It will last as long as the CFO is in the room when that decision is made and the engineer is not. (Psst: there is a fairly straightforward way to make sure you are always in the room when compensation decisions are made.)
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How dare you criticize the status quo? Don't you know that the job market for top executives is perfectly efficient, and that their compensation reflects their contribution to the company they serve?
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Four decades ago, during the Nixon administration, the powers that be talked about the lack of technical talent in the United States. Clinton revived the discussion in the 1990s, and Obama talks about it now.
In the big defense contractors (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc) the most senior engineer makes less than the most junior manager. It does not matter if the senior engineer has a PhD from Caltech and the junior manager was a business major at Cal State.
This reality exists also in the Silicon Valley, but in a more subtle form. If the job market is efficient, then (in theory) the lack of qualified engineers should lead to an increase in pay for top engineering talent, right? Well, the job market is not efficient. Engineering is viewed by many as a blue-collar profession, and the pay gap exists to differentiate the ruling class from the working class.
I'd say because it was flagged for having no actual content beyond an incendiary political viewpoint that most American-based HN readers find offensive because it clashes with their fundamental belief systems.
I read it a few times trying to find it, but couldn't. Is is something related to the specific presidents listed?
This has me thinking - what about starting a news agency online. A disruptive news agency where every reporter cannot be from the region they are reporting on. It will be 'unbiased high level news' where only the big issues are reported on from an unbiased standpoint. I think I could be a good reporter on American news because I keep relatively up to date but have no skin in the game.
I disagree both that his post is primarily political in nature and that it has no content. It makes good points that a rare and difficult to find senior engineer for a tech company would make less than a run of the mill junior manager with a mediocre degree from a no-name school. Perhaps this has something to do with the alleged difficulty in finding talent (which oddly has never affected my firm, only firms unwilling to pay market rate it seems or those located in strange places such as anywhere in flyover country.) The topic of the thread is executive pay at google so why should comments responding directly to that theme be censored?
Increasing employee pay is a bandaid on the real problem. Googlers think there are more interesting places to work. Not even a pay-raise, or a free massage can change that.
People leaving for potential higher pay (IPO) says more about those people than Google not being an interesting place to work at. Nothing that facebook has recently done that suggest to me that facebook might be more interesting place to work at.
Facebook and twitter might have the "momentum", but they are on a niche (social) thats unstable at best. Google on the other hand is not only on several stable niche, but they are trying new things all the time.
People who are leaving for facebook/twitter are riding the horse while its still fat. Nothing more, nothing less.
Facebook has a phenomenal amount of organized data about their customers, and a reasonable amount of unorganized data.
It's a data miner's heaven.
People leaving for potential higher pay, when it's a lot higher, is natural.
Also, working for a non-public company is often quite different than a public one. Facebook is private, so we really have no idea what it's like to work there, and they can do pretty much whatever they want with their money.
Also - engineers who can cop 3.5 million dollar raises just to stay somewhere aren't really concerned about job stability, yeah? They can find work easily.
Agree, they are chasing/riding the "momentum" wave. But as you said, Google has stability. That includes structure, process, bureaucracy. A big piece to these departures is - "Employees are tired of that bureaucracy."
Facebook is getting pretty big not to though, they are either going to run into the same bureaucracy or start seeing more issues with bugs being introduced. I have to say I much more frequently see bugs/ half deployed features popping up on Facebook than any of Google's core offerings.
I predict that as soon as facebook/twitter popularity will start to go down these same people will be some of the first to jump ship. I don't think this has much to do with bureaucracy.
Just because the core business is stable, doesn't mean there aren't projects on the fringes that aren't interesting and unstable. Even Microsoft comes up with cool things from their R&D labs. Just because the company is stable doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on.
As a programmer from the outside Google seems like a far better proposition overall given the diversity of what you could end up working on. Not every programmer at Google though can work on the most interesting stuff though so for them it could be about the work interest.
Don't forget the "grass is always greener" in people's minds rather than reality. And supply and demand tells us something too, these people are some of the best in the world and the economy needs/wants them elsewhere and is sending a price signal. The company is showing them that it values them, needs them, and responding with a price signal of their own. What's unusual? Google has tons of cash, their main infrastructure is their people. I don't see why people start wringing their hands and buying into the tech journalism hyperbole over all this. What other actions could Google take that wouldn't have people filling out blog posts with breathless speculation? I suspect none.
Also, Facebook's "vision of the web" is pretty crummy if you ask me, so I am surprised they have so much buzz. The only worse thing I can imagine than Facebook becoming the dominant player on the web would be Apple somehow acquiring or merging with them in an unholy alliance of evil.
If Apple merged with Facebook, we would at least have a (more) stable platform and a well-design interface. I can't imagine the Steve Jobs would be happy with the UI the way it currently is (especially all of the spelunking that needs to happen to find privacy settings).
Don't know about this particular case - but increasing employee pay by a significant amount is one very direct way of the company showing it's dedication and value to you - more direct than free espresso and other trinkets. Money talks.
I don't think I've seen the same degree of this with Microsoft before. Is the difference that FB and Google are both in Silicon Valley and so there's very low friction moving from one to the other?
Excellent point. Back during the 1990s and the dot com boom Microsoft couldn't compete at all with startups, but moving to the Valley was a big barrier to a lot of people.
More recently a lot of Microsoft people have gone to Amazon or Google (which has done a lot of hiring in Seattle and for a while was aggressively recruiting MS folks) ... it'd be interesting to see how the numbers compare with FB/Google crossover.
I'm sorry, but the notion that Microsoft "couldn't compete at all with startups" back during the 1990s is ludicrous. For everyone who doesn't remember the bad old days, they were huge competition.
More so, there was a recent legal hullabaloo in regards to anti-poaching that google, facebook, etc. had with each other. Now that those anti-poaching agreements are no longer in force, having been deemed illegal, those companies now have a much greater chance of losing their employees to their major competitors.
From the last quarter's numbers the overall headcount is up, they added the talent from the metaweb, on2, slide (Levchin and co.) and ITA when that passes through, and the other 36 talent acquisition they did this year.
If some long time employee wants to try something new or join a pre-IPO startup that is normal, but since the Lars departure everyone got ultra-hyperbolic about the whole thing, casting every bounce or raise as some sort of desperation rather than an award after a decent financial year.
My point being that departures are normal, but as Google is a high-profile company, and a great link bait, people start reading too much into these stories.
It all seems like chump change when compared to the holdings of the CEO and founders (according to the article they hold over half the stock). Google is in amazing entity when you think about that. The smartest people in the world work their asses off, and over half of that value goes to 3 people. The ultimate pyramid scheme ;)
A cynical individual would describe most companies this way. On multiple levels: Founders work hard, and 30% of the value goes to VCs. First employees work hard, and founders get 60% of the value. Interns work hard, and first hires get 10% of the value.
On the one hand, this isn't so crazy since employee pay makes up a much larger portion of expenditures than executive pay, so there's a lot more headroom for raises to the latter. On the other hand, executives make a lot more money to start with so the same percentage of raise translates to a much larger increase in pay so this is hardly "fair".
