
Google: $100M Golden Handcuffs On Wildfire To Retain Employees After Acquisition - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/06/google-wildfire-100-million/
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rm999
I was recently talking to someone who worked for a company that was acquired
by google. He seemed to think the setup was bittersweet. On one hand all he
had to do was stay for 1.5-3 years (I forget exactly how long) and his 500K in
google stock would vest. On the other hand he was stuck there, working on a
really boring project translating some API (or something similar that sounded
just as boring as he made it out to be). He said he was in at 11 and out by 4
every day, and most of that time was surfing the internet. It must be nice to
get paid an average of 300k a year - with awesome benefits - to do nothing,
but it also kind of sucks to feel like you don't accomplish much every day.

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jrockway
I doubt anyone is stopping him from doing more, being promoted, and so on. It
probably just seems pointless when you're getting paid so much.

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rm999
The way he put it it's not possible for him to switch projects, and it's not
simple to take on a second project because he's supposed to be fulltime on the
transition. But I don't know the details, I'm not clear how Google's project
management works.

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bdonlan
The way I see it, there are always boring jobs that need to be done, and
paying more for them is one reasonable way of convincing people to do them.
Yeah, it might be boring, but on the other hand he works short hours and gets
paid really well. It's up to him whether this tradeoff is worth it -
personally, I would say he should use the extra time he has thanks to his
short hours to do something more interesting on the side, while still doing
the boring job to pay the bills.

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munin
except that anything interesting he does 'on the side' is owned by el goog?

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georgemcbay
Not likely.

YMMV depending upon where you live but in California what you do on your own
time with your own equipment belongs to you, not your employer.

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defen
I'm not a lawyer, so keep in mind that I have no idea what I'm talking about,
but see comments by DannyBee in this thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4051635>

The way I read it is that Google has their hands in so many projects that they
would have a good claim on your free-time work, even in California. Just
another good reason to ignore their recruiter emails.

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jrockway
Google also has a rather simple process for getting your intellectual property
back. It's been discussed on HN before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4051325>

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pkghost
For comparison, when Google acquired Slide two years ago, the acquired
employees numbered fewer than 100 (vs Wildfire's 400) and retention packages
summed to $46 million.

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Robby2012
I don't really understand why people get so mad when being acquired by Google.
For me it doesn't make any sense to sell your company, even worse if it's to
Google.

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vtry
I want some of that golden money!

