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Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

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Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#31

Post by vladd »

daimyoyo wrote: post #25
vladd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the contrary, you don't know Google's non-compete work-contract provisions and, if any, how would they held up in court, so your statement is quite speculative. Besides, the last thing you'd want to do is to work after-hours and find out your employer is owning the IP of your project (that's besides pager-duty and other after-hour things your employer might make mandatory anyway). Regarding taking twice as long…

I will preface this by saying I have never worked at google and have not seen their employment contract so perhaps they've found a way around it but from what I understand, California has well established laws in place protecting moonlighting. As long as you aren't coding up a search engine or something that directly competes with the company, you should be ok.

See the comment below, it's not "directly", it's "demonstrably anticipated research or development", which in the case of Google means anything (even games, thanks to Google+).

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#32

Post by _delirium »

daimyoyo wrote: post #25
vladd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the contrary, you don't know Google's non-compete work-contract provisions and, if any, how would they held up in court, so your statement is quite speculative. Besides, the last thing you'd want to do is to work after-hours and find out your employer is owning the IP of your project (that's besides pager-duty and other after-hour things your employer might make mandatory anyway). Regarding taking twice as long…

I will preface this by saying I have never worked at google and have not seen their employment contract so perhaps they've found a way around it but from what I understand, California has well established laws in place protecting moonlighting. As long as you aren't coding up a search engine or something that directly competes with the company, you should be ok.

a search engine or something that directly competes with the company

That's a lot of things for Google these days, though. Not just search engines, but also: local search, video streaming, webmail, contextual advertising, maps, route planning, social networking, flight search, RSS aggregation, collaborative document editing, machine translation, VOIP, web browsers, mobile operating systems, app stores, programming languages/compilers/VMs, web frameworks, cloud-computing services, etc., etc.

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#34

Post by nknight »

gwillen wrote: post #26
swaits wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with California's laws in this area?

California's laws state that IP can only be contractually assigned to the employer if it is "related to the employer's business or [to the employer's] actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development." Google's position, when I was there, appeared to be that 1) any web app and 2) any app for any phone or tablet, was "related to ... actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D."

There's a lot Google could claim under California law, but that's almost certainly too broad an interpretation to make it through court unmodified.

Ignoring the PR problem, if they sued one of their engineers over, say, an iPhone racing game, a sane judge is going to make them work pretty damn hard to demonstrate that it has any relation to their business.

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#35

Post by davidhansen »

oemera wrote: post #30
ntoshev wrote: post #9

Tl;dr: someone's ex-employee is now working at Google, says he gets $250k salary and he's under 30. Why is this even on HN, let alone #1?

I think it's on HN because such salaries will hunt talented or not even good engineers down and if this happens it could be a really hard time for startups. Let's be real for a second without engineers ideas are worthless and if all of those good ones are at big companies which gives a out a lot of cash what can you do as a startup? I don't it is bad as it sounds but it could be tough and it could kill a lot of start…

It's absolutely correct that technical ideas are worthless without effective implementation. That said, I strongly suspect that the current crop of startups, as a consequence of being overcapitalized by the current bubble, are also over-staffing their engineering teams. You don't need a dozen developers to write a me-too photo sharing app.

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#36

Post by gujk »

garethsprice wrote: post #20

This is very dubious - the Glassdoor stats at http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm have 1,500 entries for Software Engineers that max out at $190k and average $100k. The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k. There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-ce…

Why do you think perks and stock are not part of compensation?

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#37

Post by raldi »

Speaking as a Google engineer: There are three components to compensation here. Base salary, annual cash bonus, and stock grants. When he says he "takes home" $250k, he probably means the sum of all three. When the author says he thought the average Google salary was $130k, he might be referring just to the base.

Most of the comments in this thread are similarly ambiguous. If you post a comment, please be clear about whether you're talking about base or total compensation!

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#39

Post by gujk »

baddspellar wrote: post #12

Does anyone know if they have an active program to cut the bottom performers? If not, I suspect they have quite a collection of overpaid mediocre programmers. I worked for many years at a company that paid significantly higher than average salaries. Even with a program to cut the bottom 10% per year, we had quite a few people who were mediocre at best. It's easier for a busy manager to hold onto the people they have…

A company so toxic as to have a 10% attrition commitment is going to be filled with employees trying to abuse the company as much as the company abuses them.

Re: Programmers' salaries at Google $250k (and up)

#40

Post by bluesmoon »

I recently interviewed with several companies, and my experience shows that including bonuses, this isn't an unrealistic amount to expect. I had only one offer that ended up under $200K and that's only because the company didn't have a bonus program at the time. Many of the offers were much higher.

It was a really had choice to turn them down to start my own company, but I figure that being my own boss had some value, and being able to create something that was completely my own vision was more enticing. However, at the same time it gave me some confidence that if my startup didn't go according to plan, I did have a decent fallback.

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