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“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

businessinsider.com

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Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#281

Post by jasonkester »

WalterBright wrote: post #164

There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life. I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.

I agree that having a purpose is important, but I disagree that that purpose should necessarily be work.

I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot.

You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year...

Well, that seems like a better plan.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#282

Post by samsonradu »

m-j-fox wrote: post #113
samsonradu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.

Sorry, didn't mean to be a grammar-nazi. I think their job means much more than meets the eye. The guy is directly lobby-ing the US president, and highly ranked officials around the world. Mistakes at that level cost quite a lot. It might be the case that some professors can be up for the job, but would anyone take a chance?

> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services. I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#283

Post by TeMPOraL »

watwut wrote: post #248
lisper wrote: post #34

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…

> 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. Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get…

> Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).

Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.

I don't think I've heard of an industry that managed to solve this problem.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#284

Post by TeMPOraL »

shostack wrote: post #122
ashark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.

For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc. The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the key…

That. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#285

Post by chronic8k »

sjg007 wrote: post #76
hendzen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?

Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society. I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medic…

> So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

Forever. There are 7 billion people in this world. If it's not you or me, there will always be someone else.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#286

Post by gadders »

maxxxxx wrote: post #54
js2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why you have project managers. They (or at least good ones) handle the process and the politics and clearing the runway for the devs to do what they are good at.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#287

Post by Nokinside »

boulos wrote: post #28

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…

Groub B was part of the reason for Nokia's fall in mobile phones.

Nokia decided to develop incentive system package for key employees and it totally screwed up work atmosphere at the senior level.

Once Nokia stock skyrocketed, Nokia workforce was divided into two with system that was not all clear. Sudden multimillionaires and those who didn't get anything extra often working side by side. One group started to take it easy, or leaving the company. Others were bitter because they had to work with millionaire coasters who were suddenly more opinionated because getting fired was not an issue.

The most ironic thing was that MIT economist Bengt Holmström was a member of Nokia's board of directors when it happened. He received Nobel memorial price for economics last year for developing contract theory and researching incentive systems within companies. He knew it was overly complex and inefficient system, but nobody was interested to know what the number 1 guy in the field was thinking. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/in-nobel-prize-lec...

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#288

Post by wastedhours »

sidlls wrote: post #167
user5994461 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can teach and firefight anywhere on the planet. You can only work for the GAFA in a couple of cities, that happen to be the most expensive in the world.

The parent's point, I think, is that teachers and firefighters (in this country) are rarely (effectively never) compensated according to the value they provide. I happen to agree with that point.

Yeah, compensation matches the number of people you reach in the moment, rather than the impact of that reach. Those who reach millions of people (rockstars, football players, the person who designed the curve on a button at a hot tech company, vacuous reality TV stars etc...) will earn relative to the audience size at the moment of earning rather than the value-add-per-person.

Teachers and firefighters have immense value on a very small number of (often unappreciative) people directly. The outcomes from that value might be immeasurable, but at the point of delivery, society doesn't value it highly enough for heft compensation at present.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#289

Post by denzil_correa »

jeffhuys wrote: post #264
mattm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also learned that a big reason why some people are workaholics is because they don't want to go home. Working late at the office gives them a good excuse.

I'm one of those. I live with roommates who do nothing but party all night (it's school vacation right now here, and I've started working full time last year). It's excruciating. They don't know what I'm going through, act like it's not that hard waking up every morning at 7AM and coming home to a balcony full of people I've never met, having to have small-talk with them (or feel like I need to when I just want to go…

If mosquito bites are a problem, you eliminate the mosquitoes - you don't skin yourself.

Re: “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

#290

Post by taway_1212 »

boulos wrote: post #28

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…

Very senior engineers make seven figures at Google?
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