piaw

That's because those are the people most likely to apply to another job! The people I know getting the big packages aren't waiting to be "noticed." That's not likely to happen since they weren't recognized where they were. They took a proactive approach and shopped around for a new job.

Only then were their contributions recognized internally and the big offers were required to keep them as they were already pissed off.

Trust me, it's not the fast track people who are getting the giant paydays right now. Those people are sitting pretty and already have substantial awards and wouldn't bother interviewing elsewhere.

Having assisted in negotiating a couple of those multi-million dollar offers, that is absolutely correct. Most of those offers aren't going to "successful senior people." They're going to people who were repeatedly passed over for promotions despite doing great work (i.e., people who fail to manage their careers properly).

Attitudes like this is why I had to write a book about startups. In 2003, people said the same thing about Google. It turned out that yes, joining Google in 2003 had a very good chance of making you a millionaire, even if you weren't a star hire.

Guess what? Facebook is in the same situation Google was in 2003 today.

2 links: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/compensation-thought-experi... http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/facebook-google-redux.html

I don't think Google openly discusses it. At least, certainly if there was such discussion I wasn't privvy to it. I only felt free to post these thoughts post Google.

Paul "liked" the blog post on Facebook. :-)

See the contextual blog post above and below this comment.

I think that it is possible to build a culture where the grunchy unsexy work becomes much less un-thanked. Microsoft at its best did it: Raymond Chen was much celebrated for his heroic efforts at preserving backwards compatibility in Windows. In fact, when the Raymond Chen camp lost its political battle, Microsoft got Windows Vista, which arguably cost it billions. I think the stakes are very high in exactly this sort of political battle, and it is worth while for top engineers to spend their time fighting for precisely this sort of culture shift.

I know several Apple and ex-Apple engineers. Let's just say that the environment isn't even comparable. Google wins hands down. One of my friends at Apple had to file for an information request so that she could debug a problem that spanned multiple layers of abstraction. A Google engineer faced with that kind of inanity would just quit.

The massages aren't free. They're subsidized at $20/hour.

The slide deck was part of a blog post. It's not my fault that news.ycombinator.com only linked to the slide deck and did not provide context: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-and-google.html

That's not true. I think the traditional management systems do a good job of not setting bad incentives for tech leads.

I've often thought about that. I think it would be a worthwhile experiment.

Depends on how you feel about the recent spate of defections to smaller companies.

Sorry, the slide deck was there as a presentation to Facebook's VP of engineering. I wasn't about to transcribe my own talk.

That's a bizarre attitude. If you cookie cutter travel, you'll get cookie cutter memories. I travel my way, my style, at my pace, and at my speed. When I travel, I get invited into people's homes for tea, get introduced to their families, and get asked to stay. I get chefs coming out of retirement to cook me dinner, because I'm in a position where their hospitality really means something to me, and both they and I appreciate it.

There's no way I would give up travel. If you think travel sucks, you're doing it wrong.

If you think Europe looks like the US, you're doing travel wrong.

OK, since I have retired to travel and write, I'll chime in here. The writing part is fun, and being able to do it on my own terms (i.e., not kowtow to a publisher/editor's need to sell books by the pound rather than by content) was worth it to me.

The travel is even more so. I'd taken vacations before, but always came back wishing I had 1 or 2 more weeks more. With a day job, it was hell asking for 5 weeks or so. Now, I just go. And I no longer come back wishing I had another 2 week. The indignity of having to ask for permission always annoyed me, but I didn't realize how annoying it was until I didn't have to ask.

Ultimately, I think you have to ask what it is that drives you. Some people like being bosses and being able to lord it over their underlings. Those people will never retire, and they shouldn't. Their self-worth is dependent entirely on other people being subservient to them and their goals. But many INTJ types (especially engineers) don't have self-worth tied to the opinions of other people. Such people historically do very well in retirement, and retirement is not a bad goal for them: http://retireearlyhomepage.com/mbti.html

People tell me how much they're getting. The numbers do go up to 7 figures even for rank and file engineers. But if I wrote a post about how to get that kind of money, I'd be accused of being even more cynical (I'm already accused of being very cynical when I wrote this article). Besides that kind of information should really go into the next edition of my book.

Google can and does hand out big bonuses. There's so much cash flowing through the company that a little sprinkle of it (by Google's standards) is still a lot of money. If you're one of the fast-tracked folks at Google, there is no reason to join a startup just for the money.

Good points. I don't think interiews ever became hazing rituals. What happened instead was that a lot of folks got burned out on interviewing, and because interviewing was never taken seriously as a priority, interview training was outsourced to an outsider. That led to a number of travesties.

I don't know if I disliked a lot of things about Google. Otherwise, I would have left long before my 6.5 years. I turned down requests to join other companies while at Google. I couldn't have disliked that much of it. :-)

Google is still handing out million dollar awards. For many people, the low risk but potentially high reward setup is ideal.

For instance, getting the big Android founder's award probably beat being the 10th employee at Aardvark.

Thanks!

Google has a software engineering ladder. It was introduced in 2002-2003. Many old-timers considered it Google's biggest mistake.

Past a certain point in the ladder, promotions were a big deal and those who got promoted to that point got it publicly announced. Past another point, the CEO himself announced it in a company-wide e-mail.

Yes. The advice was given to help people move up the ladder, grab the brass ring, and get the big payout. If you want quality of life, that advice is not for you. Then again, if you want quality of life, and money is not that important, I think that a good startup is hard to beat.

Google is still the best big publicly held company in the valley to work for. I wrote this to guide the thousands of Googlers they'll add this year.

Having said that, I've been at well functioning startups, and I've been at Google. Google when I joined was better than many many startups. Google when I left was not so.

Ah cool. Thanks!

What do you expect engineers to do while code compiles? And flipping to a browser could also mean checking e-mail, filling out expense reports, or scheduling a design meeting. The problem is: even if those things are a productive use of an employee's time, they still interrupt your flow.

The slow part is the death-knell. It's not just that it takes longer for you to complete your task, it's also that you get distracted while waiting for your slow machine. What's your first response if you hit the compile key and it takes longer than a few seconds? You flip over to browsing the web. That interrupted flow cost you way more than $5000. If you could spend $5000 to make that go away for every engineer in the company, the increased productivity will more than pay for itself over time.

Sometimes, that means more than just paying for the machine on the engineer's desk, it could mean spending money on a cluster of machines just to do distributed compiles. That's also money well spent. Basically, any time you can keep an engineer from interrupting flow by spending money, it's a decision worth careful consideration.

As an extreme example, Google spent millions on SSDs for its source control systems to speed up submits. Money well spent.

Now that's a compliment. Thanks!

The extra month could be a few things:

1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire." 2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire." 3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.

Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.

This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)