A few months on, I receive a letter from the tax department advising that my previous employer provided corrected earnings information and that I now owed them most of what was left in my savings account. Grim news.
That big four job was already gone so I ended up in another interview process. Leaving that interview for the train station, I realised the coins in my pocket were not enough for the train ride home.
I set out walking, it was about 5 kilometers, 30c degree heat and equatorial humidity and then it started raining. I was in a suit. Strangely enough I found myself smiling. I thought "is this all you've got?". I actually felt happy... with nothing.
A riches to rags story by traditional measure.
Still, very sorry about the situation, I'm sure you were hoping for the best.
I know there's a sentiment on hacker news that you should take advantage of a company when you can, because they won't hesitate to take advantage of you. Is it that?
It seems like at that level of compensation you are almost certainly in a small enough circle that any grudges you incur could severely affect you down the line.
I'm sure I'm less intelligent than the average HN commenter and I'm certain there are many here with greater infosec expertise. So what explains the salary package? It's the combination of skills in this case. People are usually either good technically or good at sales. Rarely they're good at both. That's why most technology companies sales organisations pairs up an account managers with a tech guy. My talent was not being the best at either, but being uniquely good at both.
Developer salaries in the big four (I assume you mean Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple) are high but that is still twice what I normally hear (and have gotten offers for), and that's assuming you're talking about total comp. I'm not doubting you, i'm just curious what type of experience you need to get that.
He meant "the other big four", i.e. consulting companies.
If you have marketable skills that at least once (even assuming that it wasn't typical occurrence) lead you to receive a $600k offer, you're not in the rags, regardless of what your financial statement says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4a7K-I-F5s
"We didn't think it was possible to sell only 6000 copies" [after PA sold 2 million].
It's a monster-collecting game, so I really can't figure out what the link is there to programmers.
Thank god I'm only doing this as a hobby because I bet such a connection would be obvious to anyone more entrepreneur-like than I.
1) Proof that people want to play this game. Post the gameplay video on /r/indiegaming, see what people say. I remember the early days of Minecraft, people went wild for it, even though it was very basic.
2) Marketing. Tweeting is not enough. Submitting to reviewers is not enough.
On the positive side, he is fast and can deliver. I feel like he can develop minimum viable games even faster, just to prove the gameplay is addicting.