Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."

There's a value to having slack. Most novel ideas come from having one's mind wander, not by being constantly busy with coding.

Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.

Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers.

Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).

Googler, opinions are my own.

The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings).

But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst.

At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here.

[0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...

Also the term "rest and vest" isn't use correctly here. "Rest and vest" refers to people who were acquired during an acquisition. They were too important to fire as they had vital information how the acquired company worked, but also they couldn't leave due to the golden handcuffs they were given in the form of options.

So they "rest and vest".