Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.
How?
Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.
“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
51–60 of 335 posts
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#52I'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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#53Yes, 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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#54It'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 o…
You don't want to know how many of your taxpayer dollars went to pay me for helping to shepherd purchase orders through the JPL bureaucracy. :-(
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#55Ok, 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 i…
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 sound like my colleague Michael. It is you? ;) Essentially we were doing Coursera stuff together.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#56I 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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#57I 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.
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.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#58I 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?
I'm getting more and more confident as time goes on that a machine could perform his duties. It seems Bridgewater (for example) agrees with me.
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#59This 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?
Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work
#60Ok, 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 i…
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.