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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth that much?
An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent.
Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.
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.
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 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.
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!
And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-(
I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road.
I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the right thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO.
Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly.
I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off.
That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.
>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'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s.
If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.
There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life.
I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.
I agree that having a purpose is important, but I disagree that that purpose should necessarily be work.
I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot.
You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year...
It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home-improvement projects that had been planned but never executed.
"I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."
I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends.
The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.
Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.
One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work.
It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.
In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.
Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense.
Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.
The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly.
These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.
It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.
And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade.
But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?
I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism.
> But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?
What makes you think labor compensation in tech is commensurate with the leveraged value-add? I think you're generalizing too broadly.
The vast majority of tech workers, even at the "Big Names", are not anywhere near a position where they can "rest and vest". Also their compensation per unit of added value really isn't comparable to their similarly skilled/socially connected peers in finance. A "rest and vest" Google Engineer whose blood, sweat, and tears made Google a multi-billion dollar product might make in the very low 7 figures per year, while a moderately skilled investment banker earning his bank tens of millions of dollars in a year might make a similar salary.
Our human instincts can't deal with how many people there are in the world. A doctor can only treat one person at a time; even one who was saving a life every time they operated - let's say twice a day - would probably be saving less person-hours than someone who can make Google's results 1% faster. Our instincts recoil at the idea that that's more important (mine included), but our instincts were formed in a time when we lived in tribes of at most a few hundred.
With respect to your final point about teachers, firefighters, and doctors (please keep in mind I'm not against what I'm about to say) it comes down to the public nature of these jobs. When it's tax money, it's everyone's business. When it's a corporations money, it's only their business. Now obviously it's more nuanced than that, companies receive tax breaks and what have you, but I think that is largely to blame. Software engineer salaries aren't a matter of public discourse or political whims. Doctors, teachers, firefighters, and police officers are.
The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella.
None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures.
But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to.
What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...
I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers.
It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.
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?
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.
> 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.
Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract.
Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.
The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run than the reality.
I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.
> "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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] boulos|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] lisper|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Buttons840|8 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] doktrin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|8 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] js2|8 years ago|reply
:-(
[+] [-] asah|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zilchers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antod|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YANT2017|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WalterBright|8 years ago|reply
An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent.
Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geff82|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|8 years ago|reply
You do start to go insane and there is an effect on your resume/CV as the black hole widens there.
[+] [-] ashark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1024core|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Grustaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road.
I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the right thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO.
Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly.
I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off.
That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.
[+] [-] madengr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|8 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] ghettoimp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avs733|8 years ago|reply
If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.
[+] [-] WalterBright|8 years ago|reply
I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.
[+] [-] jasonkester|8 years ago|reply
I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot.
You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year...
Well, that seems like a better plan.
[+] [-] DonbunEf7|8 years ago|reply
"I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."
[+] [-] shoefly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|8 years ago|reply
The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.
Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|8 years ago|reply
It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.
In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.
Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense.
Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.
The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly.
These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.
It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.
And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade.
But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?
[+] [-] IBM|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...
[+] [-] sidlls|8 years ago|reply
What makes you think labor compensation in tech is commensurate with the leveraged value-add? I think you're generalizing too broadly.
The vast majority of tech workers, even at the "Big Names", are not anywhere near a position where they can "rest and vest". Also their compensation per unit of added value really isn't comparable to their similarly skilled/socially connected peers in finance. A "rest and vest" Google Engineer whose blood, sweat, and tears made Google a multi-billion dollar product might make in the very low 7 figures per year, while a moderately skilled investment banker earning his bank tens of millions of dollars in a year might make a similar salary.
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fh973|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Applejinx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muninn_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChemicalWarfare|8 years ago|reply
None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures.
But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to.
What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...
[+] [-] brendangregg|8 years ago|reply
It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.
[+] [-] capkutay|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hendzen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scurvy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myrloc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|8 years ago|reply
Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract.
Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.
[+] [-] whipoodle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettersdigits|8 years ago|reply
Is this really prevalent at Google?
edit:quotes
[+] [-] NTDF9|8 years ago|reply
"The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."
[+] [-] zw123456|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mavhc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofire|8 years ago|reply