
Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google's car project - prostoalex
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reason-staffers-quit-google-s-car-project-the-company-paid-them-so-much
======
FreedomToCreate
I don't think getting paid a large sum of money is the contributing factor for
the departures. If this was true, than logic would dictate that no company
should be able to retain executives based on their compensation payouts each
year.

If anything, the exodus at google shows clear lack of vision and direction
from the management and executive teams. Engineers care about achieving
something they can feel proud of and if the project lacks that, they move on.

This article is written in a way that suggests engineers should be paid less
so that they remain loyal...you know, like slaves.

~~~
christophilus
I've left a company (Microsoft) in part due to big bonuses. In my case, it was
because the bonus gave me psychological stress. I felt a lot of (self-imposed)
pressure to keep performing at a very high level. The bonus was given to me
because I did a _lot_ of work to get a product out the door successfully. That
process was frustrating and painful. The big bonus made me think "we expect
more of the same!"

In retrospect, that's not at all what management was telling me. But I felt
it. And I didn't want to go through another year like the one that led up to
the bonus. And I didn't feel like climbing a career ladder (the way Microsoft
at the time seemed to encourage). I just wanted to be a simple software
engineer and build cool stuff.

I guess what I'm trying to say is anecdotally, actions (including big salaries
/ bonuses) can have unintended consequences.

Take IBM's recent initiative to kill remote work. Well, a predictable
unintended consequence of that is a brain-drain. Those who aren't capable of
finding other jobs will stay at IBM. Those who are capable will leave for
greener (and remote-friendly) pastures.

~~~
muzz
I would have taken the opposite view-- that a bonus was for hard work already
done, not an expectation of future work. A salary increase would represent
that expectation.

~~~
ramy_d
Hah, when I was at a big company i took your opposite view in that a salary
increase represented recognition for good work done consistently and the
expectation of a new normal. It's funny how we interpret the (generally) same
system

------
beamatronic
I just realized the genius of the name "Alphabet".

By investing in this company you are "betting" that they will be able to
generate "alpha" ( in the financial sense )

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp)

~~~
CobrastanJorji
You could also consider Google as Alphabet's primary, or "alpha" bet, but
Google is also investing in a variety of "other bets". The name also provides
for cool URLs, like [https://abc.xyz](https://abc.xyz).

~~~
jogjayr
Serious (and off-topic) question: did _Silicon Valley_ name Hooli XYZ as a nod
to that domain name? A whois seems to indicate that the domain was created a
year before the second season of the show, when Hooli XYZ made its first
appearance.

~~~
kobeya
I'm pretty sure it was just an obvious play on Google X. But googlers are not
without a sense of humor.

[http://hooli.xyz/](http://hooli.xyz/)

------
waisbrot
I'd interpret the content of the article as the opposite of the title: "One
(the only?) reason staffers didn't quit Google's car project before now? The
company paid them so much"

Multiple big players want to get into autonomous cars (and other vehicles --
this is the same space as military contracts for drones) and Google's
executives were in total disarray. You'd think they'd lose out but instead
they successfully hit some giant milestones by throwing enough cash at the
problem.

I mean, if the staffers had been paid poorly, wouldn't they have quit without
waiting for that 16x bonus that only comes after meeting the division goals
and then waiting four years?

------
zitterbewegung
I think the article is overemphasizing the money that the people earned with
the project but instead people got disillusioned with the project and since
they amassed enough money then that is why they departed the project. They
even state this in the article.

------
Steeeve
That's a bozo of an excuse if I ever heard one.

Lack of vision, lack of direction, failure to set expectations or execute a
plan, better opportunities elsewhere, poor management... those are all reasons
for brain drain.

Gave them too much money? That's absurd.

Honestly, it looks more like a propoganda message to pre-explain shrinking
bonus money.

------
JustSomeNobody
And a million MBA heads just bobbled as they agreed, "Yes, yes, we pay
engineers too much! Mwaaaahahaahahaa!"

------
matart
"F- you money" is the amount of money that allows you to do what you want,
i.e. leave when things do not go your way. This must mean the staffers did not
want to be there for some reason or another.

This is interesting because they were helping build the future. It's easy to
see why people might not be excited or passionate about the next CRUD app but
self driving cars seems like a passion project to me.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Many of these people are passionate about building the future. ...that's why
they left Google.

Bear in mind, many of them are still working on self-driving cars, they just
went to work for other companies. If as you say, it's a passion project, they
are going to go to whoever they think is best equipped to accomplish the
vision. Especially since money is no longer an issue for them.

------
startupdiscuss
In an alternative universe:

1\. the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed

2\. the cars were a big hit, and

3\. there are articles about how far sighted Google was for letting the
research project have these startup like returns.

~~~
jessaustin
_...the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed..._

Have onerous regulations been a problem for robocar development? If they were,
I sort of think I would have heard of it, particularly here on HN where such
vehicles are a common topic of conversation.

~~~
waisbrot
If there weren't these rules about not killing pedestrians or ramming
buildings I could make a robot car myself! Another small business smothered in
the crib by government overreach.

~~~
startupdiscuss
This is the point I was making, although this is a more amusing way of making
it.

I didn't say they should not be relaxed, by the way.

I do think at some point there will be a big public fight about what we are
willing to accept.

I have heard it said that even current self-driving tech is safer than humans.
But I haven't looked at the stats myself.

~~~
jessaustin
Sorry! To my embarrassment, your irony overpowered me.

------
gregshap
As usual it sounds like the story is more nuanced than the headline.

A more accurate phrasing might be "One reason staffers quit google's car
project? The company structured their pay so that an intermediate project
milestone was treated like an IPO event."

It's not that the employees got rich so they no longer cared about money, it's
that they basically got their maximum bonus from Google, so they were better
off taking their talents elsewhere to get the next big payout.

Given that their CFO discussed these payouts on the earnings call of a company
with $6.6 billion in operating expenses, it sounds like these were entering
the $100million range. Makes sense given that Google was trying to recruit and
motivate people to work on startup projects, while overall Google market cap
wasn't going to grow exponentially the way that a 2011 facebook or uber might.
It probably wasn't a bad idea, they just executed in a way that only
incentivized employees to get partway done.

~~~
anindha
Agreed. If they were told to hit a certain set of milestones, and they did, I
don't see why its an issue after the fact. The people that received the
bonuses did their job and deserve what they were promised.

After hitting all those milestones and not seeing a car on the road, I can
imagine that as a reason to be disgruntled and wanting to move to another
company.

------
yalogin
Did they pay F-You money to the engineers or the management? Because no matter
how much you pay its not going to be enough to make one retire (in 5 years).
Unless of course they really paid 10s of millions. That means if they are
really paid, employees would rather not leave.

The main reason its a sieve is that they realized they could make more money
by leaving. They saw examples with Otto and others.

~~~
loeg
I'd be comfortable retiring with a "mere" $2 mil bonus payout. But I'd also
stay on at a job I enjoyed, especially something as important to society as
self-driving vehicles.

------
Fricken
Maybe in a decade when this is all water under the bridge we'll get the real
story about what sort of drama went down to cause all their top people to
flee.

It may be been banal. Now that the visionary part of the program has been
executed, and with development more or less on rails, it's possible there
simply isn't anything exciting left for the top guys to work on. That and
they're all extremely valuable to car companies who would rather not get left
in the dust.

------
amorphid
Crazy thought... If this is even possible, create a standard for everything
key employees should know. Pay people great, but not GREAT. Bank up "eff you"
money for them. If they want to quit, they get the banked money as long as
there are enough people on team to carry on without that person.

Might not be practical for a number of reasons. Just sounds interesting,
without having put any thought into the idea beyond the time it took me to
write this comment.

------
carsongross
I wonder if companies will ever take a page from the public sector and offer
crucial employees pensions based on staying on for a long time.

~~~
loeg
I don't know that that can work in the tech sector — you'd have to scale down
"long time" to accommodate higher pay (and thus earlier retirement) and even
then I'd be wary of taking a job if I knew the pay was heavily backloaded.

------
jorblumesea
But they also got the best people in the industry and the results they wanted.
Engineers that may have ended up working at Lyft, Uber or other companies.

This just in, startup type incentives does work and also produces startup like
effects including bouncing around more than they would like.

------
gmarx
I really enjoy the tone of this article. It's written like they are tracking
down the steps that led a company to dump toxic chemicals outside a grade
school. Considering I see Google self driving cars self driving all over the
place and I don't recall seeing that before 2010, maybe the idea worked?

------
gigatexal
Isn't there an on-premise labor economist on the payroll? I mean, a bachelor
level econ student could have told them this. Interesting still, is that there
is real-world proof of an upper limit to pay in this industry given the a
typical labor-leisure curve

------
throwawaycanada
Clearly you can't pay commoners too much. Only upper class people should get
upper class money. One has to maintain the social order. God forbid those
people who all "quit" use their newly earned capital to start their own
enterprise.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky rants to HN. Doing so pulls discussion quality below
the level we're hoping for.

------
no_wave
Excellent journalism - anonymous sources speculate as to what might have
caused people to leave a company.

Also pushes the new business-friendly narrative that it's good for companies
to pay their engineers less.

Well done, I hope the author's boss is proud.

~~~
maxxxxx
I am all for higher salaries but there is some truth to the dangers of
overpaying. Give me 5 million dollars and you will never see me again. Give my
CEO 5 million dollars and he'll keep going. On the other hand, give me 250000
dollars and you will have a very happy and loyal employee.

~~~
JackFr
I doubt very much that you would quit after getting a 5mm bonus. I've seen
some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

I think a more typical response would be, "Hmmm. That wasn't so hard, let's
see if they do it again next year." And when they don't -- that is typically
when you walk.

~~~
ryandrake
Really, because $5M seems like an enormous fortune to me. It's an amount you
could stick in a savings account yielding only 1% interest and pretty much
live the rest of your life with a decent lifestyle somewhere with a low cost
of living. OR, you could quit your high-stress job and augment that interest
with a more fulfilling career.

I can pretty safely say a single $5M bonus would amount to an instant
lifestyle change (namely less pressure to work) for me.

~~~
CryoLogic
Or put it all in the market in highly diversified low-ish risk mutual funds,
withdraw 4% per year and live a lavish lifestyle.

~~~
JackFr
So assume you get a bonus which allows you to maintain your previous salary
with just interest income. The problem is the cost of your leisure time (as
measured by the cost of foregone wages) just went up dramatically, so the
leisure has to be worth that much more to you for you to take it.

Two things to note: 1) this is different than winning a lottery, because with
a lottery there is no expectation of a change in wages; 2) your first week of
leisure is worth much, much more than your 50th, as is your 1st dollar worth
more than your 5 millionth. There is some level at which you stop working. I
think it's much higher than you realize.

