81–90 of 335 posts
Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient? They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.
The conventional term for this is "up or out".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Clarification: "Senior SWE", the formal rank, at Google is indeed a plausible terminal level. If you get there, they'll let you stay indefinitely. But it isn't particularly senior. If you start at Google straight out of college, it's two promotions up, and you may not have supervised anyone higher than an intern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Nah, go for gold. Learn math and physics!
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Not sure how "She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock". One has to do really risky/dumb things with stock options to get into that scenario
All you have to do is execute them and hold. You owe taxes. Look up dual basis.
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.
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 a…
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?
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 o…
> "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. Is this really prevalent at Google? edit:quotes
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).