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Adding to the data pool:

I'm also an under-30 engineer making ~250k in the Bay Area (at a publicly-traded gaming company, not at Google). My company has six pay grades for pure engineers; I'm at the second highest. My 2011 comp breaks down as follows:

* 166k base

* 45k bonus

* 35k stock grants (RSUs)

Note this does not include 401k matching, stock purchase plan, healthcare, or any other quantifiable perks.

When I took this job a year ago, I had a similar offer from a prominent NYC startup: ~220k (150k base, 30k bonus, 250k options over 4 years using offer-time valuation). I was 26 at the time.

For added context, I did not attend an elite school. I did not complete my undergraduate degree. I'm smart, but not extraordinarily so (800/710 math/verbal SAT). I interview well. I have a "disruptive" skill (cloud expertise).

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> I interview well

Any tips or techniques outside of the standard behavioral based interviewing techniques (like STAR)?

Also, I suspect you may be underselling yourself here, you very well may have excellent communication skills (like presenting complex ideas clearly to senior management) or even just social acumen.

Brushing up on your standard CS algorithms and concurrency school problems, a favorite of SV interviews. And being skilled in whatever area you are being interviewed for.

Isn't a perfect math score very hard to get, something like the upper 1%ile? Do you know your IQ? I'm scandinavian and could do a traditional finance/consulting/management/accounting thing in my home country but the software industry seems far more fascinating. I'm afraid my 120 to 125 iq means I'm too stupid to do well in SV though.

all your iq score really measures is how well you do in iq tests. if you have an interest in and a basic aptitude for programming, you should be fine.

(also, a perfect math score in the sat isn't impossibly hard - the level of mathematics is probably lower than your last school exam. it just takes a lot of practice to do that many questions fast and accurately.)

IQ is a good test, but at 120-125 you are still far smarter than most people on earth.

Just look at the normal distribution of IQ scores: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IQ_curve.svg

Sure, a lot of people are in the 120+ range on Hacker News, at top management consulting companies etc. but if you are 110+ IQ you are probably smart enough to do almost any job on the planet.

I'm not a programmer, but I imagine that like business, there are plenty of terrible programmers with 140 IQs that believe they are entitled to not working hard or being good with people.

They will always make less and even their high IQ will not allow them to figure it out.

No, you are not. The more damning trait would be believing you are not qualified because of a test administered when you were 8 years old (or worse, believing the results of any IQ test administered after that).

There are certainly brilliant folks around in the valley, who can grasp concepts faster and more deeply than seems human, but they are a significant minority.

The prime requisites for success as an employee in the valley are still:

1) Good judgement (which tends to come from accurate self-reflection and critique)

2) Love of learning (so it takes you a couple hours or even days to grok redis's failure modes instead of 20 minutes, who cares -- the question is are you going to learn it (and every other useful thing that comes along, for years))

3) Basic sociability (the valley is a small world, everyone knows each other, if you are a jerk life will get more difficult).

For a much more eloquent description of how to thrive as a programmery type in the valley, consider http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html but translate research into "generally useful skills for building stuff."

"You and Your Generally Useful Skills for Building Stuff." :-)

I don't know if things were different when he took the SATs, but I know several people who got 800s in math last year. It's not that hard, especially if you're reasonably intelligent and study a bit. (I myself got a 770 and a 780 for two different tests without really studying for math, and I think those were both just one question wrong).

I had that 155+ IQ and 800 SAT-M score, and honestly, the best thing it's done for me is take away my excuse for failing.

Once you get to a high enough intelligence that you can understand what the people around you are telling you and follow their train of thought, intelligence really doesn't matter all that much. Other characteristics like perseverance, social & communication skills, and emotional stability become dominant. There's nothing "magical" about getting an 800 SAT-M (or working at Google, for that matter), it's just that the effect of having a large body of knowledge that we spent thousands of hours acquiring to draw upon.

800 SAT is upper 1%ile among "potentially college bound high school seniors", AKA the sort of people who go on to earn a CS/Math/Science/Engineering degree and then join a prominent tech company.

If you haven't seen the SAT math, it is a slightly creative twist on 10th grade math (Algebra and Geometry). Scoring an 800 means you could get an A grade in high school math, and are not so slow at solving the problems, and are careful enough to avoid sloppy mistakes in your work.

"120" IQ is supposedly 2 standard-deviations above the "(human?) population mean", which is ~98%ile of the population, which is well within the margin of error of these sorts of measurements.

what kind of work do you do - what programming languages you can write in and what type of tasks you do

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