Google drops engineering residency after protests over ‘inequities’

[anonygler]

That's insane. The residency program is a way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requirements. SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience.

This was an incredible opportunity and it's an absolute shame that internal protests killed it. Yes, you get less pay and a smaller stock refresh, but I know a few people who's careers began with this residency and they'd still be struggling without it.

I don't even know how to describe this. You get less pay but an amazing opportunity, and then you look back and are upset that you weren't given more? Google took a large risk on these candidates with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go. But they did it anyway just to create opportunities.

[ashhdsfsa28378]

To clarify, I can say from experience (having personally helped convert 6 engineering residents at Google), I'm pretty confident the "less pay and a smaller stock refresh" in the article is referring to conversion offers to FTE and stock refreshes after the first year of FTE employment, not to their pay during their residency. Those FTE conversion offers were terrible, from what I saw, with no room for negotiation. The residency program had given these candidates 1 year to build a proven track record of performance and they were fully ramped up by the end, so there was no risk to Google at the time of those offers; if a resident was given an offer, it was because they were a pretty sure thing (far more than any normal interviewed hire). As such, I think their offers should have been higher than a regular hire, not lower. (As someone who was hired direct out of college with little experience, I can confidently say the offers my residents got were _significantly_ lower than my starting offer at the same level.) The article states this a bit unclearly, but I'm pretty sure this is what it means, because it doesn't make sense to refer to year-end bonuses or stock refreshes during residency because they aren't long enough to get these regardless (and I never heard anyone complain about this).

That said, as a side note, I do think articles like this tend to sensationalize Google as a whole as the "bad guy". Try to remember, Google is a huge company with lots of people managing its many parts. I personally feel there was a failing here, but if so, it was the fault of a relatively small number of people, not "Google". Even most of the people running this program were good, and the program itself was great (as you said) other than what I said above. There's hundreds of thousands of decisions happening every day at Google. If just a couple bad ones get to define the company as a whole, then no large company can ever be good, no matter how good all the rest of those decisions are.

[onion2k]

SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience.

I don't think that's really true.

I'm not arguing that there aren't SWEs whose total comp is $600k. There definitely are. However, those people aren't really SWEs. They're managers, architects, and strategists. They have a lot of people reporting to them, they make decisions about very high level things that are only tangentially related to code, and they work on guiding other engineers to find solutions to hard problems. No doubt being a developer before getting to that role is incredibly helpful and makes you better at it, but if you're earning $600k I very much doubt you're spending more than 25% of your time sat at a keyboard with an IDE open.

If you want to earn that much after a decade in work you'd be much better off polishing your management and strategy skills than learning how to write better code.

And yes, I realise I'm totally falling in to the 'no true Scotsman' trap here. But sometimes a Scotsman is just an MBA in a kilt. :)

[JMTQp8lwXL]

> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience.

Just like stores have "up to" 70% discounts. One item is marked off that much, and the rest are given modest discounts.

We shouldn't normalize this number as some plain old average, it'd be aspirational for many.

[b20000]

“ way for people from unique backgrounds to enter into the software engineering field with less stringent interview requirements” - sounds like discrimination and should be illegal. meanwhile, people in their 40s are dealing with leetcode BS to get a reasonable position with that sort of compensation even though they have an extensive track record.

[Imnimo]

>with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go.

This seems at odds with the article:

>Nearly all residents converted to regular employees, according to the presentation

[hkai]

True equity of outcomes means that people spend different amounts of effort but get to the same results.

So people from underrepresented backgrounds should be paid the same as top engineers regardless of output.

[junon]

> SWE can pay upwards of $500-600k after 5-10 years of experience.

Where? lol

[footlose_3815]

The IT residency you don’t even get stock.

[Manuel_D]

It seems like this engineering residency program is essentially an extended internship, which converts to a full time role if the worker does well. Google searches say residents are paid ~$95k a year. This is by no means bad pay for entry level work.

I'm really struggling to see the injustice of this program. It seems to me that axing it only leaves the people who used this role as a stepping stone to reach a full time role with no opportunity to get their foot in the door.

[tdeck]

That was my impression as well. The eng residency program is intended as an entry point for those who aren't yet qualified for Google's entry level engineering positions. It's a kind of apprenticeship. I have heard (but can't confirm) that folks are sometimes invited to apply for residency after not passing an ordinary engineering interview. I also got the impression that there are strong incentives to always convert residents at the end of their residency. I have had limited experience with residents on the job so I can't really comment on their qualifications.

[maxcan]

I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but if I had to steelman the argument against Eng Res it would be that since pay and promotion seems to follow percentage increments year to year, if you start at a lower point than someone else, you are going to be consistently behind them. So, having this program essentially creates a second class of engineer at google, predominantly URMs, who will be given lower pay and lower prestige assignments.

Personally, I don't buy this because the alternative is not that these Eng Residents would have been given entry level roles at google with the commensurate pay and benefits but rather no role at google.

[desertedisland]

I once went out with a nurse in the UK who worked in palliative (end of life) care. On a daily basis she was responsible for life-changing decisions concerning medications; she had to comfort the dying and tell bereaved people that their relatives had died (frequently ending up in tears herself); she had to give bed baths and clean up human waste daily. She had to undertake continuous training and assessment with her career at risk if she failed; she did not know more than a week in advance what shifts she would be working which on any given day could start at 6am or 9pm (and go through to 4am the next day).

For all of this she was paid £25,000 (USD 35,000) / year.

The injustice is that software engineers and the tech sector in general are being so insanely rewarded as most of the rest of society stagnates and living standards fall (I say this as an insanely rewarded software engineer).

This will not end well.

[pancaku]

I'm not commenting on whether these programs are a good idea or not. But I wanted to point out one thing about these programs I find funny is while the candidates races may be diverse their educational background is usually quite similar. A program at my work is very similar, and the majority of students went to the top ten CS schools.

[Siira]

The education system’s admission criteria is heavily correlated with the hiring criteria, even without taking the prestige of their degrees into the account.

[MikeUt]

> Critics have long argued that Google and its tech industry peers favor white, Asian and male workers

Google was 51.7% white in 2020, down from 54.4% in 2019 *. The US is 61.5% white, meaning whites are under-represented at Google, and increasingly so. How can one then argue they are favored? Why do reporters not apply even the smallest degree of scrutiny to such claims?

* https://diversity.google/annual-report/

[temporalparts]

I think it's worth considering the following points:

* The critics are talking about Software Engineering (~1/3rd of the company?), whereas the source you cited is about all of Google. I wouldn't be surprised if the White/Asian/Male splits are far worse when you only look at software engineers.

* Google has many international offices (e.g. there's > 1000 employees in Google Japan).

[Imnimo]

Google hires many people who are not from the US to come work in the US, so I don't think the 61.5% is reflective of their hiring pool.

[akomtu]

What's "white" even mean? Descendants of north Europeans? Surface albedo of skin greater than 0.85 in the visible spectrum?

[b20000]

downvoting won’t help you in 20-something years from now

[judge2020]

Using an anecdote from one person doesn't actually prove the point you made in the first line. If you can find repeated cases of over-reactions from Googlers over multiple months/years, then you might have evidence to support your argument.