
“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work - SQL2219
http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7
======
boulos
There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different
groups.

Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over
N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a
mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's
what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic
"rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any
outsized grant).

Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well
for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard
of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote
disturbing:

> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to
> work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t
> want to get promoted.

At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal
level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never
move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors.

Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are _normal_ for very senior
engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest
and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the
folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they
get their work done, what do I care?

~~~
scurvy
At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They
were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just
wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at
MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would
I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

~~~
watwut
> The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I
> spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

I am not sure whether I should fear sorry for the kids or for the father.
Having father that jokes about not liking you must sux.

~~~
ltaaug8
I once interviewed with a team leader and two of his engineers. When I asked
"What qualities characterize a valuable member of your team?", one of the
engineers described how hard they work: they work so hard that the team leader
cancelled dinner with his wife on their 10th anniversary so he could work late
that night. The team leader was beaming with pride. I felt sorry for all of
them and especially for that guy's family.

------
lisper
It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion
Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the
Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder.
Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's
essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most
engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in
2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an
obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-)

To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came
out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go,
including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to
negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition
that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.

The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's
strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had
been on the losing side of huge political fight
([http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html](http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-
lisp.html)) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to
take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I
basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and
getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a
parasite, at least it wasn't for me.

~~~
Buttons840
From your linked blog post:

> The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been
> advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL
> should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is
> twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The
> two are not the same. And second, we're assuming that best (or even
> standard) practice is an invariant with respect to the task, that the best
> way to write a word processor is also the best way to write a spacecacraft
> control system. It isn't.

Well said. I think I'm going to have to hold onto this argument for a rainy
day.

~~~
lisper
Thanks for the kind words.

------
asah
Can confirm.

But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the
people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact
and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply
need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support,
they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google
keep them around.

Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the
kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.

~~~
antod
And for a rich company, I suppose keeping them around stops their competitors
from hiring them a while.

~~~
aisofteng
The article explicitly mentions this.

~~~
antod
Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about
the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading
the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that
reflects badly on me or modern journalism.

------
YANT2017
This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been
instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty
afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite
literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is
meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance.
Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they
want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you
can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he
wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me
space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to
bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will
use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have
and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a
startup in that regard.

There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by
knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to
tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of
dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.

------
WalterBright
I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he
was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth
that much?

An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the
university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university
brought in donations, grants, and top talent.

Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.

~~~
sillysaurus3
What was the XXX figure? It'd be interesting to know.

~~~
somecontext
Wikipedia claims that Feynman's first job after Los Alamos was at Cornell for
$4,000 per year (~$54k/year inflation-adjusted). This claim is repeated in
many sources, including the book "Genius: the life and science of Richard
Feynman".

That book also makes the claim that in the 1960s (perhaps as early as 1960
itself), Feynman's salary crossed $20,000/year and that he was the highest-
paid member of the faculty. Inflation-adjusted, that is at most $165k/year.

------
geff82
Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years
myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at
two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions
because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then
pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for
more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work
to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a
few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them:
essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make
sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots
of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not
the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.

~~~
ashark
It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not
anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee.
Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones
who are doing almost nothing.

~~~
shostack
For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but
for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to.
It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc.

The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work
with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy
part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my
plan of attack in my head.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that
they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.

------
ChuckMcM
And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-(

I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the
previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various
restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some
people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my
shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no
longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they
didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to
do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given
additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they
were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road.

I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found
wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a
sort of fearlessness to do the _right_ thing even if you boss doesn't think
its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be
politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion
of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't
been there pre-IPO.

Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly.

I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have
someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers
control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them
they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from
anything that could set them off.

That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can
do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time
productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.

~~~
madengr
I had $30k in Sun stock at one time; lost it all.

~~~
ChuckMcM
A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was
horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half.
That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it.

I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase
plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I
didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I
sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told
him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until
1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a
replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent
value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!

The dot com days taught me the hard way _why_ you diversify. Sure you don't
get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it
all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all
when the stock goes down either.

All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd
like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the
stock I sold.

~~~
madengr
I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust,
wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm
diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).

~~~
zeusk
except tech has been the driver of growth since the last economic crisis.

~~~
madengr
Sure, but on average, everything is doing well since the last economic crises.
There are dot-com tech stocks that never recovered. I'll only buy funds or
dividend paying stocks, though mostly everything is in a 401k (which rode out
the crashes quite well).

------
icelancer
>Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his
career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project
months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.

>They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but
didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months
involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being
available to answer questions, he recalls.

This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a
total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and
the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the
engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having
him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours
a week of "free" labor.

------
ghettoimp
So working 9-5 is "coasting"...? Fuck you. I've got kids.

~~~
avs733
I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take
advantage of the poor companies /s.

If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for
yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a
construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue
against worker protections and rights.

------
WalterBright
There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life.

I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D
programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm
not interested in retiring.

~~~
DonbunEf7
It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my
time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home-
improvement projects that had been planned but never executed.

"I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you
know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."

------
bane
I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different
jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply
weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into
weekends.

The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and
again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use
it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be
needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much
at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management.
However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior
pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs
because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.

Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job
again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more
productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now
where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and
rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a
pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs
(and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.

~~~
RSchaeffer
>I'd structure my days very differently

What would your restructured day look like?

~~~
bane
I think I would definitely put more effort into establishing clearer
space/time boundaries between work and home. I live near a local library and
might turn it into an office of sorts so that I have a place to go, people to
interact with and so on.

I'd definitely put more effort into making sure I'd wake up, shower, and dress
for work during work hours and then stop at the end of the work day.

Basically, better discipline, more delineation.

~~~
jdswain
I used to go out in the morning to a local Starbucks and do email and planning
tasks plus also get some social interaction. That worked really well for
staring the day with a clear boundary.

At the end of the day I'd walk up to the train station (through a park) to
meet my wife, so I'd have a clear boundary on both ends of my day. It worked
really well while I lived there. Now I'm in a small town and it's a bit harder
to do something similar.

~~~
spraak
That's great advice, thank you.

------
ChemicalWarfare
The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl
are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella.

None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only
"shock factor" is the compensation figures.

But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments.
Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can
cruise if you choose to.

What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will
assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment
where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they
are on a different team now...

------
pixelmonkey
One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big
tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect
huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work.

It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am
afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of
"elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.

In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at
Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being
paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.

Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with
the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and
Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden
handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year
cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No
one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are
different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They
have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu
of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not
actually increase operating expense.

Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the
same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.

The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism
seems to value different professions wrongly.

These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And
physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often
requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.

It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for
engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions),
capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.

And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid"
professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a
compensation upgrade.

But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are
among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged
value-add?

~~~
IBM
I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of
the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will
be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely
different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-
trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making
that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the
shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-
trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both
from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly,
and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and
necessary counterbalance in capitalism.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2017/7/31/16021844/antitrust-better-deal)

~~~
wbl
The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook
might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better
search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search
monopoly is anti-consumer is there?

~~~
shopkins
Google has such a vast amount of data on users that its search really can't be
beat right now. If you're fully in the ecosystem with mail, maps, contacts,
calendar, smartphone, apps, etc. you're going to get better results -- not to
mention switching could mean giving up these integrated products.

~~~
wbl
So if we break up Google, this harms consumers by stopping the integration.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating
Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between
services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work
between the best services from different companies?

We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling
them with their good ones.

------
brendangregg
I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that
some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the
past with stock offers.

It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid
almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not
only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no
vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with
everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people
that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.

------
capkutay
These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being
content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor
or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services
(mail, ad analytics, etc).

~~~
myrloc
True. The issue then becomes: what could they be doing for society? This takes
more ingenuity and leadership.

~~~
capkutay
Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in
their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start
to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had
before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.

Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives,
raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job
where they are respected.

------
user5994461
> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to
> work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t
> want to get promoted.

Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to
be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract.

Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get
promoted. Don't bother.

~~~
whipoodle
The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really
know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything
seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize
killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would
care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run
than the reality.

------
seattle_spring
I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are
actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really
unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside
of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.

~~~
trelliscoded
I agree. I've worked with people who actually put in 8 hours of work a day on
a regular basis, and it had a huge impact on my desire to get things done.
Also, working with Germans.

------
lettersdigits
> "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior
> engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to
> kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles
> of their own jobs," one engineer described.

Is this really prevalent at Google?

edit:quotes

~~~
muzz
My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If
someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation,
evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work
less. But I really don't see how they could do this.

------
NTDF9
Reminds me of the common saying,

"The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the
job in the first place."

------
zw123456
Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I
once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground
and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could
have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead.

I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for
doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are
getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting.

Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.

~~~
mavhc
Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works
harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they
have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the
company to try and get promoted.

~~~
gorbachev
There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of
CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is
just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex
CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other.

I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically
solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows.

Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and
more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO
leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.

------
spraak
Well, at my current position I am certainly resting, but not vesting, so I'm
torn about what to do. On one hand, I have lots of time to do my own projects,
but instead I've been very lazy and mostly read HN :/ and on the other hand, I
am at the low end of the pay spectrum for my experience. I'd rather be paid
more, but I don't want to have to work harder for it than I am now.

Wow, I am silly.

Edit: I mean that the company has not IPO'd and I don't own any stock/equity
as a remote contractor.

------
natch
I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google
services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are
well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered
to care. Not limited to Google of course.

------
hendzen
I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public
that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim
the fat?

------
jokoon
I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and
indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how
their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.

~~~
m-j-fox
I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could
hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between
them, they could perform his duties, no?

~~~
samsonradu
Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They
would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions
under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people
and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are
quite good also, a very good speaker.

~~~
m-j-fox
Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class;
could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each.
Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on
their services.

~~~
samsonradu
Sorry, didn't mean to be a grammar-nazi. I think their job means much more
than meets the eye. The guy is directly lobby-ing the US president, and highly
ranked officials around the world. Mistakes at that level cost quite a lot. It
might be the case that some professors can be up for the job, but would anyone
take a chance?

> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on
> their services. I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.

------
cylinder
All's good when the stock price is inflated. The reckoning (cost cutting) will
come.

~~~
tanilama
Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped
them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to
imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.

~~~
contingencies
They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...

~~~
tanilama
Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff
on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they
will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the
companies do.

------
Swizec
> she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her
> people from losing their jobs over it.

> As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk
> of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those
> taxes.

> after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work

Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the
$1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.

~~~
hendzen
Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.

~~~
lisper
It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.

~~~
Kiro
How?

~~~
lisper
Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.

------
rb808
Google is sounding more like IBM every year.

~~~
home_boi
Did IBM pay well back in the day?

~~~
DonHopkins
There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers.
The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I
had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.)
When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun
Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult
corporate research menu design at its best!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-
_Almaden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden)

[2] [http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/](http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/)

------
master_yoda_1
I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work.
I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave. 4 month after that the
startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding.

So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is
no free lunch".

------
kelvin0
Legendary slacker story: [http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-
job-chin...](http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-
china/index.html)

Don't work hard, work smart :)

------
peterburkimsher
Is it unethical to keep a chair warm when my boss didn't give me new tasks to
do?

For other areas of life (immigration), I need to get more years of continuous
relevant work experience.

I come to an office every day, but my boss just doesn't have enough to keep me
busy. My job title is "Project Engineer", which is vague enough to cover
everything from DLL debugging to Node.JS programming to network monitoring to
evaluating Advanced Planning systems. The latest task is to do some online
course in machine learning, even though he didn't specify how the company will
need it.

On bad days, I feel useless. But I reconcile the situation to myself by saying
it's basically a "basic income" (the salary is not high; the minimum that
people on my visa can have). I could think about changing after I have the
years of work experience, but years just come with patience, not with
productivity. I feel like my situation isn't "fair" because my friends are so
much more stressed, but I need the years, not the results.

I also do a lot of side projects and post them online (e.g. learning Chinese -
[http://pingtype.github.io](http://pingtype.github.io) ), but my contract and
visa specifically state that I can't have any other paid work. So all my
projects must be free and open source.

If another rest-and-vest person wants to comfort their conscience, I suggest
reading more about Basic Income theories.

------
rebootthesystem
I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that
could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And,
yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of
a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these
environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way.
I think it's soul-sucking depressing.

------
shoefly
This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the
"host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.

~~~
peterburkimsher
That's what I'm doing now. It's ok, but it's against my contract to get paid
for those projects. So I have to give everything away for free, open-source!

Sounds great, but that also means my marketing budget is zero. I can't find
users. I've put in all this effort, but nobody knows about it, and it feels
all like a waste of time. But you know, I still get paid ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
freyir
> _" They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start
> to pull 9-5 days"_

Worthless slackers.

~~~
tensor
That quote is super cringe worthy.

The article is very unclear, they also quote:

>"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior
engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick
into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of
their own jobs," one engineer described.

Probably a lot of cherry picking going on.

~~~
jonas21
They're not really contradictory. A 9 to 5 day can easily turn into 4 hours of
real work. Show up, eat breakfast, spend some time reading HN, an hour of
work, lunch, an hour or two working, grab coffee, play some foosball, another
hour of work, go to the gym, time to go home!

~~~
madhadron
Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard,
sustainable technical work in them per day, and that's assuming a regular
schedule, adequate sleep, good nutrition, no major emotional upsets going
on... Now, that is _work_. No checking Facebook. No checking email. Process
optimized so there are no long periods of waiting around.

I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an
hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with
email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective
schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work.
That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a
couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and
the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.

~~~
ksk
>Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard,
sustainable technical work in them per day,

What makes you say that?

~~~
madhadron
Measuring myself for a decade and a half, and some data from colleagues
measuring themselves on my suggestion, and watching youngsters that I was
mentoring.

------
jayd16
So...the age old concept of "Fuck You" Money?

This is more an indictment of the work hours/pressure on average engineer.

------
jaequery
I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there
are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs.

It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long
that you have no idea what is going on and where.

------
banku_brougham
I notice ther was no mention of amazon, but that is a large tech company with
10s of thousands of engineers. Anyone have an amzn rest and vest story?

~~~
Applejinx
I think that's culturally impossible. Amazon's a bit of a snake-pit and
there's no way such behavior could exist in that environment: it'd be painting
a giant target on your back.

------
adamnemecek
So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more
than 1M a year are at each of these companies?

~~~
thrill
And can they use one more?

------
maxxxxx
I think it's not only engineers. I know several people who are either
corporate lawyers or other long-time managers who pretty much go to meetings
the whole day because they have nothing real to do. They all are pulling good
money but feeling like they are not doing much seems to take a psychological
toll.

------
nodnyl
What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how
ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much
more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money
on, than actually taking their money.

------
ComodoHacker
Well, this highly connotates with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045)

------
p0nce
Sad to see tech giants not recapturing carbon with their unlimited money.

------
k__
Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient?

They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be
fired.

So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.

~~~
sjg007
No. The partner model is different. Tech companies are keeping talent on the
bench. McKinsey and co turn over hardworking younglins.

~~~
k__
Different from what I said?

------
JohnJamesRambo
Why are programmers called engineers these days? An engineer has an
engineering degree and does something completely different than computer
programming.

~~~
jessaustin
Having interacted with various P.E.'s and been mostly disappointed with their
work (seriously these guys are worse than architects as far as having
creativity pointed only toward fuck-ups that the client would never want), I
wonder why programmers/coders/whatevers even _want_ to engage in this
pretense. Why not call ourselves "code lawyers"?

------
loeg
Where do I sign up for that job?

------
IBM
This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are
higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost
half of Google's and Microsoft's).

The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is
Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently
(or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they
changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be
a regular retirement.

I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or
what they even do.

>"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send
me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the
hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens,
and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's
Melia Robinson last year.

Called it a year ago [1]:

>I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google
says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees
from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being
attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways
to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of
Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups
and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm
guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can
anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662)

~~~
aetherson
A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was
involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around,
spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and
Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate
it was after years of this kind of behavior.

~~~
IBM
I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture.
If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's
common.

I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned
after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up
his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects",
which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].

[1] [https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-
apple-...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-is-
said-to-be-developing-a-curved-glass-smart-watch/)

[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-
ove...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-oversee-car-
project-1469458580)

~~~
aetherson
Apple's a big company with a lot of business units that are pretty
hermetically sealed from each other. Various different people I've met who
work at Apple have had very different experiences there.

------
joejerryronnie
Or, as a recently bought out/retired colleague remarked, "My job now consists
of being home all day and trying not to piss off my wife" \- a much harder
endeavor than any engineering project I can think of.

~~~
pdimitar
Sounds like love and respect are long gone from that "relationship".

~~~
frenchy
Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get
along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if
you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's
no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children,
which makes things harder.

They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company
enjoyable.

~~~
pdimitar
I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely
right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and
respect exist in such conditions?"

People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for
the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out
there.

~~~
user5994461
Are you really surprised that people can't get along when they re stuck
together 24/7 all days?

That's what happens when they retire.

~~~
kbutler
My wife and I recently took a trip together involving hours of driving
throughout western Europe. We were glad to find we enjoyed just being
together, even at the end of the trip.

I think it's important to keep building that relationship (courting)
throughout the working years, not just to avoid hitting retirement and
thinking, "What am I going to do with this person for the rest of my life?"
but also just to enjoy all the years along the way!

You wanted to be together enough to get married - isn't it worth investing
time and effort to keep enhancing that, rather than just letting it wither?

~~~
jasonkostempski
"We were glad to find we enjoyed just being together"

Currently. Feelings towards people change constantly. They can hit extreme
levels on either side at any moment.

~~~
kbutler
Yes, but we are 20+ years in, and excited to continue...

Seems like a house - if you don't do maintenance, it gradually deteriorates
until it becomes unlivable, but with continual maintenance and improvements,
it can last forever...

~~~
jasonkostempski
Sometimes. And sometimes it's better to walk away from the mortgage and file
for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, there's no way to predict which choice is
right. I think "The Money Pit" has some solid guidance here but I haven't
watched it in many years.

~~~
pdimitar
You are right. We can never truly know from the start, especially having in
mind that we grow and change all the time as well.

I've had a failed relationship which lasted 8 years and I know the struggle
and the bitterness.

I have however confirmed the old cliche that love can bloom any time at any
place as long as one is with an open mind and open heart and doesn't hold
grudges to the world at large.

------
0xbear
This actually dates back decades. DEC invented "no output division": a team
comprised of senior but bored people who would be unfashionable and dangerous
to kick out. You give them some bullshit bling project and segregate them well
from people who are actually doing meaningful work so that they don't get in
the way. It's better if they do something meaningless for you than something
meaningful for a competitor.

~~~
fh973
These also exist at Google.

------
feelin_googley
"It's a defensive measure."

"That's Microsoft Research's whole model."

?

------
mklarmann
It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then
often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a
bit like gender bias.

