There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best!
In the 80s and before IBM was THE place to work. Pretty much like Google or Facebook today. In the 90s they slowly started to cut retirement benefits and other perks and now it's not a great place to work at as far as I know.
Edit: Never mind all that, I didn't get the joke. My apologies. In my defense, text doesn't convey emotion very well.
Leaving up the post for my own shame.
What, because they work 40 hours per week?
I have a 4x10 schedule (including a weekend day) and I work exactly my assigned hours. The company is paying me for those hours and nothing more--exceptional circumstances excluded, of course--so I feel no qualms about sticking with that. I get to have a life outside of work, too.
I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all.
Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all.
Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.
I tend to find typical instances of sarcasm(especially in written form) so unfunny that I don't even recognize them.
That being said I had no problem seeing sarcasm in this example, chiefly because the language was obviously different(how often does one use the word "worthless" to describe people?). I guess it makes for a useful rule of thumb regarding what could be reasonably considered sarcasm.
There are no verbal or visual elements in written form. We are strangers across continents and cultures. Usually English is not our first language. People reading may be in a different mood or mindset. Etc etc. The Elders of the Internet were right to give us smilies :)
Sarcasm and satire are very effective ways of communicating a point. The above comment added only 2 words to draw attention to the absurdity of that statement.
>"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.
I don't think its that surprising. Essentially what happens is, engineers do a good job and keep getting promoted. If their service is required/essential, they continue to get funding etc. until they reach such a stage that they know their systems through and through. They're also at a point in their lives where other things take priority (most of the times its children).
I don't particularly find this situation to be bad. They are doing the tasks assigned to them, and there is a defacto agreement with the management that they have other things to take care of as well, but will get a ton of shit done when they do work.
They're not really contradictory. A 9 to 5 day can easily turn into 4 hours of real work. Show up, eat breakfast, spend some time reading HN, an hour of work, lunch, an hour or two working, grab coffee, play some foosball, another hour of work, go to the gym, time to go home!
Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day, and that's assuming a regular schedule, adequate sleep, good nutrition, no major emotional upsets going on... Now, that is work. No checking Facebook. No checking email. Process optimized so there are no long periods of waiting around.
I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work. That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.
Agree. If I'm at work it seems I can't get shit done due to innteruptions. If I'm working from home I burn out after 4-5 hours due to zero interruptions. I don't know where the happy medium is.
Measuring myself for a decade and a half, and some data from colleagues measuring themselves on my suggestion, and watching youngsters that I was mentoring.
Also depends what you call work. Actively coding is not the only work engineers do, particularly if they are senior.
As a senior engineer, communicating to those less senior is typically much more important than coding. That's how a good senior engineer force multiplies their knowledge and levels up the entire organization.
Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.
Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the companies do.
Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.
I've been in those jobs before. (Though never paid as much as your examples.) The only way I stayed sane was to basically take Coursera classes and teach myself things while being paid to do so. It felt enough like work and was obviously an incredible opportunity to be paid to learn.
You do start to go insane and there is an effect on your resume/CV as the black hole widens there.
You could spend the extra time learning about new technologies and languages. Become an expert at Haskell or AI. Since you're probably in America I suppose they'd sue you if you started working on a side project but you can at least get thoroughly prepared for one!
Well, as someone who can not sit doing nothing, I accumulated a lot of knowledge. I did Coursera courses, studied some courses at university, studied for a total of 5 boat- and radio licenses (Europe...), I did about 6 IT certifications that I prepared for at work, set up complete mail servers and recently dove into the topic of data science.
It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.
I agree, but there is something I just can't make sense of. I would love to just work my ass off for 4 hours a day but you won't get through any part of an interview if someone finds that out.
For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc.
The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.
That. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.
> I changed the positions because the workload was so low
I knew someone who basically took full advantage of this. He was a contractor too, but just added a clause that he'd be allowed to work from home/remotely. So he was doing multiple gigs simultaneously; so instead of making $100/hr (or thereabouts, I'm not sure about the exact numbers), he was making $400/hr. It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.
I'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time. It sounds great in theory but I feel like it would just tangle you up in a web of lies.
I ain't a swindler for sure but I had to do this several times during my life, in order to provide for my family, to kill debts, to fix health problems and a load of other things life loves to hit you under the belt with.
That perfect storm you described indeed happened several times and I was indeed lying about it but you know what? I was willing to own up to every single promise and engagement I made -- and I did, even though it took a toll on my mental health and work motivation.
> I'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time.
That is why it is a good idea to make the acquaintance of some subcontractors that you can further contract the work out to if a "perfect storm" happens.
The next step after that is telling the various people you work for that, actually, you've got subcontractors doing the work now and your job is to manage them. At that point, boom, you've just built a development agency.
There was play about that; a guy dating 3 stewardesses, then commercial jet flight is introduced, and he has to juggle them all until his scheme crashes down. Pretty damn funny play.
I also had a similar cushy contract a while ago. I was 5 years out of university, but I was the most senior developer and effectively in charge of training everyone else - who were mostly juniors with absolutely no clue what they were doing. Eventually I felt I was stagnating my career prospects and switched. I'd be happy to do the same if I could work with peers who were at the same level as me though.
> she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it.
> As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.
> after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work
Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.
It says the stock was from a recent acquisition and the article context is about vesting. One can surmise her stock is tied up in a vesting schedule and thus illiquid for now.
Not sure how "She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock". One has to do really risky/dumb things with stock options to get into that scenario
To realize the benefit of ISOs you need long term gains treatment. That requires you "prepay" tax when you execute. It's the difference between 20% and 33%+ effective tax rate.
Just to be clear, sounds like you are referring to the company that was acquired (not Google, whose stock is liquid). Few startups have Early Exercise of stock options. For those that do, if one has the cash to do the exercise and the willingness to put the cash into that illiquid startup stock, it behooves them to do it as soon as they can, so that there is no difference between their Strike Price and the Fair Market Value, so the tax owed is $0 when they file their 83(b) election. If Early Exercise is not available, one could exercise the options as they vest, but that is entails both the risk of both owing taxes (since FMV would be higher than strike price by that time) in addition to putting cash into illiquid startup stock-- all for a potential benefit of slightly lower tax rate (33%+ vs 20%) when the hope of both appreciation and liquidity is realized. That's the risky/dumb thing I was referring to. Alternatively, they could simply hold the option, which costs them nothing, and just pay the normal taxes (33%+) when exercising and selling.
"Alternatively, they could simply hold the option, which costs them nothing, and just pay the normal taxes (33%+) when exercising and selling."
This forfeits the tax advantages of an ISO. You don't need early exercise, you exercise when they vest, hold them for a year, and sell at long term treatment.
These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services (mail, ad analytics, etc).
The fact that they have a the market position and capital to buy up human resources and waste them simply to keep competitors from being able to develop products goes to show that they are abusing their monopoly positions. Wouldn't it be better for the economy & society at large if these talented people were working hard at building new & better products?
People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?
Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society.
I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc...
His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money.
So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?
But most contributions to society are about labour saving - if we don't think that kind of life is valuable then surely those contributions aren't really valuable either.
If I spend more than a week without getting meaningful work done, I get extremely depressed. I love the thrill of building projects and creating business value.
You'd actually have to pay me more to do nothing than to do something.
Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.
Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.
This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.
>Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.
>They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.
This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.
I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim the fat?
There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different groups.
Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant).
Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing:
> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted.
At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors.
Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are normal for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?
Yes and moreover, engineers are expected to have an upward trajectory until they reach senior level. Edit: I'm not sure what happens these days if someone doesn't get promoted in a timely manner.
Clarification: "Senior SWE", the formal rank, at Google is indeed a plausible terminal level. If you get there, they'll let you stay indefinitely. But it isn't particularly senior. If you start at Google straight out of college, it's two promotions up, and you may not have supervised anyone higher than an intern.
Thanks for that (as you surmised, I meant "senior" in the broad sense). For those following along, new college grads usually start at Level 3 ("SWE II"), and "Senior SWE" (Level 5) is considered "high enough". Explicitly the guidance for L5 is that: "All Google engineers are expected to reach this level".
From what I understand, the levels exist across all job ladders, but the SWE ladder starts at level 3, except in rare cases involving acquisitions. Facebook is the same way, and Amazon starts at level 4.
Usually companies try to make it so that levels mean roughly the same thing across all professions, so 1 and 2 or 3 mean "almost no experience". So while there might be people at level 1 and 2 in the HR department, or receptionist, or other professions where there is extremely close supervision, they don't hire anyone at that level for engineering. Often management also has a similar level system, but starts at a yet higher level (in the likely case that they never hire engineering managers straight out of college).
That's so confusing for students and new graduates. I would imagine a large number of students aren't applying for those jobs because they think the jobs require more experience than they do, shrinking the talent pool from which companies draw.
The numbers aren't advertised that way, and also Google is inverted in that you apply to Google and then after meeting a hiring bar for a level they match you with a specific role.
Right they aren't advertised that way, but they can certainly be interpreted that way.
There's rarely any sort of explanation of the numbering system in job posts. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a III requires more experience than a I or II.
Yes but I haven't been talking about just Google, and I have been talking about applying in the first place. My point was that some people may not apply, thinking that those jobs require more experience than they do. Think entry-level vs. junior.
That doesn't explain why the bottom rung of software engineers has the profession-specific label "SWE II", though. Entry level at eBay is also "Software Engineer 2".
I've seen it like that before because it gives hiring managers scope to create different types of job. They might have to hunt for talent at a certain price/responsibility point, but having extra steps on the scale downward allows them to open up a position at a lower price point if needs must. If that rung didn't exist, it's be a much harder ask to get a JD approved in a large co.
Also, a number of places need a few spine points below someone's normal band for probationary periods (I once started a role at a lower salary and they bumped me up to my real one on probation pass), or other reasons.
Most of it comes down to internal processes for job creation and sign off.
Apple has a similar system: I've never met a level 1. Level 2 SWE is kind of entry level, level 3 is mid-career, level 4 is senior. It's pretty achievable to get promoted quickly up to level 4. Some people even come in at level 4 if they come in with experience. Unfortunately level 4 where most people's careers and raises (and stock, from what I hear) come to a screeching halt.
I understand there's a level 5 that takes about 10x the effort of going from 2 to 4. You need to be pretty much a world renowned wizard to get there. I think a SVP needs to approve 5's. The vast, vast majority of SWEs will never make level 5, and managers are discouraged from promoting people to 5 unless they are super ultra mega stars.
Yes, but:
1) promotions are not particularly easy. they are approved by committee, ie not because a manager happens to favor an employee
2) Senior SWE itself is an Individual Contributor role (some say the optimal level if one wants to remain an IC). Only at the next level is leadership required
3) There is a HUGE jump in compensation between Senior SWE and the next level (Staff). Senior SWEs are not pulling anywhere near the $1M/yr referred to in the title
Right. The article instead repeatedly referred to the Group B candidates as making upwards of $600,000:
> "Engineers get paid $250,00 to $600,000 range, but there's no sense of urgency."
> "estimating that very senior engineering positions can command up to $400,000- $600,000 in total compensation at X, including bonus and stock options.
(though now that I quote it, those are all data from the same anonymous engineer working at X)
Also by "they'll let you stay indefinitely" you mean there is no expectation of any further promotion. If someone starts slacking, that would theoretically show up in perf
At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"
I ain't buying it. I don't know the concrete person, that's a fact.
I spent my younger years in much more social jobs compared to programming in cubicles (thank the gods I work remotely for 5+ years now) and out of probably 200+ men I've heard joking about horrible wife and kids, I can assure you no more than 5 were really joking. And I don't mean offhand conversations -- I am talking about people who I've chatted with between midnight and 4 AM. (It was a job with wildly varying schedules)
"Joke" in the marital context usually means "I am too scared to confront my wife so I'll pretend I am light-hearted and make-believe I am just joining the popular marital jokes club -- while secretly I am hating every second of my home life".
Sorry for cynicism. It's what I found during my whole life. Anecdotal evidence for sure but, my $0.02.
Yep. People use the joking form of expression to tell truths they wouldn't dare saying with a straight face while the other side knows they're fully serious.
Social stigma and dogma are to blame for this.
(Off-topic: one of the reasons that the love between me and my wife hasn't at all eroded -- it even got stronger -- after 3 years and a few months is that we're very honest with each other, even for the unpleasant truths. It's not about blinding your eyes; it's about being real plus being loving.)
I had a failed relationship that lasted 8 years before. But I know what you are talking about. Time can kill love.
I do believe we're on the right track however. We are sensitive to the relationship killers and we are actively addressing them. Being inert is not our thing.
Of most relationships maybe, but not of most marriage type relations though. People marry and divorse after the 5th and 10th and 15th etc. year all the time...
That's a sad reality. If my father hadn't died 16 years ago, my mother would have divorced him.
People change. Sometimes a lot. You've fallen in love with a certain person and one morning, decades later, you suddenly realize this person is no longer with you.
I've also learned that a big reason why some people are workaholics is because they don't want to go home. Working late at the office gives them a good excuse.
I'm one of those. I live with roommates who do nothing but party all night (it's school vacation right now here, and I've started working full time last year). It's excruciating. They don't know what I'm going through, act like it's not that hard waking up every morning at 7AM and coming home to a balcony full of people I've never met, having to have small-talk with them (or feel like I need to when I just want to go to my room). They act like they have it the worst because they need to go to school still and I mean, you're working! Ain't that the best?
I stay in the office until ~9PM. I go to the nearest coffeeshop to allow me to say "I've been working late, I'm tired, I'm gonna sleep. See you tomorrow". Well, that and I'm addicted to weed because it allows me to just not THINK about how sad I actually am. I'm not married, but I "have no home" basically.
That got way too personal. Contemplating on just not hitting reply. Still gonna do it. I mean, it's great for my professional life. It's not so great for my (mental) health.
Move house. I know, I know "It's not that easy I'd have to search for a place etc" but what if you were evicted tomorrow? What course of action would you take if you had to?
Back when I worked at Boeing, there was a story from a gate guard (checks badges of people coming in) that an engineer he knew drove up to the gate one day, stopped, shook his head, did a U-turn, and drove off.
He was never seen again (and abandoned his family).
I buy it. Relationships are hard and marriages are harder, even for partners trying to make things work. It was shocking to me that my friends who are married also have their own struggles. In hindsight, it is normal. I used to think, "well, those guys should have a better marriage", and now I realize how difficult it actually is, and how widespread. The parents from Rick & Morty? Yeah.
My wife and I had tried a lot of things. What seems to be working is applying the practices laid out in "Crucial Conversations". That has been helping both at home and work. It isn't magic sauce, though it helps that even after all that, we still want to try. It feels like the eigenvector is pointing towards a better relationship.
Absolutely this. Crucial conversations should be mandatory reading for anyone entering into marriage. Fantastic book. And not just for marriage either, just good life skill on how to approach tricky subjects.
Not sure I follow. Your reply reads like "marriage is yet another job, you must invest the proper amount of hours in it". If so, I disagree.
If not, what were you trying to say? And apologies if I misread your comment.
In general, I agree with the notion that relationships need "work" -- but in my case the "work" is basically not allowing certain relationship entropy events to ever happen (or to never last more than a few days). Me and my wife are real and sometimes brutal with our honesty with one another, we're down-to-earth and [mostly] humble, and we never, EVER, go to sleep angry at each other. That "formula" has worked wonders so far.
Thanks for responding. Not sure why you got downvoted.
I don't equate work with a job. By "work", I mean that you have to put effort into the marriage. A marriage is not the same as a romance, and should also not be conflated with love.
That you and your wife are honest with each other and make an effort at not going to bed angry with each other is aligned with what I was expressing.
On the brutal honesty thing: it sounds like it works well for you and your wife, and that is great. It doesn't work so well with my wife and I becuase we suck at crucial conversations and we are now just learning how to have them. One key thing about the teachings in crucial conversations is to recognizing the false dichotomy of speaking truth and having a good relationship. It is possible to do both. It sounds like you and your wife are already doing both.
I love reaching out when a possible misunderstanding is in progress. Appreciate your reply.
You're very correct about the false dichotomy -- it's happening way too often and too much people fall into that trap. It's saddening for me to watch, especially having in mind that me and my wife are doing both.
But as she would say -- "yes, me and you are far ahead in that regard but it's very likely that the people who just discover this aspect are far ahead in other regards, and we're likely very behind in those".
When I worked at Microsoft, people joking called the Red West campus "Red Vest" because it was home to fun projects (like internet and Xbox) that attracted people who had vested enough MSFT options that they didn't need to work.
I once interviewed with a team leader and two of his engineers. When I asked "What qualities characterize a valuable member of your team?", one of the engineers described how hard they work: they work so hard that the team leader cancelled dinner with his wife on their 10th anniversary so he could work late that night. The team leader was beaming with pride. I felt sorry for all of them and especially for that guy's family.
Indeed. But this is the world we're in, where coming to work and doing the job you're paid for because you have a life outside of work is considered toxic.
"Rest and vest" also happens for startups early employees who stay through IPO and are still vesting their initial grants. Generally, they've built up enough domain knowledge about the mostly-hacky systems that they are valuable enough for that knowledge alone and don't have to work very hard.
> In particular, I found this quote disturbing: "There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted."
Jesus, yes. What kind of sociopath thinks that someone who works normal hours and gets the job done is a problem? I work to live, I don't live to work.
I agree. How is working hours defined in your contract (9-5) nowadays considered coasting? And why couldn't I get promoted by not working overtime?
That sounds unfair. When you sign a contract it doesn't say you need to work overtime and burn yourself out to get promoted.
There has been a worrying trend in our industry I have observed when working normal hours is not considered enough anymore and unless you put in hours of overtime every week you are considered a slacker.
Also, the first engineer mentioned in the article is in no way coasting, but sounds like she's recovering from a burn out. It is incredibly important to let burnt out employees rest and recover.
Groub B was part of the reason for Nokia's fall in mobile phones.
Nokia decided to develop incentive system package for key employees and it totally screwed up work atmosphere at the senior level.
Once Nokia stock skyrocketed, Nokia workforce was divided into two with system that was not all clear. Sudden multimillionaires and those who didn't get anything extra often working side by side. One group started to take it easy, or leaving the company. Others were bitter because they had to work with millionaire coasters who were suddenly more opinionated because getting fired was not an issue.
The most ironic thing was that MIT economist Bengt Holmström was a member of Nokia's board of directors when it happened. He received Nobel memorial price for economics last year for developing contract theory and researching incentive systems within companies. He knew it was overly complex and inefficient system, but nobody was interested to know what the number 1 guy in the field was thinking. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/in-nobel-prize-lec...
I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.
I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between them, they could perform his duties, no?
Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are quite good also, a very good speaker.
Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.
Economists call this the principal-agent problem. When/if we figure out how to have public corporations without boards of directors who are scandalously traitorous to the common stock investor, most commerce will move to that new model.
Sorry, didn't mean to be a grammar-nazi. I think their job means much more than meets the eye. The guy is directly lobby-ing the US president, and highly ranked officials around the world. Mistakes at that level cost quite a lot. It might be the case that some professors can be up for the job, but would anyone take a chance?
> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.
I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.
They'd probably be less apt at directing the company to commit crimes, but I digress.
A large part of a CEO's job at such a big company is maintaining relationships especially with various regulatory agencies. There's no way a recent graduate could manage that.
That's definitely one way. I'm not sure if that happens intentionally at my company, but the severe lack of documentation lends itself to creating a culture where a select few who have been around for 5+ years tend to know exactly where to find everything, who to talk to, etc. And that's very valuable in that climate, even if they do little coding themselves.
It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder. Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in 2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-)
To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.
The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.
Working the bureaucracy is often much more difficult than the engineering part. In my company the tech leads spend more on figuring out what documentation to produce and how to store it than either writing documentation or producing software.
It was the OP who wrote he "spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it." I would feel all the worse knowing my pay was taxpayer funded.
That's why you have project managers. They (or at least good ones) handle the process and the politics and clearing the runway for the devs to do what they are good at.
> The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The two are not the same. And second, we're assuming that best (or even standard) practice is an invariant with respect to the task, that the best way to write a word processor is also the best way to write a spacecacraft control system. It isn't.
Well said. I think I'm going to have to hold onto this argument for a rainy day.
Its great that they make the distinction. But I also hope that they do update standard practices as well. i.e. not allow their codebase to become un-maintainable, use good distributed VC's etc.
I worked at another FFRDC, and had a similar experience. MTS-A (the equivalent of 'Principal' at JPL, I assume) was basically reserved for lifers. Likewise, the promotion requirements for engineers was the same for that of researchers (i.e. published white papers, presentations at academic conferences, etc.) - and was not particularly well mapped to any actual day to day work done by engineers.
> To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.
Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).
> So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.
It is no fun for most people, through there are exceptions. It might sound like weird analogy, but similar depression happen to women who stayed at home. The feeling like parasite is one of contributing reason I think all the wanting to go to work. (I haven't had experience with long term work where I do nothing, only a bit of experience with the other.)
> Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).
Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.
I don't think I've heard of an industry that managed to solve this problem.
> Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.
I'm not sure I follow. If threatening to quit is sufficient in making your work visible, then your work should've been recognized to begin with.
And if it takes you quitting for people to notice things falling apart, then the threat wouldn't be enough regardless.
If people came out of the wood-works to ask you not to leave, it means you were doing good work that people saw, but you weren't sufficiently rewarded for.
> there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices
Yet, this is also true for Ops, design, security... and also nurses, electricians, plumbers, a lot of "traditional" engineering, accounting... essentially most jobs, perhaps.
Employee: "Hey boss, you should give me a raise."
Boss: "Why?"
Employee: "Because if you don't then the opportunity cost
of working here will be too great for me to
stay."
Boss: "Oh. Ok. Here's a raise."
The above seems like a perfectly reasonable conversation to me. And I can't see how else it should work. What it takes to retain an employee is so widely variable that it really can't be up to the employer to determine how much to pay each person they want to retain.
But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around.
Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.
Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that reflects badly on me or modern journalism.
I'd also add, coming from a startup to a big company can be incredibly frustrating, and a lot of high performers can be quite demoralized by the bureaucracy and pace (even while they're being paid well to be there).
> "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.
My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.
I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered to care. Not limited to Google of course.
Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead.
I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting.
Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.
Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the company to try and get promoted.
There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other.
I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows.
Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.
One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.
What risk? What end of career? Maybe that's the theory but a failed CEO who destroys a company will cruise into another CEO job in practice... or even make a run for POTUS.
This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost half of Google's and Microsoft's).
The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement.
I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do.
>"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year.
Called it a year ago [1]:
>I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old.
Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?
A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around, spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate it was after years of this kind of behavior.
I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common.
I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].
Apple's a big company with a lot of business units that are pretty hermetically sealed from each other. Various different people I've met who work at Apple have had very different experiences there.
Honestly it's the opposite. The way you get noticed and promoted at Google is by building something new, even if Google is already doing something else in that space. That's part of the reason there's so much duplication at Google.
The VIPs (Vest In Peacers) are more inclined to do the easier thing of adopting and building on what's already there, which is of course the better thing: virtue of laziness and so forth.
Dr. Dre has actually been working for Apple. He's had a show on Beats 1 since Apple Music launched. There were also reports of him starring in a show about his life and career that would be for Apple Music.
Every time I read one of your comments, I know it will be about your employer, how great its products are, and how great its business is; even when the article, like this one, is not about your employer.
Yes, we know that this sort of thing is rarer outside of Internet companies. Yes, we know that Jobs's Apple and Pixar notoriously initiated no-poaching agreements with other Silicon Valley employers that depressed salaries for their workers. After Facebook broke the cartel for Internet companies, compensation skyrocketed, and it's possible to be paid well at an Internet company doing nothing so long as you aren't doing something for a competitor.
It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a bit like gender bias.
This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance. Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a startup in that regard.
There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.
Because that's also a mistake: the problem there is, you cannot keep a person doing something they're optimal for if you need to continually promote them.
One of the holy grails of effectiveness at doing stuff is having some comprehension of your boundaries. To categorically disavow even the concept of boundaries is catastrophically silly.
Up-or-out relies on a constant intake of new staff. You'll have to do a lot more hiring, and you're applying a pretty strong personality filter on the company.
And as Applejinx says, the fact that someone isn't suited to the role above them doesn't mean they aren't suited to their current role. Up-or-out means tossing out the guy who knows his job well and is doing it well to replace him with someone who's never done it before and needs a training period; this is significant overhead applied to every job in the company.
Oh no. Companies like McKinsey / Accenture etc are not more efficient. Their bureaucracies and inefficiencies are way worse than tech companies like Facebook or Google.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden
[2] http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/
Worthless slackers.
Leaving up the post for my own shame.
What, because they work 40 hours per week?
I have a 4x10 schedule (including a weekend day) and I work exactly my assigned hours. The company is paying me for those hours and nothing more--exceptional circumstances excluded, of course--so I feel no qualms about sticking with that. I get to have a life outside of work, too.
I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all.
Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all.
Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.
That being said I had no problem seeing sarcasm in this example, chiefly because the language was obviously different(how often does one use the word "worthless" to describe people?). I guess it makes for a useful rule of thumb regarding what could be reasonably considered sarcasm.
Hell, people can't decide if The Prince is a satire or not.
The article is very unclear, they also quote:
>"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.
Probably a lot of cherry picking going on.
I don't particularly find this situation to be bad. They are doing the tasks assigned to them, and there is a defacto agreement with the management that they have other things to take care of as well, but will get a ton of shit done when they do work.
I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work. That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.
What makes you say that?
As a senior engineer, communicating to those less senior is typically much more important than coding. That's how a good senior engineer force multiplies their knowledge and levels up the entire organization.
You do start to go insane and there is an effect on your resume/CV as the black hole widens there.
I worked alone in a lab doing it, none of my co-workers were interested at all.
The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.
I knew someone who basically took full advantage of this. He was a contractor too, but just added a clause that he'd be allowed to work from home/remotely. So he was doing multiple gigs simultaneously; so instead of making $100/hr (or thereabouts, I'm not sure about the exact numbers), he was making $400/hr. It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.
That perfect storm you described indeed happened several times and I was indeed lying about it but you know what? I was willing to own up to every single promise and engagement I made -- and I did, even though it took a toll on my mental health and work motivation.
And no, I wasn't living large at all at the time.
That is why it is a good idea to make the acquaintance of some subcontractors that you can further contract the work out to if a "perfect storm" happens.
Of course it's legal; a contractor is not an employee, they are a company in their own right. A company can manage its operations however it likes.
> As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.
> after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work
Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.
It can be worse, like being trapped making $8 an hour at some supermarket.
This forfeits the tax advantages of an ISO. You don't need early exercise, you exercise when they vest, hold them for a year, and sell at long term treatment.
I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc...
His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money.
So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?
Forever. There are 7 billion people in this world. If it's not you or me, there will always be someone else.
You'd actually have to pay me more to do nothing than to do something.
Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.
>They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.
This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.
"The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."
Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant).
Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing:
> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted.
At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors.
Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are normal for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?
There's rarely any sort of explanation of the numbering system in job posts. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a III requires more experience than a I or II.
https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-e...
https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/?&src=Online/House%20...
Also, a number of places need a few spine points below someone's normal band for probationary periods (I once started a role at a lower salary and they bumped me up to my real one on probation pass), or other reasons.
Most of it comes down to internal processes for job creation and sign off.
I understand there's a level 5 that takes about 10x the effort of going from 2 to 4. You need to be pretty much a world renowned wizard to get there. I think a SVP needs to approve 5's. The vast, vast majority of SWEs will never make level 5, and managers are discouraged from promoting people to 5 unless they are super ultra mega stars.
> "Engineers get paid $250,00 to $600,000 range, but there's no sense of urgency."
> "estimating that very senior engineering positions can command up to $400,000- $600,000 in total compensation at X, including bonus and stock options.
(though now that I quote it, those are all data from the same anonymous engineer working at X)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/top-one-percent-every-us-stat...
I spent my younger years in much more social jobs compared to programming in cubicles (thank the gods I work remotely for 5+ years now) and out of probably 200+ men I've heard joking about horrible wife and kids, I can assure you no more than 5 were really joking. And I don't mean offhand conversations -- I am talking about people who I've chatted with between midnight and 4 AM. (It was a job with wildly varying schedules)
"Joke" in the marital context usually means "I am too scared to confront my wife so I'll pretend I am light-hearted and make-believe I am just joining the popular marital jokes club -- while secretly I am hating every second of my home life".
Sorry for cynicism. It's what I found during my whole life. Anecdotal evidence for sure but, my $0.02.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
Social stigma and dogma are to blame for this.
(Off-topic: one of the reasons that the love between me and my wife hasn't at all eroded -- it even got stronger -- after 3 years and a few months is that we're very honest with each other, even for the unpleasant truths. It's not about blinding your eyes; it's about being real plus being loving.)
I do believe we're on the right track however. We are sensitive to the relationship killers and we are actively addressing them. Being inert is not our thing.
That's not long at all.
People change. Sometimes a lot. You've fallen in love with a certain person and one morning, decades later, you suddenly realize this person is no longer with you.
I stay in the office until ~9PM. I go to the nearest coffeeshop to allow me to say "I've been working late, I'm tired, I'm gonna sleep. See you tomorrow". Well, that and I'm addicted to weed because it allows me to just not THINK about how sad I actually am. I'm not married, but I "have no home" basically.
That got way too personal. Contemplating on just not hitting reply. Still gonna do it. I mean, it's great for my professional life. It's not so great for my (mental) health.
Do that.
He was never seen again (and abandoned his family).
My wife and I had tried a lot of things. What seems to be working is applying the practices laid out in "Crucial Conversations". That has been helping both at home and work. It isn't magic sauce, though it helps that even after all that, we still want to try. It feels like the eigenvector is pointing towards a better relationship.
(We both work from home).
Go read it. Honestly :)
If not, what were you trying to say? And apologies if I misread your comment.
In general, I agree with the notion that relationships need "work" -- but in my case the "work" is basically not allowing certain relationship entropy events to ever happen (or to never last more than a few days). Me and my wife are real and sometimes brutal with our honesty with one another, we're down-to-earth and [mostly] humble, and we never, EVER, go to sleep angry at each other. That "formula" has worked wonders so far.
I don't equate work with a job. By "work", I mean that you have to put effort into the marriage. A marriage is not the same as a romance, and should also not be conflated with love.
That you and your wife are honest with each other and make an effort at not going to bed angry with each other is aligned with what I was expressing.
On the brutal honesty thing: it sounds like it works well for you and your wife, and that is great. It doesn't work so well with my wife and I becuase we suck at crucial conversations and we are now just learning how to have them. One key thing about the teachings in crucial conversations is to recognizing the false dichotomy of speaking truth and having a good relationship. It is possible to do both. It sounds like you and your wife are already doing both.
You're very correct about the false dichotomy -- it's happening way too often and too much people fall into that trap. It's saddening for me to watch, especially having in mind that me and my wife are doing both.
But as she would say -- "yes, me and you are far ahead in that regard but it's very likely that the people who just discover this aspect are far ahead in other regards, and we're likely very behind in those".
I am not sure whether I should fear sorry for the kids or for the father. Having father that jokes about not liking you must sux.
Indeed. But this is the world we're in, where coming to work and doing the job you're paid for because you have a life outside of work is considered toxic.
Jesus, yes. What kind of sociopath thinks that someone who works normal hours and gets the job done is a problem? I work to live, I don't live to work.
I agree. How is working hours defined in your contract (9-5) nowadays considered coasting? And why couldn't I get promoted by not working overtime?
That sounds unfair. When you sign a contract it doesn't say you need to work overtime and burn yourself out to get promoted.
There has been a worrying trend in our industry I have observed when working normal hours is not considered enough anymore and unless you put in hours of overtime every week you are considered a slacker.
Nokia decided to develop incentive system package for key employees and it totally screwed up work atmosphere at the senior level.
Once Nokia stock skyrocketed, Nokia workforce was divided into two with system that was not all clear. Sudden multimillionaires and those who didn't get anything extra often working side by side. One group started to take it easy, or leaving the company. Others were bitter because they had to work with millionaire coasters who were suddenly more opinionated because getting fired was not an issue.
The most ironic thing was that MIT economist Bengt Holmström was a member of Nokia's board of directors when it happened. He received Nobel memorial price for economics last year for developing contract theory and researching incentive systems within companies. He knew it was overly complex and inefficient system, but nobody was interested to know what the number 1 guy in the field was thinking. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/in-nobel-prize-lec...
> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services. I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.
A large part of a CEO's job at such a big company is maintaining relationships especially with various regulatory agencies. There's no way a recent graduate could manage that.
To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.
The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.
:-(
> The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The two are not the same. And second, we're assuming that best (or even standard) practice is an invariant with respect to the task, that the best way to write a word processor is also the best way to write a spacecacraft control system. It isn't.
Well said. I think I'm going to have to hold onto this argument for a rainy day.
Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).
> So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.
It is no fun for most people, through there are exceptions. It might sound like weird analogy, but similar depression happen to women who stayed at home. The feeling like parasite is one of contributing reason I think all the wanting to go to work. (I haven't had experience with long term work where I do nothing, only a bit of experience with the other.)
Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.
I don't think I've heard of an industry that managed to solve this problem.
I'm not sure I follow. If threatening to quit is sufficient in making your work visible, then your work should've been recognized to begin with.
And if it takes you quitting for people to notice things falling apart, then the threat wouldn't be enough regardless.
If people came out of the wood-works to ask you not to leave, it means you were doing good work that people saw, but you weren't sufficiently rewarded for.
Yet, this is also true for Ops, design, security... and also nurses, electricians, plumbers, a lot of "traditional" engineering, accounting... essentially most jobs, perhaps.
But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around.
Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.
Is this really prevalent at Google?
edit:quotes
I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting.
Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.
I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows.
Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.
The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement.
I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do.
>"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year.
Called it a year ago [1]:
>I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662
I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].
[1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-ove...
The VIPs (Vest In Peacers) are more inclined to do the easier thing of adopting and building on what's already there, which is of course the better thing: virtue of laziness and so forth.
(source: xoogler)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/curator/the-pharmacy-with-dr.-dr...
Yes, we know that this sort of thing is rarer outside of Internet companies. Yes, we know that Jobs's Apple and Pixar notoriously initiated no-poaching agreements with other Silicon Valley employers that depressed salaries for their workers. After Facebook broke the cartel for Internet companies, compensation skyrocketed, and it's possible to be paid well at an Internet company doing nothing so long as you aren't doing something for a competitor.
There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.
They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired.
So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.
The conventional term for this is "up or out".
One of the holy grails of effectiveness at doing stuff is having some comprehension of your boundaries. To categorically disavow even the concept of boundaries is catastrophically silly.
And as Applejinx says, the fact that someone isn't suited to the role above them doesn't mean they aren't suited to their current role. Up-or-out means tossing out the guy who knows his job well and is doing it well to replace him with someone who's never done it before and needs a training period; this is significant overhead applied to every job in the company.
The whole up or out principle sounded rather efficient to me.