
Google Pays Its DeepMind Tech Professionals a Huge Salary - SunTzu9087
https://insights.dice.com/2019/08/08/google-deepmind-professionals-salary/
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rco8786
I don't understand why this is news, or on the front page here. Google pays
highly skilled, highly technical people a lot of money. End of story.

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Brakenshire
It's unusual in the context of Britain, I’d say, usually there's quite a well
defined pay scale, with grades of worker, skilled worker, management, senior
management, etc. It's all very class based. The exception is for self-employed
contractors, which can be higher. But in general the notion of non-management
salaried workers getting paid £300k upwards would be very surprising for a lot
of people.

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dmix
Experts at the top of their field in an advanced industry getting paid $300k
would be surprising in the UK?

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oblio
Yes. Outside of the US, salaries for non-managers rarely break $100k.
Switzerland is probably an exception, but that's just because the average
salary in Switzerland is really high, as are living costs.

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otabdeveloper4
> ...no doubt it’s working on impressive, world-changing things behind the
> scenes.

Not really. Those salaries are there to keep these smart people from doing
something world-changing that might contest Google's Internet domination.

For Google, the less productive they are, the better.

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rco8786
That's awfully cynical

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creaghpatr
Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who
have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even
if they could win without the star playing for their team.

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joncrane
Sports isn't an equation. The human elements by far outweigh the "on paper"
strength of the team. Also you never know who is going to get injured or when,
so teams will stack their roster. The only thing that stops the biggest teams
from having all awesome players is financials (either salary cap/financial
fair play, or simple economics)

Look at how the Patriots succeed, for example. On paper, they are nowhere near
the best NFL team. But they contend for championships almost every year.

The only example I can think of recently is Kimi Raikkonen in F1. Ferrari paid
him his usual salary after removing him from the first team (each team in F1
only has two seats, then sometimes there is a reserve and an additional test
driver role, mostly for the simulator). The agreement was they would continue
to pay him his regular F1 driver salary, as long as he didn't race for any
other F1 team.

He spent a year doing rally, did a couple of NASCAR races, snowmobile,
motocross, and came back the following year for Renault.

Funnily enough, a few years later he returned as a first team driver for
Ferrari for a few additional years and now races for Alfa Romeo.

His main thing is he hates promotional appearances (stuff like commercials and
autograph signings) and restrictions (he has a private motocross track and
shop, and he refuses to race for any team that won't let him ride motorcycles
and snowmobiles and whatever the F else he wants to do).

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rmah
_Sports isn 't an equation_

Tell that to Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, who used
statistical analysis and team interaction models (i.e. "equations") to turn
propel the team into the top ranks with salary expenses of only 1/3th of the
other top teams. The story was described in the book Moneyball and dramatized
in the film of the same name.

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citrablue
This is a common misconception. Beane did use statistics, but the central
point of Moneyball was how he found market inefficiencies and exploited them.
Other teams were using statistics as well, but it was Beane who applied market
principles.

That's basically what early Michael Lewis books were about: exploiting market
inefficiencies.

(Agree with your larger point about sports, however.)

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idiot900
This includes benefits, retirement, etc. According to levels.fyi, not far off
from other Bay Area tech companies.

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blaser-waffle
Yeah when you consider the total comp, 400k doesn't sound crazy if there is
stock, sign-on bonus, retirement/pension/401k, expected bonus, insurance
(health/dental/life/whatever isn't covered by the UK NHS), etc.

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gigatexal
1% acceptance rate of new hires — they have to compensate those they hire for
making it through the gauntlet, because if the process works, they’ve just
hired the best of the best and the best of the best would qualify for some
ridiculous salaries given their likely high opportunity costs (one would think
a duo or trio of Google engineers would make for a compelling startup team
potentially worth millions so paying high figure salaries as guaranteed income
could be a good compromise).

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goatinaboat
_1% acceptance rate of new hires — they have to compensate those they hire for
making it through the gauntlet_

But there are loads of companies, universities, whatever making that claim. If
you get 100 applicants and 90 are just spamming their resumes everywhere or
are recruiters doing it, 9 go elsewhere or stay put for whatever reason, and
you get 1 then you get that 1% but it doesn’t really mean anything.

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rmah
Most companies may say "we hire the best", but what they really mean is "we
hire the best we can get".

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ilaksh
If a few people making $500,000 come up with breakthrough ideas that lead to
AGI, then Google would be able to easily recoup their entire DeepMind payroll
many times over. Because, how much would that really be worth? $100 billion?
$1 trillion?

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tasuki
That's up to the AGI to decide! ;)

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samfisher83
The median salary at google is 246,804. It has about 100k employees. That
means 50% make more than that which is about 50k people. I guess they have 700
employee who make about 581k. It seems the are on the right side of the curve.

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eberkund
How are you able to make those assumptions using just the median? Did you
assume a normal distribution with some arbitrary variance?

>It has about 100k employees. That means 50% make more than that which is
about 50k people.

No it doesn't, a typical business has far more people making minimum wage than
it does making millions.

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Oletros
Yes, it does, median is the value defined as 50% of the set

The "median" is the "middle" value in the list of numbers. To find the median,
your numbers have to be listed in numerical order from smallest to largest, so
you may have to rewrite your list before you can find the median.

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repolfx
There's really only one interesting fact in this story for the HN crowd (who
already know about tech salaries at the top), and it's this:

 _Pay is basically doubling every year ... Last year, the company earned £102
million (admittedly up from £54 million) a year earlier._

So both pay/headcount and revenue doubled.

Tech firms hiring isn't news. What shocked me here is that DeepMind makes £100
million pounds a year off anything. What are they doing, exactly? I thought
they didn't have any products. Is this based on some kind of funny inter-firm
accounting where the main Google HQ pays them IP licensing fees? Or do they
have lines of business they aren't talking about much?

Anyone know?

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danpalmer
I think Google pays a lot of its "tech professionals" a huge salary – it's
just easier to break out and analyse for a single unit like DeepMind.

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tootie
An anecdote from Reddit on a guy earning >$500k

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/cdp9yz/a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/cdp9yz/another_data_point_on_industry_hire_in_the_bay/)

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blaser-waffle
From the link:

"I interviewed at Airbnb, Facebook, Lyft, Uber, and 3 other companies. I
received offers from Facebook, Lyft, Uber, and 2 other companies. First year
total compensation ranged from 380k~500k from both public and private
companies, 2nd year comp was around 400k for most of them. The offer numbers
correlated with my interview performance, and from my research, it seems like
some companies offer standardized offers to every candidate. Surprisingly the
private companies did not beat out the public companies in equity package.

 _Breakdown was around 180~210 base, 500~800 equity, and 0~100 sign-on._ "
[emphasis added]

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carlob
I don't think that's how these calculations should be done.

Let's assume that all of their estimates are correct, in most European
countries the difference between what you cost an employee and what you take
home is often more than a factor of two. Now I'm not quite sure about the UK,
but I know about France and Italy and in both those cases if you spend 100
your employee takes home around 40.

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kozhevnikov
[https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php](https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php)

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purplezooey
Doesn't this include all the costs of an employee, like health benefits,
insurance, and amortizing things like office space, HR and company services...

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polskibus
Is this more to keep already grown talent from joining competition, or because
there is really huge shortage of talent in this area?

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boltzmannbrain
Looks like rather flawed back-of-envelope calculations to get those salary
numbers... anyone with more credible sources?

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boltzmannbrain
"... average salaries of Google’s DeepMind staff in Great Britain, which
amounted to $345,000 per employee."

[https://www.top500.org/news/ai-engineers-commanding-six-
figu...](https://www.top500.org/news/ai-engineers-commanding-six-figure-
salaries/)

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sjg007
Funny... I studied planning, reinforcement learning etc and what was once
almost a backwater is now big business.

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bsaul
How is deepmind making any money ? i’m surprised they’re making any money at
all..

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sjg007
I would imagine that some of their tech will be integrated into
Google/Alphabet projects. Also DeepMind is a long play.

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mbrumlow
Are they even factoring in the cost of compute required to train their systems
?

