to call it now. But but I think that we saw changes in our industry that probably prompted people to say, you know what? Like, OK, I live in, you know, I live in Arkansas somewhere where the wages aren't as high, but I can work remotely for a place like Facebook and make more money and ultimately have a better quality of life.

Right. I don't have to live out in California where the prices are higher. I can live here and live better. So I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of that happen too. Yeah, I think that's kind of the main takeaway for me in thinking about this is, okay, the great resignation, it already happened. That already started last year. It's kind of calmed down by now. What does it mean for us going forward? I think part of it is like, yeah, you've seen companies already adapting and realizing, oh, you know, our workers want more flexibility. They want higher wages. They want to work from home and they want to be able to live wherever they want to. So people in the tech industry, at least, have kind of opened, that's opened some doors with even major companies and a lot of small companies for sure going full-time

remote or remote as an option now what's this what's the stat though for people that quit because they wanted to go work somewhere else to like code and go or rust i mean those were high on the stack overflip right yeah i'll have to look at the survey results i wish we could do stuff like that that'd be nice to fill out some government forms every time you quit jobs let them know why and fill in the comment section. Yeah. That's what we want to do is like have to tell the government why we're leaving.

Yeah. And you're going to answer it honestly too. That's what I was going to say. Everybody's going to be completely honest about it. It actually reminds me, I was listening to not this American life. What's the financial one? It's one of those. Planet money. Planet money. Yes. I was listening to, not This American Life. What's the financial one? It's one of those.

It's Financial Life. Planet Money. Planet Money. Yes, I was listening to that. And they were saying that they were actually, there was an episode about what makes a good manager. And I know this is a tangent. But the interesting thing was they said it is really hard to quantify because the only way you can get data about this is with surveys and surveys are just horrible with honesty because people, when they, when they

do something about their, their manager, right? Like, is he good? Is he bad? Is she good? Is she bad? You know, they think that, Oh, well, if I say something bad, that it's going to reflect bad on me. And so, and so people just aren't honest with it. And so, you know, that's, it just reminded me of that whole, Hey, if you leave and you tell, yeah, you're not, nobody's going to be honest. So you're still not going to have any good data. Yep. Yeah. As I feel like if you survey even the same person, just at different times, it's like, while they're still working in the company, how's your manager? Like four or five, uh uh after you leave and after you've had a beer one out of five is your next job interview maybe three right now yeah yeah it's it's horrible and i don't think it's anything that people do on purpose it's just you know a lot of questions like that you answer

they they can be emotionally charged and it's you, you know, it's like you said, it could be a different time of day. Yeah, so what's the right answer? How was the manager? Yeah. So numbers are hard is what I'm wondering. Numbers are hard, yeah. Even when it's just a one to five, numbers are hard. Well, I, for one, love Roman numerals.

What is that? Wait for it i think i'll offer us do you just connect i got it i don't get it i for one oh love roman numerals Oh, love from innumerables. Okay, nice. Thanks, Darren. Yes. Very nice. So let's talk about what this means for the companies. Think about if you're Facebook or Microsoft or even smaller companies too, maybe even more impactfully for small companies,

the number of people that you've got quitting and coming in has doubled from doubled from the year before and now especially with covid going on stuff a lot of times you aren't in the office you know things are just different the way your work is different and you're the work you've got to do just the overhead of hiring people is is doubled and hiring is not cheap you got to find people there's referral fees if they get referred recruitment working with agencies getting job descriptions up. Even putting a job description up on the websites. I don't know. It feels like a lot of work.

I hate it. And then once you hire them, how long does it take for a person to become productive? Until actually earning their salary. We'll get into this later. But we were looking at Netflix hires grads right out of college and pay them, uh, like 240,000 a year. And we looked this up and ends up being about a thousand bucks a day. So your first day of work, they hand you a thousand dollars. Second day of work, a thousand dollars. You have done squad, right? Yep. How long until you start actually earning your keep? It's crazy to think about.

And, and here's the thing, right? When we say hiring is expensive, if you take it out even further than that, so it takes you, I don't know, let's say six weeks for somebody to get productive and actually really know what they're doing. If they leave, at that point, it's more than them just leaving because now you've got another six week ramp up time for somebody else to, to slot in there. Right. So yeah, it's expensive all the way around. Retaining and acquiring talent is it's, it's way better if you can retain it.

Right. Yep. Yeah. Companies really don't want people to leave. And so, uh, you know, what are companies to try and keep you?

I mean, it doesn't feel like it sometimes. Right. Right. I mean, it really doesn't feel like it really feels like companies are more like they, you know, they want the fresh ideas and they want to churn is the way it seems like nowadays, at least in some of the companies we've been in that have high, high churn. Maybe it's interesting though. So it seems that way because there is high churn. Maybe. It's interesting, though. So it seems that way because there is high churn, right? But we've talked about the FANG companies, right? And a lot of them have similar compensation methods, right? They pay you a decent salary, but then they really compensate you with stocks, right?

And the way that they try and keep their hooks in people is, hey, you're not going to start getting those stocks until you've been here a year. Right. And then you're really going to start making some good money because it's going to start pouring in. So so if you look at it purely from a compensation standpoint, it looks like they are trying to retain talent. Right. Because it's what they call the golden handcuffs, right? Like you see this big chunk of money that's going to hit if you stay for a year, you're going to try and stay that year, right? No matter how bad it is, you're going to see this payday coming up. And so it seems like that's what it is, but there definitely is still high turnover, even within these companies, right?

Where they do compensate very well yeah it's interesting especially if uh yeah i think um if you're there's certain kinds of shops especially like game industry is famous for like kind of hiring young burning them out and letting go but if you uh your next wave of workers every year is coming in winning 10 percent more salary because the market's gotten more competitive and that gets a little less appetizing, right? Yeah, that's true. So I think the hope here is that with these companies are having to compete with this huge now global job market

that the companies have to have better offerings. So now, you know, we mentioned a person in Arkansas going to work for, say, Netflix. Now the companies in Arkansas now, they've got a decision to make. Like, what are they going to do to try and keep that person that used to work for them? You know, maybe they can give them better working conditions, maybe better pay, maybe, you know. I like how Arkansas is the example here because you know who's based out of Arkansas.

Walmart. Walmart. Dude, right. Yeah, who's notoriously not paid well, right, for a talent. Or corporate Walmart, though. I don't know what they do, yeah. Because that's what I was thinking of. And, like, all the efforts that they're having to try to, like,

push back on the competitive pressure they get from Amazon. Well, they are the number two online retailer, so they're not doing terrible. Yeah. But they used to be the number one retailer. They did be., but they used to be the number one retailer. It did be. Yeah, they used to be the number one,

but it is interesting though. When you think about that, when you take the economics from a higher earning area and now it can become more global, it does change things. And it's like Joe said, like if, if every single developer in a small

town in middle U S somewhere decides that, Oh, well I can, I can work for Netflix or Amazon or Facebook remotely, then, then the companies there have to start figuring out, well, what am I going to do? Right? Like, how am I going to get talent? Because what a lot of companies seem like they want to do is they want to go after young talent coming out of school, but then those people in school, they're going to get that experience and then they're going to leave too. Right? So you, you, you have to figure out a way to keep the churn down. Yeah. It's interesting. So if you pull back for a second, say, okay, who, who is this good for people in low cost of living

areas this is great because now they can they have much better opportunities than they had before well who is it bad for a lot of the people that were living in these high cost of living areas that used to have to live there to to have high jobs so people in silicon valley people in new york city like you know people in los angeles this is rough for them because now they're competing with people from you know poor i don't say poor but like lower cost of living places and you know people in los angeles this is rough for them because now they're competing with people from you know it's poor uh i don't say poor but like lower cost of living places and you know we're talking us here so i said you know we've talked about like arkansas mississippi whatever but uh when you look globally like there's a huge skew on like salaries and so if you say like i don't know uh cambodia salaries compared to san francisco salaries like it's a huge

dip there and so you know globalization we saw what happening with like manufacturing and stuff in the u.s like things went all over the place and not necessarily where you might have expected them to go so uh it definitely benefits people in lower cost of living you know areas with good internet right yes and it hurts local companies too right it makes it easier for those companies that can't afford to cast a wide net to do that and you know the companies in arkansas for example it makes them you know they have to compete harder okay so the takeaway for all this because this is this is software development this is coding blocks not a hiring box right but the takeaway for all of this is to get a job,

a software developer job, uh, move to the lowest cost area that you can possibly afford that has the best internet and, and just work from there. And hopefully like maybe you can get to, like if you're going to stay in the U S you could move to one of the States that don't have an income tax maybe,

or a state income tax rather. Or, you know, maybe go somewhere else too. Yeah. Go explore the world. But that's the, you know, it's, you know, it's really ironic about that. Tennessee actually ranks high on everything you just said. They, um, there was actually an article written in one of like entrepreneur or something like that. Um, the Chattanooga area specifically has one of the best internet infrastructures in the country.

And, and the cost of living there is not crazy either. And there's no state income tax. So it's like, if you can get out there, you like the mountains and all that, you, the,

you got a nice place to live with, uh, with some access to some fast internet. So I was saying like Arizona or Nevada. Doesn't one of those areas, don't they not have a state income tax? I'm not sure. I know they're hot though.

Yeah, I like warm. That'd be good. I'll take the mountains. I don't want to deal with snow. That sounds awful. The kind of calculations you're doing there, I think are the kind of things that developers are doing right now at home. They take a list of things they care about, like health care, child care, education, closeness to family, cost of living, blah, blah, blah. And they kind of do this math.

And I think a lot of people are deciding to move and stuff. And we've seen the housing market going crazy, too. I don't know how much of an impact remote work has had on that, but I imagine at least a little. Anecdotally, we definitely know people who have moved from expensive areas like Seattle's to Tennessee's or New York's to Kansas or whatever. Yep. Yeah. So why do people change jobs anyway? I looked up a couple reasons.

The obvious ones are kind of promotions, better conditions, more flexibility. What's interesting was I thought it's like sometimes you just leave problems behind. You don't like the people, you don't like the project, or you're worried about it for some reason. Or there's that ticket that you just can't finish, and you're like, well, this is the easy way out. Yeah. You wake up in the middle of the night, and you're like well this is the easy way out yeah like you wake up in the middle and you're like oh man i did something wrong i'm gonna quit and then you know and then your co-workers meet up with you later and they're like we're still trying to figure that out yeah yeah not my problem you know it's funny though we've talked about this before one of the things that and I don't know if this causes people to do it, but, you know, as you stay at a place longer and longer, you become the person that has the knowledge of things. And so it seems like you're never working anymore.

You're helping other people work, but you ever you never actually get to work. And that that might be one of those leaving problems behind type thing, too. Right. work and that that might be one of those leaving problems behind type thing too right like maybe you want to get back to working and and not being the the hub for for people trying to discover information like i don't know it's so interesting it's not listed here but like i think i would classify that as you want to be the f and g right what's the new person yeah the new guy i never heard that uh expression for it really no i haven't either no i mean you you can like place it you can think about yeah yeah i don't have to spell it out for you, but you've never heard of that term ever.

Is that a thing? Like people are like, I just want to be the new, the new person. Well, but no, that's what Alan was describing, right? Like you, you, you don't want to have that. You don't want to have all that tribal knowledge of having worked in the environment for so long that you are the person that people come to with like, Hey, how does that work? Or where do I go for this and whatnot? And instead, if you're the new guy, then, you know,

nobody's coming to you with those questions. And instead it's like, Oh, Hey, we're paying you a thousand dollars a day. Here's your first ticket. You're like, sweet.

I will go ahead and knock that out. Yeah. Very nice. Uh, the other thing I wanted to mention here is just resume building. Like sometimes, uh, you,

you know, if you've got five years, uh, in a certain stack of technology and a certain kind of projects, the difference between five years and six years, six years and seven years, there's not a lot of difference there. And so it kind of makes sense from just like diversification of your resume perspective to change jobs every once in a while. So you can kind of broaden your experience and also uh you know just like sometimes you can get a more prestigious job like for example if it's you know the year 2022 and when did vb.net come out but yet you're still doing vb.net this would be a good opportunity to explore other avenues to build that resume. Right? Yeah.

I mean, all kidding aside, I, that's not far from if you're in a job where you're working on a single piece of technology and you're not getting exposure to more types of things, right? Like it might be worth looking for another job just so that you can play with newer technology or more technology or get, or get that, that broader scope of things. Because I mean, you can get stuck at a job where you're just working on wind forms all the time or, or, you know, swing components in Java. And it's like, eh, or you're, you become so, uh, like specific to that one thing that now, like, you know, thing that now you're the hard resource to find.

You're the diamond that everybody's finding. So you get paid really high bucks to maintain that legacy VB.net app. Yep. Does it happen? I'm sure it has happened. Some COBOL app for a banking application or something? I don't know. Although I will say it does seem a lot of times like the best way to get a

raise is to change jobs. It is. That's sad, but that's true. I see that a lot of times. Yep. And then there's kind of the question, but that's if you wanted,

but that's if the quote raise was, I mean, in the compensation models that you mentioned earlier, though, the it's, it's those, the stock that's really, you's really making up for it. And that's hopefully going to be increasing the value of the company is increasing. And therefore,

it's going to outpace inflation because any raise that the company would give you is probably not even going to match inflation, let alone. So like, you know, yeah, if you're trying to outpace inflation, you know, for, for my quote, raise in your, like, uh, uh, you know, whatever your pay cycle is, then yeah, you know, you might have to leave unless you count that stock. Well, well, not completely because you also get paid per bands, right? So like most companies have, you know, levels. Well, that's promotion though. Well, that's what he was talking about.

No, he said pay raise, not promotion. Well, they kind of go hand in hand though, I guess is what I'm getting at. Because like, I mean, let's take simple numbers. Like a level one software developer might make, I don't know, 70,000 a year and they might get 50,000 in stock. Well, when you go up to level two, it might be a significant jump to 90,000 a year and a hundred thousand dollars in stock. Right. And, and I think what Joe's saying, there's a lot of truth to it. Like if you're in a company that doesn't seem to promote within very well,

it might behoove you to be like, okay, well I'm a level one. I know I've gotten enough experience. Now I can go test into a level two somewhere else. Whereas if I just stay at this company, it's going to be two years before they put me up for a level two promotion. Right. So that's promotion though. But I'm saying like just raise a loan period, which, you know, there used to be a thing in the world where like your employer would, you know, recognize like, oh, hey, their inflation is a thing. So like every schedule you would get, you would get some kind of a raise. Yeah, that's the cost of living bump. I think, I think that's what I'm saying though. It's if it doesn't match

inflation, then can you call it a cost of living bump. I think, I think. That's what I'm saying though. If it doesn't match inflation, then can you call it a cost of living bump? If it's not keeping pace with it? Like, for example, if inflation is 7% and you got a 3% bump, that's not a cost. You didn't match cost of living. Agreed. No, I guess when you said that, Joe, I assumed like trying to get to the next level of money, right? Not, not, not a cost of living type thing.

Yeah, either way, it's an interesting discussion. I do think like if you're in a smaller company, you're less likely to have things like stock or equity that pans out. And also, if there's only five people in the company, chances are you don't have a multi-tier level of career path that you can kind of go after and get that next bump and see what it is and have total clarity on how to get there. And so you're kind of at the mercy of the company or you have to negotiate with the company and say, like, hey, I'm worth more to you now. You need to pay me more. And that can be really hard to do when you're working there and you don't have any leverage and really easy to do when you're changing jobs and they're trying to draw you away. Man, you just said something that I want to bring up that is a business type decision for people

who are looking to switch jobs. So like you said, smaller companies, right? They're not going to have like the stocks, like the Amazons and the Netflixes and those guys. Actually, I don't know if Netflix does it, but like Facebook and those folks do. Right. But what they might do is they might throw things like options at you. If you are looking to go towards a startup and they may pay you well for it and their start and they start talking about equity, look at and listen to, if they say that they are a series D funded company or a series C funded company, because that'll mean a lot for what your potential stake in the company is, because it starts at a, and it goes on through Z, right? I guess. I don't know if anybody ever gets to

hopefully never had the Z, right? The Z would be would be rough. But what that means is Series A is they got an investment from outside investors to which they basically traded for shares. Right? That's a Series A. If a company had a Series B, then that means they went for two rounds of funding, Series C, et cetera. Right? series C, et cetera, right? And so what that means is as you get further in the alphabet, that means the shares are going to be valued less and less typically, unless you got just some rocket ship company doing things. But that means that, you know, the thousand shares or options that you got when it was a series A, those weren't going to be worth that much when you're in

a series E, right? So just be aware worth that much when you're in a series E, right? So just be aware of that. If you are looking and you're negotiating for a new position or something, be aware and ask, you know, like, have you had any rounds of funding? And if you have, what series are you on? And then that way you can go into it and know that, you know, Hey, I think I'm going to get compensated really well, right? Like the salary is good and the stock options are good. Or if the salary is not high enough and they're on a series E or a series, you know, F, then you might want to look at it and say, Hey, you know, I want, I want more of my base salary to make up for this. So just be aware of that. If you're joining a series A, you never know if they're going to dilute with whatever.

Like if you're not, yeah, especially private companies, they can kind of do whatever they want with stock. Yeah, it's hard and you won't typically know the valuation, but every round the value of a share goes down, you know, significantly in some cases. Yeah, and we're about to take a breakdown to do surveys and reviews and all that stuff. When we come back, we are going to be talking about those levels of compensation and how things break down at some of the larger companies and think about it. I know people working at smaller companies in different parts of the world, these might seem like ridiculous numbers. I think it's important to know, you know, what's going on in the industry as a whole.

And also just it's interesting to see how these bigger companies kind of break down their levels. So we'll be talking about that soon. This episode is sponsored by Mergify. Doing manually what should be automatic is frustrating. So stop wasting time managing pull requests. With Mergify, you can define rules for pull request conditions in YAML with a robust and well-documented DSL. And those rules can be as simple or as complex as you need, like backporting the PR into another branch once the original PR is merged.

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And we greatly appreciate that. Apparently, you can also rate us on Spotify now in the app. So if you wouldn't mind going and clicking on five stars over there, if your heart's feeling it, that'd be amazing. So, again, thank you very much. And we look forward to each and every review, dear listeners. So the somber voice is the direction we're going now. Thank you very much. And we look forward to each and every review, dear listeners. So, so the somber voice is the direction we're going now. Was that good?

Yeah. Yeah. It was a good time. We should mention. So over on the patron, if you subscribe for a minimum of $50 a month, you actually get the whole ASMR feed there that you can subscribe to. That was a little teaser there for Alan.

And yeah. Okay. right there uh that you can subscribe to that was a little teaser there for alan and uh yeah okay well joe took it to an even different direction i'm gonna i'm gonna bring it back i'm gonna bring it back here wait hold on don't we need to set up the patreon page with asmr we gotta get that done right no no one's going there i'm sorry it was good it wasn't that good dang it all right you got alan all excited about it yeah man i thought i had a new career path you know we were talking about careers tonight so all right go ahead yeah well i'm gonna bring him back to earth then and we'll head into my favorite portion of the show survey says all right so uh Let's see. We asked a few episodes back, how much personal time do you take

on average each year? And your choices were a week or less. It's awful, but without me, the company won't survive. Or two weeks. It's like I just joined the company. America! All right. Or three weeks. It's like I just joined the company America.

All right. Or three weeks. It's a nice, or four weeks, an entire month. This must be what it's like to be European or more than four weeks. I wouldn't say I was missing work. All right. So, uh, what episode is this?

180. So, Joe, you are up first. Okay. Four weeks. Entire month. With, let's see, divided by five plus two. Carry the eight. Divide by pi. And you got some pie in there circle around

uh arc tangent 30 30 four weeks okay with with the pies and the arc tangents came out to a nice round number that that happens a lot oh yeah it amazing. It's amazing how often that happens. A whole number. Yes, a whole. Yeah, that's crazy. All right. Just a bunch of them. I truly don't know on this one. I'm going to go with three weeks.

It's a nice, just because I like that. I like the logic there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can't go wrong. So I'm going to go with a, you know, carry the one and 12 and all that. And I'm going to land with 35. Ooh, bold. Now it's interesting. That was a big jump, wasn't it?

All right. So four weeks. You've got the derivative. There you go. Joe goes with four weeks for 30%. And Alan goes with three weeks for 35%. You know you want to say it. I have it right?

It's a nice. Is that right? Okay. You're both wrong. No. Is it two? I hate that. It's four. More than four. It's more than four.

Really? More than four. 38% more than four. Dang, I'm right. I missed the furrier transform. I didn't want to call it out when you were doing your math, but yeah, you nailed it. That's what it was. First outer, outer inner last.

Yeah. But three weeks was number two and four weeks was number three. So, so you said, you said four, three was two and four was three. Yeah. That's not confusing at all.

So you said over four was 38%. What was the three weeks? It's got there with it. Now they started to follow. They were, there was like a, even is a pretty even stair stack. So you said over four was 38%. What was the three weeks? It's kind of up there with it. No, they started to follow. There was like an even, it was a pretty even stair stack. You know, it goes to 26 for the three weeks and 20 for four. Okay.

So yeah. All right. So hey, people are taking time. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. And if you're looking to change jobs, that's something to talk about. It's something to negotiate because apparently a lot of people are getting it. Yeah. Yeah. to talk about and something to negotiate because apparently a lot of people are getting it yeah yeah so for this episode uh you know we're talking about jobs and the great resignation and and

everything so it only made sense to ask like what's the what's most important to you when you're looking for another job and your choices are it's all about that promotion. I need the title. Or work-life balance is what matters. I need to be able to enjoy my life and my work. Or dollar-dollar bills, y'all. Mo' money, mo' problems, and I'll do anything to have more problems. Or I need some flexibility in my schedule. Life gets hectic. Or whatever it takes to get away from this company. Or whatever it takes to get into that company. Those are good options. I like those.

Yeah, very nice. Thank you. Thank you. All right. all right so what can i gain from yeah the great resignation so um there used to be a statement tell me if y'all had this i kind of felt like uh well i will say 10 years ago there were remote jobs lots of people had them but there was kind of like at least you know for me i kind of felt like if you took a remote job you knew you were going to get paid a little bit less because the opportunities that were available, they just kind of paid a little less, but you decided that that was worth it, right? Yep.

That wasn't just me, right? Nope. Okay. I wasn't able to find any good stats on that to back that up nowadays. But I always kind of had that perception, and I don't know if it's true at all anymore. So basically, I think I entered this poorly, but basically just here is kind of thinking about what you can gain from changing jobs.

So wait, were you saying that the salaries, like you're able to get a better salary now as a remote than what you previously were able to get? It feels that way to me, but I don't know if that's true or not. Okay. I feel like it's kind of evened out. I mean, okay. Because I guess I was thinking for the software industry, though, did that really...

It might have opened up more work from home opportunities for other industries right yep you know i don't although i don't know how permanent those became i think i'm with joe though it seems like you know like you said 10 years ago if you wanted a remote gig they weren't going to pay you as much, right? Because they're like, well, you're not having to drive into an office. They sort of had these excuses, right? And I think that's gone away. I think companies now have almost realized that software developers were kind of idiots. Because if we work at home, for whatever reason, we won't pull the plug a lot of times,

right? Like you'll get on the, you work a lot harder. Yeah. You work more hours. And I think companies have realized that. And so instead of trying to treat it like they're doing you a favor, they kind of realize that they're getting a decent amount in return.

Now, not every developer is the same, but it does seem that way, right? It seems like you'll see people on more. They'll be replying to things late at night that like, it's just, there's a whole lot more that comes with it now. But here's, here's the problem though, with, with remote work though, right? Because like when you go into an office, right? Like you can, you can develop a rapport with people and everything. There's that face to face and like, you know, in the office,

my coworkers laugh at my jokes in person. Right. But never online. Never. And when I asked them why they say my jokes weren't remotely funny. That was a great, that was a great setup. I liked it. Well done. Well done.

Thank you, Derek. Oh, but yeah, I, I honestly, I think that I have, I've noticed that the salaries have gone up because now it seems to be more

about hiring talent versus trying to make somebody feel like they're getting something special for being not in an office, right? Yeah, and so I did a quick Google to see, and I saw lots of articles with headlines like, remote jobs don't have to pay less. And basically every article I kind of clicked into, just a quick anecdotal survey, all of them were saying that the pay is basically the same. And sometimes they had to kind of cheat a little bit to get there. So they'd say, well, remote jobs pay a little bit less,

but you're not spending gas. So they kind of fudge things up a little bit. But overall, it's pretty close. And so it seems like the general consensus is that it's about the same. So interesting. So you marked off this thing, but you haven't actually said anything about it yet. Are you going to wait on it?

Yeah, I got it. I did things in poor order. I did bad, the notes. All right. I did want to mention one other thing before we got into the next section, which is basically the term TC, which is probably a term a lot of people aren't used to unless they're looking at all the sites. But you'll see a lot of times if you look at it. There's a video game for it.

That's right. There is a video game for it and that's right there is a video game for it uh yeah so total compensation is what i'm talking about and you'll see this a lot of sites like um blinds.com or levels.fy or just a lot of job sites where people will refer to tc what they mean by that is total compensation. And what it means is you'll look at a job and it will have a salary of $150, but a total compensation of $350. And what that means is that there's $200,000 more dollars that are coming in, usually in some sort of stocks, whether it's restricted stock units or some sort of options or some other stuff. But what stinks about that is that that's presented as one number and a lot of times uh that's kind of like the maxed out version like this is what you're gonna get hired at but the way restricted stock units in particular work and sometimes options is that it gets divvied up and so the first year you get five percent the second year you get 15 and then from there on you get more and so what it means is

your total compensation on paper is 350 but that first year it's 200 and the second year it's 250 and that third year it's 350 and from there on assuming the stock stay the same which yeah right well well being more realistic you're one you're closer to what your salary is, right? Yeah. You're one in a lot of companies, in a lot of these ones that do this particular pay method. You're getting your salary year one, year two, you stay around, you're going to start getting a taste of it. But most of these companies do like a four-year vesting period, right? Almost all of them do.

And so, you're 350, that's what you're going to see year four, right? And here's the thing, and Joe touched on it a little bit, is you would make 350 assuming that the stock price didn't fluctuate, right? And this is where things can get really crazy in good and bad ways for you. If if you were in year four when the pandemic hit, then what you were thinking you were going to get 350 that year might have dropped down to 250 because stocks took a nosedive for a decent portion of like a quarter, I believe in 2020, right? But if you were around in 2021 and you had these things vesting, they could have gone up 40, 50% from where they were previously. So when you thought you were going to get 350, you might've actually walked away with 420 at the end of the year. So this is where getting paid in our shoes, it's,

it's like a double edged sword. Like it can be truly amazing or, or it could be ugly, but that's why you don't bank on it. Right? Like you want to try and get the base salary that you'll be happy with. And then the RSUs are kind of the icing, the icing on the cake.

But like Joe said, you're not getting that, that total compensation number until you're into your fourth year. It's also totally misleading, though, that, and this is why I like that comment that you just made about get the base salary that you're happy with, because depending on your type of personality, you might, what was your base salary in your example? I'd say $150, I think.

$150. what was your base salary in your example? I'd say 150, I think. 150. So, you know, you might get, how to say this, it might as well be as if your compensation is 150 even through year four if you are never selling those stocks, right? Like if you're not the type of person, like if you're going to save it, and you know what I'm saying, like if it's just part of like, Oh, you know, I'll save it. And when I really need it, you know, I'm not going to use it for living expenses.

Then, you know, then it's not helping you out in like your, your day-to-day expenses. Does that make sense? But I think that's a personal choice though, right? It totally is. It totally is. That's why I said it's the type of person that you are. So that's why I like that. You know, you want the base salary. You might want that base salary to be something that you're happy with. If you're the type of person that knows that like, well, any stocks that I'm given, I'm either going to like hold on to, or I might just convert it into a different stock or

a different fund or something like that. But I'm never, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to use it for living expenses. But, but the good thing on top of that though, right. Just to keep in mind for anybody that doesn't know how this works, right.

Like literally, um, we're kind of glossing over it, I think a little. So you get your salary, right. You get your paychecks. Um,

when we talk about these stocks, these, these are issues that they're restricted, restricted stock units. Basically what it means is that the company says, Hey, I'm going to give you these stocks, these RSUs, they're restricted stock units. Basically, what it means is that the company says, hey, I'm going to give you 500 stocks, right? But you can't have them today. You're going to get them in a year.

Your first amount, you're going to get in a year, right? And you're going to get a chunk of them. And that's awesome. So maybe at the end of the year, you get 100 of those stocks and they just give it to you right then. And to what Outlaw was saying, it's up to you. Do you want to sell them? Do you want to keep them? You can, you can keep those stocks, um, and whatever the company is that you were working for, you could just keep it in those stocks. If you wanted, you could sell them immediately

and go spend it, go buy you a car, right? Like whatever, or you could turn around and put it into another investment. But the interesting thing is, and I think most of the companies do it this way. Um, Jay-Z, I think you've been with more of the bigger ones. Um, so you kind of know how it works a little bit better, but I want to say like when they give you your RSUs, when they issue you your grant, like sums vested, they automatically take out enough in taxes to cover that thing. So it's actually treated as active income, right? So let's say that you were going to get $15,000 worth of stocks. Well, they're going to automatically sell 5,000 of that to cover your taxes, right? So you're going to be walking away with $10,000 and you can either keep

it in the stock or you can sell it. Right. And that's what outlaw saying is it depends on the type of person, like, you know, maybe you just want to keep it as an investment, right? Like, it's like the savings account that you didn't even, you tried not to think about, or other people are like, you know, I've been wanting to pull in my house and this is a good time to get it. So, you know, you can do what you want with it. I've been wanting a Lamborghini in my house and this is a good time to get it so you know you can do what you want with it i may want a lamborghini in my garage so uh yeah that's right yeah yeah so i just want to kind of call that out and for anyone uh you know there's many many years so i like i would have just not believe the kind of numbers that we're talking about um you know and so for large portions of

the world these numbers are totally uh absurd that we're about to be talking about and that we've given just as an example so far. Talking about grads coming out of school, like 250 care about, you know, if you want to make more money or you want to know what's out there, then it's important to look at this stuff and know. And if you are criminally underpaid or you think you can, you know, get do better, like now is the time to do it because a lot of people are changing jobs and it's never been easier to try and get some of these jobs. So we're going to talk about basically the top paying companies in our industry. And it's mostly tech companies, but there's a website, levels.fyi, that we're going to be looking at here for a little bit and just talking about kind of conversation across some of these bigger companies. And as far as I can tell, the numbers track, I've never heard anyone say,

I work at this company and these are way off. So, you know, I believe they're pretty repeatable. I don't know if say I work at this company and these are way off. So, you know, I, I believe they're pretty repeatable. I don't know if y'all have ever heard anything otherwise, but I don't know. I mean, it tracks pretty well with my experience. Yeah. Same. I mean, I obviously we don't know all the numbers out there, but they, they seem to be pretty decent ballparked, um, from, from people we know from our own experiences and everything else so um so when we start talking about these numbers be aware like some of these might be shocking but they're legit after you've been there for three to four years right so sometimes

some of them some of them aren't even that long. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. So I just clicked the first link here. We got in the notes, which is takes you to levels at FY. And they've got a leaderboard that shows you across the normalized levels. And what that means is basically they tried to take these companies and they kind of kind of mapped the different hiring titles and stuff so that they kind of roughly align with like similar type levels and they mapped it into five levels so entry level software engineer senior engineer staff engineer and principal engineer and then they've got like a leaderboard for each of those five across all the companies that they they've got in their database

and so that first level, entry level, here's the bad part. I'm sure you guys are seeing this right now. You have to sign up for the website in order to see the full list of companies. Yeah, I was going to say, I only see three. Yeah, and you can't sign up for the website right now. You have to join a wait list.

So I don't know what those past the first three, but luckily we can see the top three so i guess that's what we're focusing on that's right but for entry level we are seeing a number one instacart at 250 000 total compensation and the way they got that broken is a base salary of $140,000, $110,000 in stock, and then no bonus. Now, we're not going to break down everyone we talk about like that. But number two, Two Sigma. I don't even know who that is. They're $240,000 and Box is $236,000.

Which one did you click on? What level are you? The first one. Oh, sorry. The first link. No, no. I mean, like, which level did you. Entry level, he said.

Entry level. Okay. Entry. Sorry. Gotcha. Okay. And so you can see, like, you know, it's not like it fell off a cliff after Instacart. And, you know, we mentioned Netflix being around 240 something.

So these numbers aren't, you know, totally. You can see they're kind of clumped together here and so while this number still seems absurdly high to me they're within range of each other uh so you know i i would assume as a college graduate uh and i assume you would have to be a college graduate to to apply for an entry-level position at instacart, but maybe not. Maybe they take experience into account here. I imagine it's competitive, but that is a good amount of money to be

making, you know, starting your career. There's a lot of people who would be happy with a fifth of that, maybe. I went ahead and clicked ahead, got to principal engineer. And you know what? I am sold.

Yeah, I know, right? We'll talk about that, too. We got something about that. So they also do say this is zero to two years of experience. So $250,000, not bad. Total compensation. Software engineer. This is kind of like the middle of the road software engineer.

We've got crews at number one, $405,000, base salary of $200,000, and they've got stock of $125,000, and bonus is $75,000. Bonus is something we talked about a lot, but a lot of times companies will have bonus targets. And maybe that bonus is optional based on some metrics they set aside at the beginning of the year or whatever. So maybe you'll get it. Maybe you don't. It's best not to count on that. But sometimes it's pretty great and definitely not something you would. Oh, Cruise.

We know somebody that works for Cruise. They're like self-driving cars company. Oh, okay. I just assumed it was a made-up company name based on. Oh, I finally found it. Getc a made-up company name based on... Oh, I finally found it. GetCruise.com. Yeah, they actually have speakers that do stuff at Kubernetes conventions and stuff, too. So they have some pretty cool talks.

So this is a case, like looking at Cruise, right, on this particular one. 205 in the base salary, 125 in stock, and then 75 in bonus. That's actually a pretty nice split. If you were looking for a company to find out where you have good potential, like 205 ain't a bad salary, right? And then 125 in stock, stock fluctuates. So that could go up. And then a $75,000 bonus to kick it. That's a, I mean, that's not a terrible living right there. So, you know, and that's where some companies you'll see are lighter on salary, really heavy on stock, and then maybe don't even have a bonus. Right. So, you know, you gotta look at these things and say, Hey, what's, what's important to me.

So it's, it's interesting and it's crazy what these numbers can get to. And this one, again, this was a software engineer, too. This is basically somebody that's, you know, experienced. You're no longer a junior level developer. You're probably not quite a lead, but you're strong. So these are good salaries here. It does seem like though, this is a,

an on-prem job. The people I know are in the area. Really? Cause I, I, at least with the way levels. FYI shows it. If I go to look at like overview or benefits,

right. I mean, one thing like just leveled fyi like this is pretty cool too because like it'll show you all the benefits and then they quantify the benefits into a dollar amount so but the reason why i was i was thinking that this must be an on-prem is like you look at all the benefits that they list in here they never talk about uh working home, but they do talk about like relocation bonus and transportation allowance and company shuttles. And like everything is kind of catered towards like, hey, you're going to be here. So we're going to give you free lunch and free snacks and drinks.

And an on-site gym. You know what else they do that's nice is they show you the vesting schedule. So where we were talking about some companies, you're not going to see that until year four. You can actually see when you're going to get these things. So that's pretty nice. And the people we know are on-premise in there. It's like Silicon Valley, California. And it kind of makes sense.

If they're doing autonomous driving vehicles, a lot of the work is probably done near the vehicles. Yeah. Well, then you would think Detroit, right? Maybe. But where I was going with that, though, is you're talking about that $205,000 and falling over the $205,000, but if you have to live in san francisco area yeah that's a really good point that's where that's where like that that base sounds great but if they aren't a remote work company then yeah same friend that's that's your cost of living right there right yeah totally

and that's yeah that's something good it should have called out too absolutely and i think all the companies that we talked about before the entry-level ones i think those are all uh silicon valley and here too that number two and number three are databricks and stripe i believe both of those are bay area but does that do you know if they have to be on site for those they might be i don't know i don't know about that i know stripe is payment processing and databricks is like uh i'd say like spark hosting it's pretty interesting um yeah databricks is is like big big data stuff yeah that's cool this is for two to five years of experience two to five plus so that's pretty nice all right so if you go to senior engineer that's like typically uh five plus years

uh now uh we're starting to see some uh which is basically Netflix, shows up here. So we've got Netflix number one at $5.15. And they just show straight up $5.15 here. They don't show a stock. They don't show a bonus. I don't know what the deal is with that. That's what I saw on another site. They don't really give you any art. No stocks.

No bonus. Yeah, it's salary. You make the money. Yeah. So that's interesting. Yeah. And there are no Rsus at uh at netflix is everyone you get five percent each year of your salary and fleeced in free stock but uh and sorry let me start

over every year everyone in netflix gets five percent of your annual salary and free stock options which are offered at 40 of their current value investing every month so every month you can buy at a discounted rate stock you know how that's killer yeah it's pretty nice you can use up to 100 of your salary for buying these stock options too i mean dude if you can buy them at a 40 or at a 60 discount yeah but there's probably a limit on when you can sell them like when you can sell them. When you can sell. Yeah, so it might be like, yeah, sure, you can buy all you want up to 100% but you can't sell them for six months or a year. Who knows?

Yeah, that's another thing to keep in mind. A lot of times these employee stock purchase programs, they have stipulations on when you can sell those things. Yeah, that's interesting though. Stripe, number two here, a 41. LinkedIn, number three. Now, LinkedIn's owned by Microsoft, so it's interesting that number two here, a 41. LinkedIn, number three. Now, LinkedIn's owned by Microsoft, so it's interesting that they've got them separate here. Microsoft's made up a whole lot of companies, but yeah, LinkedIn is way up here.

Yeah, 480 total compensation for the senior engineer. I do feel like most people can kind of intuit if we say like, Hey, entry level, you know, junior developer, developer, senior, I feel like those are kind of understandable in terms of position responsibilities. Well, what we've seen, um, I think in our careers and,

and correct me like what you guys think, like senior engineer to get to that level, you're usually, you're one of the top developers in that area, right? Like not the entire group is going to be that. There's going to be a handful of you that are senior developers, and that's kind of where it's at. Software engineers are going to make up most of the group, the level twos.

And then this next one that we're talking about, staff engineer, you typically have one of those, right? Maybe. So I've got an interesting definition, but I do want to say first, like I've kind of, I don't know if this is, you know,

if y'all agree with me or not, but I kind of feel like the understanding is that in most companies, you kind of progress up this ladder from entry level to software engineer, and eventually senior engineer. If you just stay there long enough, you're going to end up being senior engineer. The next two positions we're going to talk about staff engineer and principal engineer those are kind of optional levels up you know those are there's people that will spend their

entire you know latter half of their career in senior engineer level three basically and never go to those other two and it's totally fine because staff engineer and principal engineer really take a kind of a divergence on responsibilities yeah so i'll tell you yeah i agree with that your senior your senior engineers are still typically contributors on on software development and i think this is where i think this is where you're sort of draw drawing the line right but on what the next level is but i do take issue though with like the way you said though because like just because you stay with the company for a period of time doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to become a senior engineer you could definitely be uh an entry level

developer for 10 years right just because you just because you've been there for 10 years doesn't mean you have 10 years of experience right yeah totally but i just you know the general kind of sense of it is like if you stay somewhere you should eventually progress from junior to mid to senior yes doesn't have to be right but if you're somebody that's like 10 years and you're still a junior and they're hiring seniors and they've been working for five like you should get a new job or you're just not a go-getter right and i mean and that might be what it is you just might not be somebody that excels at it so yeah or yeah something else going on there uh so senior engineer the definition i've got here is that senior developers may specialize

in a specific area oversee projects and manage your developers but uh the next level up that we've got here they call staff engineer they say is the staff engineer is a senior individual contributor role being you don't have direct reports in software engineering and there is no one kind of software engineer but usually can come with things like tech leads or architects or solvers which i've never heard before or right hands and i didn't say anything saying there's only be one of them but it's basically like a kind of a level up from senior engineer where are you getting the definitions from uh this one came from staffeng.com slash faq yeah i want to say yeah the staff engineer usually does seem to be uh another roll up right like

they're not typically writing a lot of the code anymore. They're usually the ones helping plan out projects, like how you're going to do things, architect things, like you said, the right hand person or whatever. Um, they're usually more involved in, and this is crazy, but creating design docs and getting people on the same page and agreeing to technology specs and all that, it's not quite the same as the senior engineer who is more involved in actually getting the code done. Yep.

And the last level that they've got things broken out by here, the principal engineer, I looked up, I didn't see the link for some reason, but the definition is basically a highly experienced engineer who oversees a variety of projects from start to finish. So you can kind of see like that could be a senior. That could be a staff. The definitions are pretty squarely. And as far as I can tell, there's not like a hard, you know, like you say, even staff engineer, like it didn't relate to staff in any way. You didn't have direct reports.

Principal engineer, same way. Like, what are you principling? But we didn't even talk about the salaries at these positions, right? No, not yet. Yeah, we should. Yeah, when you get to the staff, like it's, you can do all right. Yeah. So let's look at staff then.

So number one, we got Splunk here. Total compensation of $776,000 per year per individual contributor software role that's $258,000 in salary $450,000 in stock and then $68,000 in bonuses

yeah you can imagine if that stock just goes up a little bit I mean you're making a million dollars a year you know that's pretty nice so I guess if we just talk doubles So, yeah, you imagine if that stock just goes up a little bit, I mean, you're making a million dollars a year. You know, that's pretty nice. So I guess if we just talk doubles. Databricks, number two, 763. Instacart, 710.

Instacart. Who knew? Right. And all of these, all of these, here's the interesting thing is none of these have crazy high base salaries. They are basically paying you with stock, right? So the Splunk was $258, Databricks was $220, and Instacart was $260. So you're not making crazy amounts over what the senior engineer was, right? Your salary is about the same but your stocks they go up almost 100 so that's where you can really start making a killing with this stuff and you know

that's where like what outlaw was saying where you just act like you don't even have it and all of a sudden you're a millionaire in a few years and you're good right so like two years right yeah you know it's funny i don't know if you noticed this but this is the staff engineer category but the splunk title for this category is senior principal upper engineer that's crazy you can see the titles are really squirrely and so and we'll see we'll talk about it in a minute uh the map the levels like map between companies and you'll see that some companies don't even have staff. Some staff is kind of lower in the rankings than you might have expected. It's all over the place and the terms are basically meaningless. Alright, here's the big one. There's got to be like a Rosetta Stone

out there somewhere that maps one company's senior engineer to the other company. Well, that's what this does. This levels.fyi on the main page. Oh no no no but I'm just saying like well you're saying on the main page Yeah we'll see the next link we got was going to do exactly what you want to see. Yep.

So let's get through for this first and then we'll see. Yeah because we need to know what this principal engineer is going to make. And I'll tell you they do have a stipulation on this one that says, hey, this is typically 15 plus years of experience. And this level is representative of a very small percentage of people. Not a lot of people are talking about their salaries at this level.

And so they're saying this data is the least reliable of any of the numbers we've talked about. So be warned. When I get to be 36 years old and I know that I can qualify for this, I'll be so excited. Yeah, very exciting. Number one. I don't know.

It's funny, huh? Yeah, that'd be very nice. Number one is Roblox, actually, the game company. The TD1 is the title. And they've got a total compensation of $1.2 million. I'm not even going to bother with the tens of thousands. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they don't matter at that point, right?

But why don't you tell us what their base is here? $420,000 base salary. How much is that per day? More than $1,000. Yeah, it definitely was. Yeah. I can't take it serious though. It's 420. That's the number?

That's the drug number. Yeah. So if you just take 1.2 million and divide by the number of days in a year, which is around 356. 356? Really? Is that what you said?

He did say around in fairness yeah how many days are there it's roughly he didn't say roughly he just said it's around it and he's not wrong 365 i always do that stop laughing at him he's not wrong he was it is around it oh it's in the neighborhood it's close yeah that's pretty good it's closer than 30 it doesn't even change the number that much when you when i do when i fix it so apparently there are 365 days in most years you know sometimes i grew up in florida you know all right all right i'm sorry go ahead so what what is

yeah if you divide this by the number of days in most years uh you wake up and even on a sunday you're making 3.3 thousand dollars a day. That's not terrible. It's not working days. That's yeah. What do we say for every day? 50 times five, roughly 250. Yeah.

250. 250. There are my street. I got a hint to regularly count her own eggs. She's a real math. I'm a chicken. Nice. Very nice.

It's almost $5,000.,000 every time you show up at work if you only had two weeks vacation. But hopefully you got more than two weeks vacation if you're making that much money. Yeah, $5,000 for showing up to work. That's not terrible. That's crazy. Number two is Facebook. I want to thank Dave for that real quick. Nice. Nice. Dave.

God. Facebook is $900,000. Google Facebook is 900,000. Google is 800,000. So yeah, some pretty healthy numbers. I did want to say one more thing before we go actually compare the levels across companies.

I feel like, and I have no way to back this up, but I feel like it's really hard to interview in past senior engineer though you know we said staff engineer and principal engineers these salaries are like mind-boggling go look at microsoft or roblox or facebook or google and check out their job openings page and see how many staff engineer and principal engineer openings you see it's basically none yeah there's not many and i can tell you from knowing people that interview for those positions like interview other people

man it's it's hard enough to get in some of these fan companies at a senior level like you got to know your stuff if you're going in for that next level you are getting grilled by by lots of people in lots of different positions that have tons of experience like they don't play around and i feel like even then like it's not stuff you're going to see on the jobs page these aren't things that you can just submit your resume to blind this is like when microsoft remember microsoft hired um i forget his name though the guy who wrote python um oh yeah they also took the guy who did kubernetes the the main guy who did uh kubernetes yeah and the guy who did uh mono and stuff michael acasio whatever yeah i was thinking of the example of the guy that was literally one of the founders of the internet that works for Google. Yeah.

Yeah. And so we're good with names though. We go, Van Rossum was the Python. So I feel like, you know, Guido probably didn't search the job board at Microsoft and apply for a principal job. Microsoft said,

look, we really want you to work on a project. We know you, we've talked to you before. We got to, got to, we'll bring you in as a principal. They were like,

that's how you get in Python two, eight project that we want to upgrade to Python before. We'll bring you in as a principal. And that's how you get in. We've got this Python 2.8 project that we want to upgrade to Python 3. Right. He's like, I'm not doing that. And they're like, let's show you our compensation sheet. Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that this is probably more, hey, we want you. You didn't go searching for this job.

They said, hey, will you take this if we give it to you? So sometimes people will say, especially if they get their first job, they're kind of a thing. Jump one of these larger companies, right? As they'll say, you know what? I got an idea. I'm going to work here for two or three years and I'm going to jump to another similar company. I'm going to get a big pay bump and then two or three, four years. I'm going to do it again.

I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. Sounds great on paper but when you see there's only really three levels you can hire in that you're not going to be able to pull that trick more than three times right you might be able to jump up to that third level pretty quickly doing it yeah but i think where the difference might be though uh okay so i wouldn't say you're going to pull that trick three times, because then that sounds like such a depressive kind of way, the despair kind of view of it, right?

Like the demotivator posters, you know? You're not going to be able to do that many times, so make it count, right? Because going back to the inflation comment right like you know if you do go if you stay in a place for four years um and and then you do go out for another job then you know your base might get jumped up and you might get you know a similar kind of compensation on uh stocks and whatnot although based on that vesting schedule, again, though, you might end up taking a hit there in the short term. So you have to kind of like weigh the, weigh it to you. And that's why it kind of, in all honesty, it goes back to that survey, right? Like that for this episode, there's so many more things that, that matter than just pay a loan that might be reason for you to want to find a new job.

Yeah, and we also said about how crappy surveys are. And guess where all these salaries came from. Yeah, these are all surveys. Outlaw just said he doesn't want that 1.2 mil, though. That's why I heard it. I don't think you heard that you know facebook we know is getting uh getting now recently into uh you know remote hiring but a lot of these work companies are also based in like the one of the most expensive areas in the world so that's definitely got an impact on it but you know like you said you're totally right

i'm kind of saying a general rule that it's it's hard to to kind of keep up that that jumping trick you can't you know probably you probably won't be able to do it indefinitely and a big part of that is that like you said the vesting schedule and so uh you know it's just something to kind of keep in mind like it at first like it may seem like this kind of infinite ladder but it's uh it's not because it's harder to interview into these staff and principal engineer positions at some point it makes sense to kind of settle in a little bit and you know put in your time if you want to if you truly want to even go to the top and maybe maybe you don't maybe there's things that matter to you like work-life balance they'll tell you staff engineers principal engineers uh you're probably not uh sitting

on your laurels if you're making five thousand dollars every time you show up to work no uh yeah you're providing some serious value to that company. And this is not a free lunch at all. And you're probably, when you get up into those levels, you're probably presenting at conferences. You're probably also presenting internally. Like it's a whole different set of optics. But one thing I will say, like we've been talking about jumping for the purposes of

salary. And I know we mentioned earlier that there's other reasons, right? Like work, work, life balance and all that. But if your goal is to get up to one of these principal type things, one of the reasons you might jump is to get exposure to all kinds of different technologies, right? To, to get exposure to architecture and system setup and all that kind of stuff, because you may not get that in one company, right? Um, you may not get that in a small company. You might not even, if you're working in a large company in a subsection of one of their services, you may

not get it. So, you know, it might be a good way to diversify what you're trying to learn for your career path. Yeah. I would think like, you know, if you're one of these, you know, principal engineers that are making a million dollars, I would think a lot of your job is, like you said, talking in conferences. Yeah, sure. But not just conferences. You're probably talking to customers. You're probably going into boardrooms of very large companies who spend millions and millions of dollars with your company. And you're talking with their engineers.

You're convincing them to buy stuff. You're almost part of the sales arm. You're not sitting down and closing tickets for a million dollars a year. It's a whole different role. And maybe you don't want that. Maybe you do. if you're almost part of the sales arm, like you're not sitting down and closing tickets for a million dollars a year, you know, it's a whole different role. And maybe you don't want that. Maybe you do. It's pretty nice.

But I will say no matter what principal engineer, just like I said, uh, you're going to make some trade-offs in your work life balance and kind of everything else. Like this is going to shape your life. Just kind of being like a C level of the company, like a CEO, uh,

you know, so Steve jobs, such in Dell, any, anyone they've made significant, your life just kind of being like a c-level company like a ceo uh you know so steve jobs sachin nadella anyone they've made significant sacrifices in their life for their career and you know that's part of the that's part of it kind of stinks so hey on to those levels so if you check out that second link, Outlaw. Okay, second link. So here is a spot where you can pick up to three companies and compare their levels across the board. So I've got it preset to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

And you can see, like, Microsoft in particular has a bunch of different levels. ranges from 59 to 80 so if they're only there's some way to figure out you know the difference between 59 and 80 we could figure out uh what that is oh well if you can't because there's numbers that don't exist like there's nothing between 70 and 80 it just goes from 70 to 80 so that's funny you can actually choose five five oh five nice okay yeah so like i've got apple amazon google facebook and microsoft and i didn't see five yeah that's nice yeah so like amazon sde two that's kind of like the senior level um yeah well they have senior sde as a level six or an SD three, but that's where it kind of levels off with like Facebook fives. Um, Apple ICT for somewhere straddling the line there.

And Netflix is the weird one. Say what? Netflix has two categories on here. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. The, the entry and everybody else.

Yep. And so you can say, I'm just going to use them. I'll do them in Apple just to kind of compare. So Netflix has new grad software engineer and senior software engineer. Apple has IC2, which is junior, ICT3, software, ICT4, ICT5, ICT6, and they've got some special categories at the top. So if you're a new do grad software engineer at Netflix, you're roughly equivalent to, uh, you know, ICT two and maybe a little bit ICT three. There's some overlap. It doesn't map perfectly. Right. And then everything else is mapped to senior software engineer. So if you were a new grad software engineer at Netflix, that would tell you, you'd want to go to Apple and you would want to interview as ICT three.

Otherwise it's going to be a pretty big jump in good luck. The ones that have a lot more categories, like, you know, Microsoft, we said it's got about like 10 different categories here. You can see that even just comparing to Apple, like,

you know, if you're a 60 at Microsoft, then that could be a 60. It's clearly actually, I just closed it. A 60 is a line between ICT2 and ICT3. But if you're an ICT3 at Apple and you want to go to Microsoft, well, you might try to interview as a 60 or a 61 or a 62 or a 63. Those are all the ones that are kind of close to you.

So this gives you a basis for comparing and you can click on any of these levels and see the salary ranges, total compensation and breakdown. So you can say, Hey, I see T3 at Apple. You're looking at total compensation of two 13. If I go over here and look at Microsoft at a 61,

it's right out in the middle, looking at 182. So for a comparable experience level, Microsoft pays less than Apple. And we can bump it up a level in 205, and it's still less than Apple. So that kind of gives you a sense right there. You know, this is not an in-depth analysis, but just based on clicking around a little bit, it looks to me like Apple pays more than Microsoft. Interesting. clicking around a little bit it looks to me like apple pays more than microsoft interesting but those are also in different areas so again going back to you know if if the survey was from people who lived in the bay area that work for Apple and Cupertino,

then yeah, they might have a higher salary or total compensation package because their area versus, uh, Redmond, you know, might have a lower cost of living. And so therefore you don't need as much.

I don't know. Yep. This is where it's, it's difficult to no pun intended to compare apples to apples or you know here right apples to netflix's or yeah yeah yeah but it but you were looking for that rosetta stone and this is about as close as you'll get to it right like this whole this mapping horizontally going across the bands and it's nice i what joe just said a second ago is the thing that is really good about it is if you are somewhere and you're looking to take a leap you can kind of look and see where you kind

of should land at another company right like if you are an SDE2 at Amazon, then you're probably somewhere in an L5, an ICB5, an E5, you know, whatever, depending on the company, you could sort of see visually where you should be if you're trying to take a jump, right? Yeah. And so I can say to you, like, um, let's say, uh, I've only worked at at small companies but i really want to try and work at microsoft i've got five years of experience so i can say okay for five years of experience it doesn't really break that down very easily but you know just based on kind of roughly what we said about like one twos and threes for software engineers that would put you as like sd2 level so let's say you're looking at a total estimate of about ballpark 182 000 total compensation and microsoft is one of those companies that's really opening up to remote work and so that you're looking at a total estimate of about ballpark 182,000 total compensation.

And Microsoft is one of those companies that's really opening up to remote work. And so that's, it might be something you can go after and pay. Maybe you'll get a lot more, maybe less, you know, but either way, not too shabby. I mean,

you know, one thing I would say about this particular chart here that would probably be helpful for most people is Amazon sort of is almost like the, the industry standard for like levels of, of software developers. And so if you want to kind of get an idea of where you should be, if you put Amazon against next, next to each one of these, like if you're an SDE one, you're sort of junior ish. Um, if you're an SDE two, you're experienced and you can do things pretty well. You can sort of junior ish um if you're an sde2 you're experienced and and you can do things pretty well you can sort of see where where that lands in the bands here yep yeah they've got

pretty clearly defined there it's nice so anyway just kind of a cool website to to look at yeah totally um not all depressing some of them like if you go through and you start adding in other companies, I definitely found some that I was like, oh, okay. Well, that one I'll remember to stay away from. Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. So if you're thinking about thinking about uh you know changing jobs or something then remember like these are definitely the biggest in the industry so uh you know if you're making 70 000 now you're gonna have a hard time going to your boss and

saying look uh twitter pays 500 000 for my level of experience so you better up me to at least 400 you know it's probably not gonna happen but it gives you something to aim for if that's a goal of yours. And I do think that there's a lot to be said for having one of these big names on your resume, even if it's just for a couple years or even one year. So the next thing I think is important, what can you lose? Yeah, so we talked about all the things you have to gain from changing jobs, but what do you have to lose? Yeah. So we talked about all the things you have to gain from, uh, from changing jobs, but what,

you know, what do you have to lose? Like obviously the people, right? So if you like the people you work with, you may never meet people like that in your life again. It could just be gone. You know,

those relationships that you build, you may never find that again. Next job may suck. You may never have it as good. Well, that's, that's the grass isn't always greener. Right.

And that's, that's a legit thing grass isn't always greener right and that's that's a legit thing that happens is everything looks amazing you get there and maybe the culture isn't a good fit maybe i don't know maybe people don't like telling dad jokes like there could be all kinds of things that are problematic right no no jokes i'm out forget it yep yeah you never know too like you may uh have a friend who works at a company and like everything is great according to them and then you get in there and you're on a different team or you like you just start to see the the things that uh that don't bother them as much bother you a lot and uh that stinks so there's a risk there yep and so you know

that's what it is uh also let's seniority so um one thing that i think sometimes people struggle is like they work at somewhere for a couple years and they go to the next place and they're a new person and they find that the things that they say don't have as much weight as they're used to. So they say, hey, no one asked my opinion or maybe I said that we shouldn't do it this way and I got downvoted

and people didn't respect my experience from the last company and feel offended about it. And so I think that's something you got to know that it takes some time to kind of build up that social equity and people have to kind of take your advice a few times and talk to you a few times before they really start kind of giving you the same kind of weight that you had somewhere else and it's not fair to expect people to kind of hop to because you say well i worked at a better place than this and they did it this way like that never goes over

well and also just i feel like anytime you appeal to your credentials like you said well i went to this college or i worked on this project so you should you know you should see things my way it never goes well it always feels like whenever you appeal to your credentials that your argument is weak i feel like yeah i would agree so that's kind of you find yourself doing that like you should evaluate what you're trying to advocate for and figure out a better way to do it also there's a lot of comfort like changing jobs really stinks like it's rough it's hard you're going to be stressed out you're not going to feel productive it takes it's got like a psychic cost to it i think and so you got to kind of weigh that even just interviewing you know we kind of take it for

granted that you're able to get all these jobs. But a lot of these things like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they tell you straight up you can expect to interview more than once for these jobs if you want them. So they know that the way they interview is tough and it leaves a lot of great applicants behind. And they tell you, we know it's not perfect, but keep coming and eventually you'll get through if it can happen. So that's expensive on your soul. It takes a lot of energy. It is. Yeah, so that's about everything I want to talk about.

All right. Well, what's the takeaway from this then? Do we dust off the resume then? Honestly, I don't know. A bunch of people quit. The job ecosystem is changing. It's going to benefit people in lower cost of living areas and it's going to be less advantageous for people in more expensive areas. But I feel like looking at the levels that we just talked about, I feel like those levels, those numbers are going to be so much higher than what people are expecting. If they've never looked that you can see that even if there is some

rebalancing that there's room for you to get a raise. Yeah. I was going to say that that's ultimately the takeaway is just be aware that, that these are out there, right? It doesn't, it doesn't mean you're going to be able to get it because like Joe said, it's,

it's hard to interview for these things. Like it's, it's like, it's like studying for a final exam, right? In college, like it takes effort. But knowing that it's out there, there's a lot of people that just don't know that that's possible, right?

And just having that in the back of your head might give you something to go for. I had never heard of levels.fyi until i'd never even heard of the top level domain fyi so so like you know learning about that website that was pretty cool so uh all right well then with that we head into my favorite portion of the show no it's not can't steal it yeah i tried i tried alan was shaking his head fine we're heading down to alan's favorite portion of the show it's the tip of the week that's right and i've got a few this week oh of course he does i'd actually show off yeah i've been doing some development you know it was new to me and so I found things. So the first one, man, I can't even tell you. So I love GitHub. I love Git. But I did not love GitHub PR interfaces because you go to the PR and go to the files tab and everything's expanded. And I'm like, man, I want the file list. Like, give me the file list. And there was nothing on the page to actually see the file list.

But that little Chevron arrow that you can click, that you can collapse and expand one at a time. If you hold down the alt button and click that thing, it'll do them all on the page at once. Do that. It's it will make you have no sense. Yeah, it was so good. I was so used the viewed button. That's good. If you have like less than a hundred. Yeah, it was so good. I just used the viewed button. That's good if you have less than 100.

Yeah, if you got a ton of files like I did recently, dude, seriously, it was infuriating, that page. So yeah. I think if I could go back to episode 90 and have a listen to Kit, ain't no such thing. Sometimes life happens, and then you have to find out how to deal with it away from my 4 000 file commit that's fine that's fine i'm just gonna rubber stamp it um so so the uh the next one i was actually really cry at that. Like, let's be honest. Once it gets past 20,

Oh, it's well before 20. Maybe Ted. I don't know. Yeah. Two. Um, yeah,

there's a point where it's like, yeah, ain't nobody got time for this. Um, all right. So this next one, I'm actually really excited about. So,

um, working in Google cloud there. I've been writing Kotlin code because interacting with a lot of Java libraries and whatnot. And there were some things that I just could not wrap my head around how to write the code to use the Google library, the SDK. Well, Google is awesome. And they actually have a Kotlin section for using Google cloud SDKs. You can go to cloud.google.com slash Kotlin. And it is how to code for GCP using Kotlin. And it's absolutely awesome. Like that's just a killer resource. So Kotlin is growing in popularity apparently. And then the last one I want to share, this was from Dave Follett.

I don't remember. There was a conversation about erasing hard drives. And I, I think we had this conversation like a month ago or something. I can't remember. But he shared an article that had a bunch of different ways to go about it, including free and paid. Um, so if you are needing to wipe a bunch of hard drives that are laying around your house, you know, the, here's a, here's a nice set of resources to do it. So that is all that I have. So were these like specific to PC then?

No, these had Linux. These had Windows. These had like a little bit of everything, which is, I think, why he shared that. I guess, like, is this faster than the built-in utilities that are already there? Like, why? I don't remember. You have to read the article, sir. I don't remember. Yeah, I don't know. I can't remember. You have to read the article, sir. I don't remember.

I don't know. I can't remember. I sent this to myself like a month ago and then I totally forgot about it. That's why it's coming up again. Well, I have an interesting one. Wildback gave a tip of using nvim, which was basically a NeoVim.

It's an implementation of them that uh strips away some of the kind of legacy stuff that um you know i guess it's kind of doable but it's uh it streamlines things makes it even faster and uh it just kind of drops some support for some older things in lieu of some newer things well nv chad uh is and i forgot to say it's from fuzzy muffin it's from fuzzy muffin thank you fuzzy muffin how can i forget that let me write that down all right i pasted like super big too so like the notes it's like fuzzy muffin so anyway nvchad is a uh a nice uh windowing tool that you actually you clone the repository into your nvim directory and it uh gives you a nice face for nvim and so you're using vi but it's got a nice like support for windows and tabs and

opening multiple files you can do things with your mouse, which is really nice. So, although I do use them just for like little, you know, little edits, I'm definitely far from an expert. The things that frustrate me the most have just been like trying to navigate

between files and just sort of little things that I'm used to having it with ID and I know there's plugins and stuff for it. And that's basically what this is. It looks really nice. It looks kind of like VS code actually. Yeah. I was going to say it looks a lot like I thought this was VS code when I first looked at it. And that's basically what this is. It looks really nice. It looks kind of like VS Code, actually. Yeah, I was going to say, it looks a lot like, I thought this was VS Code when I first looked at it. Yeah, it's really nice. So yeah,

give that a shot if you're a Vim user and this might be a really nice thing for you. Sorry, a Neo Vim user. Very cool. Alright, and with that, we head into my favorite portion of the show. You're listening to Git Blocks with your host, Michael. And I have a couple of tips here for you.

So a while back in a previous episode, we had talked about using subtree, the git subtree command as a way to work with another repo in your repo? Well, I've got some cooler options for you. And I think at the time, too, I had actually referred to it as a way to merge another repo into your repo. But technically, it's not like merging it. It was more, I later learned it's more like in lieu of like a sub module kind of approach to where you can have like another repo baked into another repo.

Right. But it's still like, get still knows like, Oh, that thing is, you know, coming from another place. Well, I found what I was wanting to do

is to merge two repos together into one. And so I found this really great Stack Overflow answer where the question is, how do you merge two Git repos? And the surprising thing is is that the accepted answer for the question, actually, I don't even know if this one had an accepted. Oh, yeah, it does have an accepted answer where they do use subtree as part of the approach. But the. The cleaner answer, which by far has more votes, is this other path.

I'm not going to go into all the commands there, but it's just basically a very simple approach of where you add a remote for the other repo. You fetch it and then you do a merge, which one of the merge options is allow unrelated histories. And that's the key is get merge dash dash allow unrelated histories. And that's the key is get merge dash dash, allow unrelated histories. And that thing will allow you to, uh, when you, when you merge in the history from that other repo into the,

you know, the, whatever your main one is going to be. Um, it's, it's super clean because then you don't have like, get doesn't think like, Oh,

well some of this is coming from that repo and some of this is coming from that repo. And some of this is coming from this repo, like, like it would be in a subtree format. In this case, you know, it's super clean. You just have two remotes and everything is merged into the one repo. So, um, I'm going to have a link to that, but you know, as I was going through this whole effort to, um, you know, like you might want to just take an inventory of like, well, what is my repo? Do I like, is this a problematic repo that I'm even starting with? Right. So, you know, they'll find a bunch of answers and questions out there that will end up, eventually you're going to probably download Git Sizer, which I'll have, I have a link to the GitHub project from GitHub. Uh, but with get sizer, you can just say get space sizer and it'll, it'll tell you all kinds of stats about

your, your repo. Like, uh, what, you know, if you have any like really large blobs, how many directories, how many objects are being referenced, things like that. And it'll call out like, here's problematic areas of your repo, right? But specifically, you might find that, okay, I've done that. And now like, I realized, oh, crap, I have some like really large files in my repo, right? Or I need to go track them down, I guess would be a better way to say it. So there's another question on Stack Overflow about how to find and identify large commits in your Git history. And again, the accepted answer is not the one I'm going to link to. Because in this case, the accepted answer has like, oh, hey, you know, here, write this bash script, and it'll iterate through everything one by one, and it's going to be slow on a large repo. Versus the amazing answer, which is literally titled a blazingly fast shell one-liner, and it is not lying.

Now, they do use the term one-liner a bit loose here, because really it's like one command piped into the next command piped into the next. And to improve the readability of it, it is spread across multiple lines. But, you know, technically you only press the enter key one time to execute it. So I guess that's all that matters. But the key thing here though, is that like they, they provide the base script here. The author of this answer did a fabulous job. They provide the base, uh, you know, what is that like six lines of, of a shell script. And they have like, Hey, if you're on a Mac OS, you need to install this extra thing for that to

work, blah, blah, blah. And if you want to filter it, so like maybe you want to do file sizes, right? Which in my case I did, then they're like, hey, add this line and it's already includes the pipe for you. And they tell you where to add it into the previous command, right? So the beauty of that though, that, like, for example, public GitHub. Right. There is a a hard limit there that you can't push a file into a repo in public GitHub that it's larger than 100 meg. So that's where like that file size, that the ability to filter that matters. But now you find all of those large files. You're like, well, what do I do now?

Right? Well, there's some older utilities out there for modifying your repo. So if you've ever been through it, you'll know the names that sound familiar of either BFG or Filter Branch. But there is a new kid on the block who is the new king of that domain called git filter repo. And it's a much better way to remove those large files from your git history. Now, we've talked about this though. Beware, there's strong warning sign here

because any changes to history rewrite history. And so therefore you're changing the get commit ID from wherever the file was, the large file was introduced from that commit forward. Every commit later will be different from it. Right. But, you know, maybe you have to do it. And so, you know, there you go. You know what? I think there was another one that I forgot to add in here. I'll, I'll add it to the list because that commit that, that answer from stack overflow will give you the, I believe the blob ID or the object ID from Git of the large file, but you don't know the commit that introduced it. And I believe you need the commit that introduced it. No, no, I'm thinking them back now. I'm thinking Git filter, you can just give it the

path. And it doesn't have to be a file that's in your current path because like maybe you've long since removed that file but yet it'll still go back through and find it uh so so it's pretty cool um and then there's some other things that that i learned too uh going through this exercise that i thought i would just share because i think we've talked about like maybe doing like a shell like a if you wanted to do a shallow fetch or a shallow clone, where you could specify a depth, right? But I found out that both get fetch and merge, I'm sorry, I wrote merge there. I meant clone. Dang it. I'll go back and fix that. But get fetch and get clone, they support another option called shallow exclude. And what you can do is shallow exclude is you can include it as many times as necessary, right? And everything

that you provide there. So let's say you have whatever your main trunk is. So let's just call it trunk. But then you have branch one, branch two, branch three. So you can say shallow exclude branch one, shallow exclude branch two, shallow exclude branch three. And when it, it fetches or clones, depending on what your operation is, it's going to look at whatever is in trunk and anything that is reachable in those other branches, it'll exclude them. And where that's helpful is, let's say you have a repo that, you know, has grown to be a big size and you want to only take a portion of that over to some other repo, like maybe you want to like split it off into two, you want to take one repo and split it off into two, then it might be helpful to just start with like, hey, let me get

only the things that are, you know, in, if, if you had it branched off, I mean, it kind of makes that assumption that you had those two things, you know, different branches, but, um, you know, that would be one way to, uh, like, let's go back to our, our, one of the get workflows that we had talked about last time. We're like, you know, you have a branch for version one, a branch for version two and a branch for version three, and maybe you want to split off the new development that's in trunk. And so maybe you want to say like, Hey, anything that's available in branches one, two, and three exclude that, you know, if it's, if it's reachable on those, then I don't

want it, um, anymore. So at any rate, uh, you know, that, uh that contrived example may not fit your needs, but you get the idea though. It was a pretty cool option. And then lastly was again related to public GitHub, another one of the many limitation or limits that GitHub puts on things. So like not only the file size, but they have a limitation on how large the push can be. And by that, that push limit is a two gig. And I think maybe they have it tiered to where like, uh, depending on what, like what level, uh, deal you have with GitHub. Maybe you can do a larger push. I don't remember if that's accurate or not. But the point is at least that out-of-the-box is a two-gig push, which you're saying, like, why would I ever push that much?

That's huge. But if you were trying to push up an entire old repository from somewhere else to GitHub, for example, to public GitHub, even if you were going to keep it private, then that might be a reason. And there's other reasons why you might say, well, that's too large a repo anyways. And keep all that aside. Let's just say that this is the cards you've been dealt, right? You need to move a repo from somewhere else into public GitHub. And it's, and, you know, because of all the history that you're bringing over with it,

the repo size is going to be a push, a get push command that would be larger than two gig. So what you can do is you can actually do the equivalent of like, hey, push up to this amount of history. Right. And then and then maybe I'll do a second push where it's like, you know, maybe I push the first first gig in one or a gig and a half. Let's say you had a three gig repo. So I push the first gig and a half in up to this commit and then the next one in another commit. And, you know, this totally contrived because I don't know like how you would even find like, hey, which commit ID represents the first one and a half gigs of the repo,

but forget that for a moment. So the point is, is that with your git push command, you can specify the commit ID colon and then the branch. And Git will treat that as up to that commit. You're going to push that branch up to that commit ID. But it's a weird format because let's say if your remote name was like the default, the typical origin, right? So git push origin commit ID colon and branch name. And you're saying, Hey, push this branch name up to that commit. But if that branch name doesn't already exist up there yet, cause this is the first push that you're doing, then you need to specify the branch name in a special format where it's refs slash heads slash, and then the branch name and, um, it'll push it up there.

So I know that was like a bunch to take in. Like I rattled off a whole bunch of things really fast and mostly because like, I'm not trying to like, you know, for you to like grab every one of those get commands off the top, you know, as I said it, cause instead, because it is so much, I'm just going to have a whole bunch of links and stuff in the show notes for this episode. And you know, yeah. That concludes this episode of Git Blocks. Sounds like you've been having some fun lately.

He doesn't love Git anymore. Yeah, you over it? Second subversion? No, no. My frustrations have not been with git per se uh here here more recently why are you looking at me um well it was more i feel like i throw this technology under the bus so much so i hate to do it again. I hate to say it,

but like I've been fighting Jenkins and I haven't been getting along lately. And so like, that's where my frustrations have been. Not with get, but you know, yeah. Yeah. Fun times.

I mean, I still, I love Jenkins. I'll still love you. I'll still keep you on my Christmas card list. But for right now, can we just agree? Like, you know, we need to each go to our own corner. We like, we need to take a minute.

It needs time break. Yeah. We were on a break. So yeah. Oh, cool. Well, I mean, that's a, that's it for the show. Um, so I hope you, y'all let's know in the comments. you think of uh the stuff we talked about after you know which is those uh salaries i'm still like i don't know just starstruck i guess it's crazy

and with that uh we're on to my fourth portion of the show i forgot forgot. It's the end. Yeah, I'm so sorry. I totally forgot there. Yeah. You know, it's only like, this is only our second episode, guys. Cut me some slack. That's right. So subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcasts. And if you can, as

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