Google Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees

$3.5 million for a key employee I can deal with, but $100 million? It feels like absolute lunacy, if true.

This isn't an April Fools post is it? I mean seriously, if you're willing to pay $50M or $100M to keep a single employee from walking, what happens if they die on their commute into work? What sort of risk are you carrying anyway?

And I didn't think I could be amazed by 'Google scale' any more, sure proves I was wrong on that.

I agree that it's an outrageous amount of money, but it's not just a case of losing talent, it's also about losing trade secrets to a competitor.

The $50M/$100M still sounds a bit out of whack.

The chances that the players in this game are using careful leaks to TechCrunch, either with real or fake information, in order to make moves against the other players is very high. As readers we shouldn't really trust that what Twitter sources tell TechCrunch is totally legit, or the same for what Google sources are telling TechCrunch - playing TC or other members of the press in order to help tilt the direction of discussion one way or the other seems like a pretty obvious move.

For example, Google Competitor X sending TechCrunch fake information about Google's desperate-sounding counter-offers helps reinforce the perception of their desperateness.

Also, these two sentences don't really add up:

Google may have paid as much as $150 million in stock grants to retain key product employees Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan, say multiple sources. Both were offered the chief product role at Twitter

Regardless, the fact that large fortunes are being handed out to mid level technical managers is somewhat of a red flag in general.

Usually I go straight to HN comments to read the first few ones to determine if a posted article is worth reading. You guys/gals rock because you help me avoid tabloid stuff and save precious minutes of my life.