He wasn't just a graduate of a hacker bootcamp, he was hired on by App Academy after he finished and was quickly promoted up to Director of Product. He spent a lot of time teaching people how to pass whiteboard interviews. He was probably better prepared for an interview than your average Stanford CS grad, and already had prior experience as Director of Product and a portfolio of side projects.

He didn't bluff any company. He went through Triple Byte, the trendiest new tech recruitment startup. He got an offer from Triple Byte themselves even though he didn't even apply for them, got an offer from Google, and when word about the Google offer got out every other company started bidding for him.

He's also just a really smart guy in general. If you spend 15 minutes talking to him, he'll leave an impression. It's not a bluff or a con, he's just a really smart, really analytical guy.

I agree with a lot of what you say (and in fact, I work at a company that doesn't allow negotiations at all and has an open salary calculator: http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator ) but I wouldn't call it sad at all, I would call it playing the game.

I'm saying without any attempt at being rude: You're thinking way too much like a programmer.

From his about page:

> I quickly rose to the top of my class, and after two months into the three-month bootcamp, I was asked to join the instructional team. Three months later, I was promoted to Director of Product.

That wouldn't have happened if he wasn't good at what he does. Clearly he is doing something that is more than just the right charm.

Also, letting go of whatever opinion you have about his technical skill, absolutely everyone should negotiate their salary. I never have though, for many of the reasons outlined in his first post. Thanks to his writing I will definitely negotiate whenever my next change happens and apply his techniques - his writing has provided a huge amount of value to engineers everywhere in the same position.

http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...

Excerpt:

... many people are drawing the conclusion that I primarily got a job at Airbnb by being really good at negotiating, or gaming the system, or something like that.

If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview. Much less 8 of them.

If you don’t know the ins and outs of object-oriented programming, database design, asymptotic analysis, binary search trees, or how to improve the cache efficiency of an algorithm, then you’re not going to pass a computer science-heavy interview at a top company. You don’t even have a shot at it.

The moral of my story is not “get really good at negotiating and you’ll get a great job.” Negotiating is important, and I certainly encourage everyone to negotiate!

But first, get good at the thing you’re doing. Then worry about negotiating.

I moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas about a year ago because I decided I was going to earn-to-give. Since then I’ve been relentlessly trying to build a new career for myself, so I could earn more and donate more to charity.

Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.

It’s certainly true that I probably have a mind that’s well-suited for coding. But it’s also true that I outworked almost everyone who was in my cohort. And when I was hired by App Academy to help teach the course, I continued working as hard as I could to get good at this.

I still stayed late in the evenings, I still came into the office on weekends alongside the students just to continue coding and learning more. I started an algorithms study group in the evenings where I taught students new algorithms that I had read about, and wrote specs and instructions to guide them through the implementation. I took over our entire algorithms curriculum and taught well over 100 students the basics of data structures and algorithms.

And of course, I was scared that none of this would matter. That having been an English major, having a non-traditional background, being 26 and too old to transition into tech, competing against 20 year olds who’d been coding since they were 10, I thought I must have no chance.

Thankfully, I was wrong. And I’m very, very lucky that I was wrong, because I was almost right.

Hold up, by this logic does this mean that people who don't have these things (no advanced math, no top-tier 4 year school) should receive salaries that are even less than half of that?

Or will it make you feel worse to feel that he was denied the position at AirBnB but made some phone calls?

Its cool, learn how to play your cards, and this guy already had a track record of successfully doing that

The computer details aren't the hard part of software jobs.