

Google to give staff 10% raise - abless
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703523604575605273596157634.html

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jrockway
Nice. Now if you want a 10% raise this year, it's easy to say, "everyone at
Google got one..."

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bkhl
If you are performing well at a company as big as Google, you get 10% raise
easily every fiscal year. "easily" as in the company is doing well. (It's a
common sense that companies are less likely to give raises if the company is
not making much money) If you happen to be asking for a raise, you are either
working for a wrong company or not performing well compared to your peers.

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Dove
I wish. It's more commonly some sort of good-cop bad-cop routine, where the
line manager really appreciates your work and fights hard for you against the
upper level manager, who is just so stingy about raises in general. If you're
stellar, you wind up with something way better than your teammates, but an
insult compared to what you could command on an open market.

I think on some level, they're constrained by collective bargaining
agreements. Maybe they hope you've been with the company so long you only see
the people around you. Maybe _they_ only see the people around _them_.

There was a real technical superstar of a guy a few years ago. I didn't work
with him, but a coworker did. He went to management and said, "Give me a 17%
raise or I'm leaving." They didn't and he did. The fallout was cataclysmic.

I left a project about three years ago, and there was widespread panic when I
announced my decision to leave. I took four months to pack things up and leave
them in a stable state, but you cannot totally mask the absence of talent. A
coworker asked, "Is there anything this program could do to make you stay?" I
answered, "No." He said, "How about a 200% raise?" I said, "Oh, I'd stay
another year for that." Judging from the fallout over that year, it would have
been an efficient option. But they either didn't have the power or didn't have
the perception.

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jrockway
_He went to management and said, "Give me a 17% raise or I'm leaving." They
didn't and he did. The fallout was cataclysmic._

I wish this happened more often. Then people would just automatically receive,
as a raise, whatever it costs to hire a replacement. The problem is that
people are really too nice about their compensation and don't realize that
they have a business to run -- themselves.

(Man, now I want to get a business card that lists my title as "Technical
Prostitute".)

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gaius
Why 17%?

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rkudeshi
Maybe so the raise could ultimately be 10-15% and the company would think
they'd "won."

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pama
"The company also began testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which
employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews."

Does anyone have more information on this?

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clemesha
I don't have more info on that statement, but it reminds me of this:

    
    
        When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to    
        engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision
        to a simple logic problem.
    

From here: <http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html>

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mfukar
It'll be interesting to follow this up to see how engineers solve (or not) HR
problems.

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bigbang
"Mr. Schmidt wrote that company surveys indicate salary is more important to
Google employees than any other component of pay, such as bonuses or equity.
He added the company was moving a portion of employees' bonuses into their
base salaries, so they would receive some of it in every paycheck."

Not sure, if this a 10% raise really.

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stevenbedrick
The wording was a little bit unclear to me, but I interpreted it to mean that,
_in addition to the raise_ , they're changing how their bonuses are delivered-
rather than as one lump sum, they're being spread out over each paycheck. I
could be mis-reading, though.

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dspeyer
This is correct. The two changes are independent, and stack.

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tcskeptic
This strikes me as misguided. Surely they cannot be equally concerned about
the loss of any of their 23,000 employees. Wouldn't you be better off giving
substantially larger raises to your higher performers? This way your high
performers are pissed off and your low performers are happy, is that the
outcome you want?

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cma
Implement a ranking system and standardized tests. Count lines of code and
apply it as a bonus multiplier. Make sure to only measure things directly
assigned to a person, while ignoring 'off-the-book' things like bringing new
hires up to speed, code review, etc. Devote a large portion of the bonus to a
'face-time in meetings' metric. Put everyone on an artificial bell-curve
measuring whim in exquisite detail.

20% of staff-time should be taken off anti-pagerank gaming efforts and
redirected at anti-bonus-metric gaming.

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jonursenbach
Counting the lines of code an engineer has written is a _terrible_ road to go
down. I can write 500 lines of good code, or I can abstract it into a 5,000
line heap of unmaintainable garbage.

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jeff18
That was the point ;)

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a-googler
Some asshat leaked the "CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY" memo. Good work,
(presumably) newly unemployed person. You won't even get the goods.

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Timothee
With presumably 23,000 people getting that email, unless the person (if only
one did) was not careful at all, I don't think they could be discovered. (I'm
not sure that anyone would really care either)

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stanleydrew
Google found and terminated the employee responsible.

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gaius
Got a link for that?

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stanleydrew
No, but Google notified employees internally that the person responsible was
terminated. If you have a friend at Google just ask.

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eyeareque
Google's base salary is so low compared to other companies... they had to do
this eventually.

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supersillyus
Citation?

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cloudkj
Glassdoor.com seems to provide supporting evidence of this.

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tlack
Seems like a desperation move. Can you imagine the exciting, dynamic Google of
5 years ago thinking ""Uh.. give them slightly more money?" was a great
solution to this problem?

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Locke1689
Almost every perk at Google I had at Microsoft. One of the biggest things
keeping me from being fully invested in securing a position at Google is
knowing that the salary is approximately the same at Google while the cost of
living in Silicon Valley is much higher. You may not think about salary
(beyond having enough to do what you like) but it is a very real maker/breaker
for me.

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BarkMore
You don't need to move to Silicon Valley to work at Google. Google has a large
engineering office a few miles away from Microsoft's Redmond campus.

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Locke1689
True. They also have one in Chicago. However, that doesn't mean you get to
work on anything you want. Different teams are in different places and you
usually get assigned to a team based on where you work.

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BarkMore
Yeah, I heard that Google tries to colocate teams. I recommend that you ask
Google what they do in Chicago and other locations that are acceptable to you.
There might be something that interests you.

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nl
[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-
raise-2010-1...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-
raise-2010-11) claims that _In addition, Google will also give each employee
an additional raise equivalent to 1X the employee's target bonus for the
year._

My understanding is that Google "target bonuses" are much, much more than 10%
of salary. I've heard 30%-40% as not uncommon. So does that mean that people
are actually getting a much bigger raise than the headline indicates? (Or is
the "target bonus" something else again?)

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bwillard
My understanding is that the target bonus is more in the 15% range but that
there are multipliers (company and personal) that most of the time turn that
~15% into the 30-40%.

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dstein
10% doesn't make up for the fact that GOOG stock already peaked way back in
2007, which means any Google stock options granted at today's prices are
worthless to new employees.

Google is essentially powerless to compete with Facebook's stock option
potential value.

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guelo
This logic seems dumb, Facebook is a big company, if you're joining Facebook
now, even as a star hire, are they really going to throw enough equity at you
to make you a millionaire in some unknown future IPO? And you have no idea
when the IPO will happen, it could be 10 years before you can liquidate. And
you might get screwed over on some dilution or the strike price or something
currently undisclosed, private companies are notoriously secretive about their
financials.

It's just too many unknowns. I don't think it makes sense to plan your life
around hitting this options jackpot.

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dstein
It's the difference between your stock options being worth $0 (in the case of
Google), and they being potentially worth 10X (in the case of Facebook). I'd
say 10X is a pretty big difference.

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guelo
$0? GOOG is at $624, I'm sure there are a lot of googlers sitting on options
with $300-500 prices.

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jamesaguilar
Considering the repricing [1] that occurred earlier this year, yes.

[1] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-googles-
em...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-googles-employee-
option.html)

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adambyrtek
This is from Jan 2009, not this year, and I'm sure you're aware of the fact
that the downfall affected the whole economy, not Google in particular.

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jamesaguilar
Oops. Memories fade. At any rate, my point is that a lot of people have
options with a low strike price. I'm not sure what the downfall of the economy
has to do with this fact.

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nathanlrivera
I heard the top performers are getting the 10% raise and a bonus equal to 40%
of base pay.

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dlevine
I'm not sure if bonuses have gone down recently, but a few years back (when I
was there), bonuses of 40% were pretty common.

Even though some people said that Google paid "below market," when you take
into account that kind of bonus (and some stock options), I think I did better
than I would have pretty much anywhere else.

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mkramlich
Google felt peer pressure from the Federal Reserve and decided to do it's own
QE

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tocomment
Indication of inflation on its way?

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jessor
This does make the battle for talent look pretty dramatic, doesn't it?

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mitrick2
If "battle for talent" is focused on a battlefield being fought by large,
enterprise companies vs. startups and more risk-adverse organizations, sure.
I'm not convinced that people who opt for Google/Facebook are the right people
for young companies look to take big risks with potential (vs. guaranteed)
rewards.

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bretthellman
For real entrepreneurs, the type of people Google needs to retain, a 10% raise
is meaningless. I will say it's a nice PR stunt.

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mwerty
What about really real entrepreneurs?

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mkramlich
the really real ones are imaginary

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random42
Non-US person here. Is 10% raise supposed to be big? We get 10% raise minimum
at my country (inflation is around 12.5% here)

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jamesaguilar
You probably know the target inflation rate in the U.S. is slightly less than
two percent, so a ten percent raise in a year is an 8% real raise. In your
country it is a -2.5% real change in salary. So yes, of course a 10% raise is
a bigger deal here than it is where you live.

Now, is it life changing? Not for me. Maybe if you were only making $20,000 a
year, or if you were spending right up to the edge of what you make, an extra
10% of breathing room would make a huge difference in your life. And sure,
some people if they change job function or get promoted in a U.S. company can
get anywhere from 20-40%, all the way up to multiples of 100% raises. But even
though it is not out of this world, a raise like this is nice. It's also nice
to get something for "nothing" above and beyond what you're already doing,
which is the effect a blanket raise must necessarily have.

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aswanson
A

