Sounds like an OK test to me. Great (senior) developers should be able to do that kind of thing. Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap.
No engineer that makes 7 figures calls themselves a ruby developer with the exception of DHH.
Know what I'd do if the interviewer asked me to debug PHP? Pretty much return the question:
"I've never used PHP. Are there logging macros/functions defined somewhere? Where do I see the output? syslog maybe? Is there a debugger of some sort I can use? How do I run each `piece` of code in isolation?"
(I am assuming the job listing did not explicitly mention PHP experience. If it did, both myself and the recruiter would absolutely deserve to fail me for this interview).
Assuming that high earners are offsetting that to the higher end, most people aren't making 6 figures, and the bar isn't which language they're programming in.
How many companies are out there paying $1,000,000/year for devs?
How many devs who can command that kind salary are going to put up with bullshit coding challenges?
It's ridiculous how developers mindlessly accept that you should constantly be learning to keep yourself relevant, but keep it shallow by just jumping from one tool to another, instead of encouraging deeper knowledge of generalizable patterns that stay relevant across waves of technological disruption.
Debugging old DSL vendor specific languages or code so old using, frameworks and standards long out of fashion and support, that they are half way to being a different language.
Adding support for some back ported features or patching security holes in an old client or legacy stacks.
Or at a big company we had some escrow code from a much smaller partner that we ended up becoming responsible for.
Often getting the environment setup for proper debugging is more work than anything.
But yes, it's a good test for a senior+.
Junior salaries go down much lower than $100k.
Interviewer: Now reverse this array.
Me: OK, in Python that would be array.reverse(), or reversed(array). I bet JS has one of those, probably the .reverse method.
Interviewer: Great guess!
That was genuinely fun. I came out of it feeling like I'd learned a few things, and the other person got to see how I'd reason about a new problem.
Be a generalist. Yes, deep specialists exist and yes, some of them have successful careers based on their deep specialty, but betting on specialization is like a high school kid planning to be a MLB baseball player.
The key here is not to categorize as a “language developer”.
Google alone has 4000 directors all making a million at minimum.
I have only worked at FAANG across my nearly decade long career. So, it’s a biased but very large sample.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
It was a pair programming exercise and so with some help from the interviewer and the IDE I was able to fumble through to a working result. I agree it was fun and educational.
$132,270
This means half of all full time employed devs are higher, and half are lower. The mean is more skewed by higher earners but is similar:
$138,110
It also varies quite widely by geographic location, from a mean high of $173,780 in California to only $125,890 in Texas, from $199,800 in San Jose to $132,500 in Austin to $98,960 in rural Kansas (where I have actually developed software before!)
The short of it is, the vast majority of software developers do not make the top salaries. Even L6 is rare within the top tier of tech. There is a lot of delusion in this field around pay, so it's important to be well informed. As a field we are still very well paid compared to most other jobs especially considering our safe working conditions and lack of needed credentials and education. Compared to most of the work on this planet, it's still a goldmine.
That's not unheard of, but it's certainly rare. $1 million+ is not a "typical salary", even at Google.
Consistent total compensation offers of $1mil+ is probably reserved for roles above these, sometimes called Principal or Distinguished. I would say the rate of having one of these in an org are like 1 for ~150 engineers.
Congratulations, your experience is limited. The BLS stats represent the actual US salary data, not just your limited experience. If you want to make a claim about salaries in the US then look at data across the US and not just whatever is true within your limited bubble.
> And forgive me if forwarding the BLS statistics to candidates doesn't get them to accept offers
Did I ever even suggest such a thing?
> Did I ever even suggest such a thing?
My point is that the BLS doesn't set market rates or report on them.