>billionaire investor complains that google is paying avg salaries of 300K
>They are hoarding talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there isn’t a motivation to quit and build a startup that will disrupt the status quo.
What is this article? I don't understand if this is tongue-in-cheek or if there really is something as tone-deaf as this. Regardless, the cut is expected at this point.
Why is this tone deaf? This is relatively consistent with the stories I've been hearing from friends at FAANGs and from a lower tier company, we have definitely been feeling the lack of engineers to hire for several years at this point
Nobody becomes a billionaire off salary. Generally speaking, billionaires come to be billionaires because they created something that has value in the billions.
Someone who has created their own worth saying that there are people being paid salaries without creating enough value to justify said salaries is not tone deaf. I bet most billionaires - at the very least, the self made ones, which is most of them in the US - have a better sense of value than most other people.
The comment isn’t about making too much money. It’s about being given too much money in exchange for what is produced.
I don’t get it - which bit do you think is tone-death? Companies definitely try to keep engineers even if they don’t really need them to deny to others. But even if that’s not true how would it be ‘tone-death’?
Anyone in the industry knows that's exactly why so many are hired and so little output happens. Anyone who has friends at the company will tell you those stories.
I've heard it from ex googlers themselves when I worked in SV. We recruited two of them, they hadn't worked on anything even remotely important/interesting at google for months, that was in 2015
They aren't so much poor performers as much as Google coddled and incentivized this behavior, like many other service tech companies, as opposed to hw tech companies, in order to "corner" the talent and prevent much competition in core areas.
Who has heard it? The rumors presented in the article are about the renaming of the performance review system, not actual evidence or even rumoring of layoffs.
This system was announced in like March. Nothing about it has changed since then.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if a career pivot to learning to program was a mistake. Smells like everyone but the veeery top 2% is gonna get knocked down to $100k or below and be treated as lackeys for features dreamt up by sales.
Competition at the low level is going to be rough. However, it's pretty hyperbolic to say experienced people are going to be dropped under 100k.
Are the days of 750k TC due to stock appreciation over? Prolly. Do engineering staff tend to bring considerably more value than they cost at mid-level companies? Yes.
because with a $100k salary you'll have a very nice lifestyle in pretty much all of Europe. Even in Singapore that'll pay for a nice flat with rooftop tennis court, pools, and gym in walking distance to 100+ restaurants.
With remote work, you're competing against all of those people who are ecstatic about a $80k annual salary.
Yeah, but remote work is difficult enough to manage IN THE US where people are rarely more than a few hours apart and share a common language and culture.
Companies are not going to find it easy to hire Eastern European or Singaporean devs and get them to produce value - at least not any more than they did pre-pandemic.
Remote work has been massively overhyped; IMO it does noticeably make organizations less productive after some time has passed and people need to plan the next big project.
Seeing someone in-person is insanely high bandwidth. It takes an hour to plan a thing that might have taken a day's worth of frustrating meetings and two design docs.
I'm convinced at this point that anyone saying otherwise is either senior enough to be able to browbeat everyone else who has thoughts on their plans (and then design truly awful systems ime) or knows the truth and enjoys the extra free time.
How did you determine that their poor performance was an attribute of the employee, rather than a consequence of their strengths in a given environment?
Everyone’s performance differs depending on the environment and their personal context. I’ve know poor performers whose impact shot up once they were no longer asked to do things that frustrated them, for example.
How many software engineers have been released to the market at this point? Except for twitter, I was under the impression most Software Engineers and product managers weren’t actually being let go, and that all these layoffs was more centered around recruitment, D&I, and sales?
This article doesn't support its claim. It references an article that claims Google asked managers to rate a certain percentage of employees as poor performers. But the claim that Google intends to lay off these poor performers seems to be totally unsubstantiated.
Yeah this entire thing is just people overreacting on Blind and then that getting picked up by garbage forbes contributors.
There's been a performance review system forever. There's been expected distributions across large groups forever. The only two things that are new are
1. The system has a new name
2. There is a new bucket for "below expectations but not so far below that it crushes your compensation for next year"
That's it.
Nobody knows if Google will lay people off. But this game of telephone rumors is a mess.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 94.3 ms ] thread>They are hoarding talent from their rivals and paying workers handsomely so there isn’t a motivation to quit and build a startup that will disrupt the status quo.
What is this article? I don't understand if this is tongue-in-cheek or if there really is something as tone-deaf as this. Regardless, the cut is expected at this point.
Someone who has created their own worth saying that there are people being paid salaries without creating enough value to justify said salaries is not tone deaf. I bet most billionaires - at the very least, the self made ones, which is most of them in the US - have a better sense of value than most other people.
The comment isn’t about making too much money. It’s about being given too much money in exchange for what is produced.
Anyone in the industry knows that's exactly why so many are hired and so little output happens. Anyone who has friends at the company will tell you those stories.
This system was announced in like March. Nothing about it has changed since then.
A company does not have agency or free will.
https://youtu.be/_NeJ3Kg6OUo
Are the days of 750k TC due to stock appreciation over? Prolly. Do engineering staff tend to bring considerably more value than they cost at mid-level companies? Yes.
because with a $100k salary you'll have a very nice lifestyle in pretty much all of Europe. Even in Singapore that'll pay for a nice flat with rooftop tennis court, pools, and gym in walking distance to 100+ restaurants.
With remote work, you're competing against all of those people who are ecstatic about a $80k annual salary.
Companies are not going to find it easy to hire Eastern European or Singaporean devs and get them to produce value - at least not any more than they did pre-pandemic.
Remote work has been massively overhyped; IMO it does noticeably make organizations less productive after some time has passed and people need to plan the next big project.
Seeing someone in-person is insanely high bandwidth. It takes an hour to plan a thing that might have taken a day's worth of frustrating meetings and two design docs.
I'm convinced at this point that anyone saying otherwise is either senior enough to be able to browbeat everyone else who has thoughts on their plans (and then design truly awful systems ime) or knows the truth and enjoys the extra free time.
In any organization you can stack rank and fire the lowest whatever percent of people. Don’t think they are somehow bad software engineers.
Nope.
Many poor performers at my startup ended up at Google and Facebook
Everyone’s performance differs depending on the environment and their personal context. I’ve know poor performers whose impact shot up once they were no longer asked to do things that frustrated them, for example.
I much prefer working with good people who are average coders than brilliant coders who are insufferable colleagues.
I do expect competition for entry-level is going to be fiercer than ever, though.
There's been a performance review system forever. There's been expected distributions across large groups forever. The only two things that are new are
1. The system has a new name
2. There is a new bucket for "below expectations but not so far below that it crushes your compensation for next year"
That's it.
Nobody knows if Google will lay people off. But this game of telephone rumors is a mess.