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The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company.

Holding 90% of the best engineers in the world "hostage" with six figure salaries and great perks is a good way to slow them down. I think they're scared of being blindsided, since that's what they did to Yahoo & co.

Google should be more brave and set them free. They can easily stay the best at snapping up early-stage startups. They already do this, but it should be their only strategy. Google should almost completely stop hiring direct.

I guess this is really just "Hiring is Obsolete" from a slightly different perspective. That it might be evil of Google to jealously "horde" hackers out of fear.



I agree. It may seem funny to think that google is better off paying them 100M for their company instead of 150K in salary - but presumably, google pays that much for startups because they're worth it. Hard to believe that a 150K house plant does all that much direct damage to google (wall street expectations aside, their numbers were pretty excellent) - but the opportunity cost of keeping an office fern from growing into a redwood may be very high.

assuming google gets to buy them out...


FYI Google doesn't pay incoming engineers anywhere near 150K.


Yeah, it was just a guess. But I figure that after someone has had enough time to get complacent, he/she's probably at a pretty senior level and is making more dough.


"The vast majority of the developers at Google don't produce anything great. Lots more of them could, but not inside a huge bureaucratic company."

I'm not sure what qualifies you to make that statement. Do you work at Google?


Let me answer that for him. Google has X great products and Y employees. (...etc)




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