So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more than 1M a year are at each of these companies?
And can they use one more?
“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
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Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#32I 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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#33There 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 a…
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#34It'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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#35Where do I sign up for that job?
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#36Can confirm.
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#37> 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 compens…
Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#38> 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 compens…
Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.
It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that was sarcasm
I also got the same idea. 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 wr…
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#40I 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?