Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad

#41

Post by philwelch » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 6:28 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #22

smm2000 wrote: post #15

TIL that even students from top CS program have no idea about taxes if they think that housing stipend is taxed higher than ordinary income. He is not alone though - compensation director at Box tried to convince me that higher salary is significantly better than lower salary + bonus because of higher taxes on bonus.

There is some truth to this actually. Companies often charge both sides of payroll tax on bonuses, which adds another ~6%. IIRC some states have a bonus tax as well. That said, higher base salary is usually better than lower salary + bonus because your annual raises are larger on a higher base. Variable comp also just kind of sucks period - you get a big windfall at some point in the year, but you can't plan for it b…

If your base salary is enough to cover your expenses (and at Google it should be more than enough), it's not especially important to be able to plan around bonuses.

Re: Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad

#42

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

jeremysmyth wrote: post #24

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the first 1K employees at companies prior to going public have a much higher chance of becoming millionaires as a result of their equity holdings in the company. I'll see if I can find a better source.

How many companies have you experienced? For 1K employees each becoming millionaires, their holdings in the company would need to be worth at least $1B, and if the IPO is 50% of the company, that means the company must be worth at least $2B. That's not a whole lot of companies, and I'm being deliberately conservative in my numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.

> How many companies have you experienced?

I can't easily quantify the coverage although I've been thinking about it. Of the several hundred people I felt I knew reasonably well at Intel and Sun through the folks I've interacted with at Xerox and Tandem where my wife worked. LinkedIn's mapping function gives me pretty good coverage but the simple sample of is/is-not retired isn't a good signal.

But the other part which isn't obvious is that a number of people at Sun (for example) were not millionaires when the company IPO'd but became millionaires as the stock increased in value. In a case which is perhaps unique but not unprecedented, the Sun stock I purchased as part of the employee purchase program (basically 10% of my salary buying stock at 85% of the fair market value every 6 months) over 10 years was worth more than a million dollars in 1999[1] Similarly for folks who "only" had $500K worth of stock when Facebook IPO'd that same stock would be > $1.5M today.

The dynamic (which was also well documented in Geoffrey Moore's books) is that companies that make it to an IPO and grow, add value over time and their relative value at a size of And to reiterate the data is out there but not well collated. I'll have to do some more digging to figure out if we can quantify this more precisely.

[1] Not that I still had it in 1999 but there were folks who did.

Re: Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad

#43

Post by whitecat » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 8:22 PM UTC

I would rate big companies i.e. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and startups all at tier two places of work, when you take social and pressures of work into consideration. Good companies to work for are any that 1) do something you are interested in. 2) Don't require you to work longer than 40 hours a week.

The problem I see is big companies, and startups is the amount time they require their employees to work, which is normally over 40 hours and can be upwards of 60 hours average per week.

Paying 100k at 40 hours a week is $48 an hour.

Paying 100k at 60 hours a week is $32 an hour.

I work with undergrads always tell my best students to avoid Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google companies. Longer hours means more stress. Big companies get employees to work longer by offering food and games at work. I tell them find a company that does cool stuff and only asks for 40 hours a week. I tell them I know working for interesting research companies getting paid $80k and working ~30 hours a week. Which is getting paid more per hour than the person working at a company earning 100k and doing 60 hours per week.

I checked up and Google isn't too bad from what I can see online. Some say 40[1] Others say 50-60 [2] Places like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are worse places to work.

[1] http://mashable.com/2012/05/10/reddit-users-google/

[2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-day-do-Google-employee...

Re: Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad

#44

Post by aries1980 » Wed, Apr 15, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #40

getpost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should recent grads be making major engineering decisions for any established company? This article smacks of entitlement. A very few recent grads may be able to make major contributions. How do you know if you're one of them?

Some are, yes. We're talking about the top CS students at schools like Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and MIT - these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1% of students. They may not be making major decisions on day 1, but they expect to be able to grow into a role where they are at least a voice at the table within a year or two.

> these kids are in the top 10% of the top 1%

And the unit is... ?