[sures]

My current employer pays in rupees.

I don't have a Masters degree.

I cannot share which university to keep my privacy. But I am not from IIT, NIT, or any top state college. Basically I am not from any Tier 1 university or college. My university must be Tier 2 or Tier 3.

[codesternews]

What is secret of your high salary. Can you please point out what thing helped to you get high salary?

[sures]

Is it really that high? I know people of my experience level who are earning even more. :-)

I have no secret. I am decent at my work. Like to keep learning new tech and non-tech stuff. So I think the interviews go well and I get the good paying jobs. Not the algorithm puzzles type of interviews. I suck at those too.

[godelmachine]

And people of your experience earn ever more than you do?

Do you mind giving us a fair idea of how much they make? The highest amount in your experience range?

[sures]

I know one guy in my experience level with a pay of 12000000 rupees. He works in speech recognition and translation area in Bangalore. There are others in the 9500000 - 10500000 rupees range. But everyone is not an engineer in this sample. Some are directors too.

In contract based employees in specialized skills the numbers for my experience level goes even higher like in the 12000000 to 16000000 rupees range.

It gets me also thinking that I should take risk in life and choose contract based employment. But the work pressure is higher. There is also pressure of renewing contracts. So it is not an easy decision.

[godelmachine]

So, what kind of interviews are you talking about, if not algorithm puzzles kind of interviews?

[sures]

Like simple algorithm and data structures problems and problems related to my domain expertise.

Simple algorithm problems are things that have some connection with my work like vector clocks, detecting duplicates, traversing trees, graph search algorithms. Another type of simple algorithm problems are things that use CS fundamentals only and no ingenious tricks like manipulating trees, matrices and likewise. I can manage these problems in an interview room.

But if it is more complex than this like banker's algorithm, manipulating segment trees, finding convex hull, printing numbers on screen in some weird fashion or like that I will get stressed in the interview room. I suck at these.

The best interviews for me are those that are related to domain expertise. Like problems involving maintaining integrity of data in a distributed database, implementing partial ordering of events, designing data consistency policies.

[stale2002]

The secret is to work for an American company.

[godelmachine]

Same question :)