[nouseforaname]

Also a huge fan. When I got my first full time engineering job at $50k I thought that was amazing. It literally allowed me to leapfrog my entire family and secured what I thought of as a middle class existence.

Then I got a salary adjustment to $70k because my new manager knew (although I didn't) that they'd lose me quickly.

And then I picked up the phone and talked to a recruiter and all the sudden I had a counteroffer for six figures. Can you believe that!? Never in my life thought I'd amount to anything especially after dropping out of college. A 6 figure job made me feel like I had made it.

Stayed close to that number for several years. Then I went remote for a big company with a high base and great RSUs. Now I'm a one percenter. My mom was a drug addicted waitress with an 8th grade education. I will own my beautiful home free and clear in my 30s. I have the means to travel the world limited only by my time. I will be able to retire in my 30s.

It's all so amazing, but I also took nearly a decade to wander into that final band of compensation that many are introduced to right out of the gate at top companies. Open information like this site is very valuable to people like me who come from a non-traditional background and live in a flyover state.

[Nashooo]

How did you make the switch to working remotely for a big company in combination with a salary increase?

Somehow it seems that remote jobs offer less compensation here in Europe.

[nouseforaname]

I was directly recruited, for 2 remote jobs at once. The first one was because I hung out in an IRC channel for an open source project. The CTO of that company just offered me a job.

At the same time a recruiter from a fortune 500 just directly reached out to me and it was a great fit. I ended up going with the big established company because:

1. Better offer 2. Long term product area I was more interested in.

This was about 4 years ago and it turns out that although I'm no household name in the community, I am one of the relatively few people who's been doing Go in production since pre-go1.0.

Company 1 was in New York, Company 2 was multi-national but main engineering offices are in the Bay Area.

[plumdot]

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

[Rinzler89]

Congrats on your achievements. Could you detail a bit more on your studies and the jobs you had? I'd like to take a similar path.

[nouseforaname]

Dropped out of college. I had an intro programming class once.

In terms of education, I'd probably say my highest achievements are just knocking out all the undergrad math for engineering and taking a few grad level classes. I really loved math and Linear Algebra and ODE specifically.

Job-wise I went from: Student web dev -> Mediumish Ecommerce -> a couple startups doing some fun distributed computing -> Ad-tech -> platform level proxy/loadbalancing/edge compute for a big company.

Title at most jobs was either software engineer maybe senior. Held a couple director jobs that were glorified team leads. Currently, have a Principal title.