Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google's car project | Hacker News Reader

Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google's car project

bloomberg.com

127 pointslxm112 comments

I don't think getting paid a large sum of money is the contributing factor for the departures. If this was true, than logic would dictate that no company should be able to retain executives based on their compensation payouts each year.

If anything, the exodus at google shows clear lack of vision and direction from the management and executive teams. Engineers care about achieving something they can feel proud of and if the project lacks that, they move on.

This article is written in a way that suggests engineers should be paid less so that they remain loyal...you know, like slaves.

I've left a company (Microsoft) in part due to big bonuses. In my case, it was because the bonus gave me psychological stress. I felt a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to keep performing at a very high level. The bonus was given to me because I did a lot of work to get a product out the door successfully. That process was frustrating and painful. The big bonus made me think "we expect more of the same!"

In retrospect, that's not at all what management was telling me. But I felt it. And I didn't want to go through another year like the one that led up to the bonus. And I didn't feel like climbing a career ladder (the way Microsoft at the time seemed to encourage). I just wanted to be a simple software engineer and build cool stuff.

I guess what I'm trying to say is anecdotally, actions (including big salaries / bonuses) can have unintended consequences.

Take IBM's recent initiative to kill remote work. Well, a predictable unintended consequence of that is a brain-drain. Those who aren't capable of finding other jobs will stay at IBM. Those who are capable will leave for greener (and remote-friendly) pastures.

It sounds like you left because you were burnt out. The fact that you were incented by larger bonuses doesn't change that. Many industries and companies use bonuses as a way to incentivize over-work (Wall St in particular) and they expect and plan for a certain percentage of employees to quit each year because of it. The fact is, the more you pay employees, the more you can demand from them. And most of the employees who quit to find a job with better work life balance aren't leaving because they got paid too much, they are leaving because they were too stressed out.

I would have taken the opposite view-- that a bonus was for hard work already done, not an expectation of future work. A salary increase would represent that expectation.

Hah, when I was at a big company i took your opposite view in that a salary increase represented recognition for good work done consistently and the expectation of a new normal. It's funny how we interpret the (generally) same system

I have never ever thought of a bonus as expectation for future work...

That was a very interesting and meaningful anecdote and I appreciate your sharing it with us. Thank you.

I really enjoyed this comment. Thank you.

You made the right call by leaving after you got the bonus, rather than just before it was to be paid out.

Google seems to have some trouble with execution.

Tesla's 'master plan' is pretty easy to understand externally and gives a clear path/vision forward. How Google plans to actually use their autonomous car tech is unclear from the outside (and I suspect also unclear on the inside).

Tesla's focus on manufacturing and using already sold cars to train their software was a really good plan. Google can't really compete with that even with their fleet of waymo mini cars - it also leaves the big problem of manufacturing cars unsolved (partnership? licensing?).

This seems especially tricky when any car manufacturer that plans to exist in a couple years is already building out their own software divisions with a focus on autonomy.

I'd suspect the engineers see that the management plan isn't going to win so they'd rather jump ship to someone that's doing a better job of it.

This seems to be a recurring trend with Google - get in early with something good, but then let others eventually catch up and beat you.

>I don't think getting paid a large sum of money is the contributing factor for the departures.

the stop of that large money is what seems to have happened:

"In December, the car unit morphed into a standalone business called Waymo, and the system was replaced with a more uniform pay structure that treats all employees the same"

>Engineers care about achieving something they can feel proud of and if the project lacks that, they move on.

they achieved "milestones", got handsomely paid for that, after that the payment structure changed back to regular with no such payouts in the future, and the real achievement - fully autonomous car - is still long in the future with a lot of grunt unglorious work to be performed in order to reach that future ... While other companies invite you to make the same glorious "milestones" for even bigger money - sounds like no-brainer.

Google wanted that division to be like a startup - they seems to have got it right to all the details, including that exodus after cash-out on an "exit" with product barely reaching prototype stage and powerpoint of trillion dollar business. An expensive at that - 16x "valuations" growth applied to 4 years of an engineer's bonus and equity - i.e. something like 16 x $1M = $16M per engineer (nicely matches market going rate for AI and other hot aquihires. man! i should have made a career out of that GC hobby back in 2004-5 :) - i'd not be surprised if Ruth had heart attack upon seeing those numbers :)

The article says departures increased during 2016. The pay structure only just changed in December. Departures were increasing over time before the pay structure changed.

I don't think that they unexpectedly canceled the multiplier program. It sounds more like it just ran out in 2015-16 without replacement (at the same levels).

Two problems with this first-principles analysis:

1. The highest paid executives in other industries tend to be at the apex of their careers, and new startups would be a status step down for them.

1. Empirically, executives do switch companies somewhat routinely.

Your last sentence presents a false dichotomy: either we're meant to reject the notion that flight money is a real phenomenon, or we're required to believe engineers shouldn't be compensated above slave levels. There's a huge excluded middle in that argument.

I would buy this more if we routinely heard "problems with retention" as an issue with runaway executive compensation.

It's possible I've not seen them, but seems curiously absent in the discourse to me.

Engineers with skills related to self-driving car development are also currently much rarer than highly trained executives, and companies trying to get into the autonomous car sector need more engineers than executives. Failing to retain an executive simply isn't as much of a problem.

This response basically ignores what my comment said. We don't have "flight risk" problems with executive compensation because there is no higher-status place for an executive to go from the helm of a company that can reliably pay 8-figure salaries than to the helm of another such company. Starting new companies is a step down for those people. And, in fact, that's the ostensible reason executives make so much: because they can and do switch companies in pursuit of better compensation packages.

These are positive statements, not normative ones.

I left this unvoiced but let's fisk it:

> new startups would be a status step down for them.

No, but highly paid executives can always go to a higher status company; similarly, if you were status-motivated but also a well placed mid career goog eng…

it's not clear to me you _needed_ a sweet bonus in order to switch to your startup, ya know?

>executives do switch companies somewhat routinely.

I think the theory of what I'm trying to advance is, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

I personally feel I would be rather loyal to someone paying me fuck you money, but then again I'm well into my own incredible journey, so it's possible I'm now blind to status incentives relative to working at google.

I'm vocal about this because the concept of "flight risk" is a very old one, particularly in consulting land.

The premise behind flight risk money is that people might not be interested in optimizing their salary by constantly switching jobs, especially because they might really like their current job. But a lot of people have a short list of jobs that they would be interested in if money weren't a factor; many employees (maybe most) aren't in their absolute ideal job, but are balancing money and work life. When you give those people lots of additional money, you change that balance.

This isn't complicated, right? A pretty large group of people (1) like their current job, and (2) would like to start or join a new company.

That's just not the same as what happens with executives. Executives are not waiting for their big break so that they can start a new thing.

Maybe by the time you climb the corporate ranks you're reduced to an efficient profit maximizer but I would presume they suffer similar incentives - there comes a time you'd rather kick back on a beach somewhere rather than Q2 reports.

To be charitable to you, maybe I'm just really underestimating how many people are chomping at the bit to gtfo;

having been self employed for "forever", it's hard for me to empathize: mid career A player at the goog probably could've made the switch much earlier, if leading a startup was what was in their heart of hearts.

I think it's more like if you pay someone FU money to stay for a fixed term or milestone, you'll need to pay them exponentially more FU money to stay for the next milestone.

Many top executives are on this track as well, which explains some of the crazed pay scales.

Agreed. I would think tons of engineers would kill to be on a project to build the first real self-driving car, whether they're getting paid millions or thousands. If people keep quitting after making a pile of money, that sounds more like it's clear to everyone from the bottom up that there's no real commitment or ability to execute on this than that they're paying people too much. No surprise if everyone is jumping ship to other companies that have an actual plan to get people into self-driving cars.

People will always quit for a bigger pile of money. It's that simple.

It's really not. There are people who value other things than only money.

True, but the people who can pass up the big pile of money generally already have their own pile of money.

Any value can be bought with an appropriate pile of money.

Is there truly nothing you would not do or relinquish for a large enough payment?

Nothing illegal, and nothing that would impact my own health in a permanent way. Otherwise yes, everything and everyone has a price.

So, there are some limits for you. Then you say "Otherwise…everyone has a price." It seems clear to me that others may not have the same limits you do, some having more, some less. And laws vary with jurisdiction. It just seems unreasonable to make a claim like "Everyone has a price" when it can be so easily qualified as to make the statement's intended absolutism meaningless.

I chock this statement up alongside "A company exists solely to create profit". It has this raw, naked capitalist "that's the way the world works" jingoism that doesn't reflect that what motivates people so often entails much more than that.

We are talking about getting a job at a regular company. There isn't much relinquishment.

I know plenty of people that refuse to work for defense contractors for large sums of money, and many others who refuse jobs in finance because they expect a miserable experience. Plenty of people consider things besides salary when taking a job.

I'm not sure engineers and executives are similarly motivated. I'm pretty sure most engineers (at least the ones that work at Google and read HN) have tons of ideas about hobby projects they'd love to work on full time if only they had fuck-off money.

I would expect most executives like the power of being executives at established companies and managing lots of people, and they probably have fewer personal projects that they want to do. Maybe I'm wrong; I'm not an executive.

I don't think it was the engineers getting paid huge bonuses, but the project executives.

> This article is written in a way that suggests engineers should be paid less so that they remain loyal...you know, like slaves.

Isn't that the argument behind Daniel Pink's book?

No, Drive is about intangible benefits. The connection to salary is secondary.

Not true, executives don't create shit. If they leave without any prospect of making money, they can't create on their own to earn. Developers are creator, given enough money, most would leave to take a chance at bringing their own creation into the world. This creation could possibly make money. Sometimes it's not even the money, it's the idea of having your project seeing the light of day. Working on a project that might not see the light of day or that might ship in 10yrs can be very frustrating for creators.

This comment is a gross misunderstanding of what good executives do, and they are indeed critical players.

I'm not disputing that they are critical players. They are, but they are not creators. Most of them at that point in life are owner of capital. If they leave with nothing in sight, they are leaving because they are bored and have amassed enough capital to take a chance and invest in someone else. But why leave when you are raking in millions for a chance?

Developers are creators, if they leave, they tend to leave because their dreams are getting squashed and the opportunity window is getting closed in an area they would love to innovate. If you are at google and don't see google releasing a self driving car, you will miss the window unless you jump ship to Tesla or GM or Audi. If you are into VR, maybe you would wanna jump ship to Oculus, the window to be part of history is very small.

As an "executive" myself who doesn't actually code on a day-to-day basis, I can assure you I am still very creative, because I advise and direct the developers on my team using my experience, knowledge and "big picture" view of the whole company.

Why, just yesterday I made some suggestions that resulted in a 20% improvement in one of our API calls, and I didn't code a single line.

You underestimate the value of executives by not valuing their experience and ability to direct.

Can you define what you mean by "create"? Are you saying programmers are creators because they can code? That sounds like a one-dimensional view of what product or value creation is.

Furthermore, you're charitably generalizing developers as people who leave because of their dreams and uncharitably generalizing executives as people who just get bored and want to turn the wheels of production at a whim.

I think the point that the other commenter and I are trying to make is what while you can defensibly claim you're not saying executives "aren't critical players", you're being dismissive of their overall contributions by painting them in a diminutive and uncharitable way.

You're essentially saying, "I'm not saying executives aren't critical players, they're just not the real creators of value...they leave because they get bored and have so much capital while developers leave because of a twinkle in their eye."

Agree. When I see people make statements like "but they are not X" its almost always a value statement with a word substitution, and you can just swap in 'good' for 'creator' (or whatever other word used).

GP's opinion that management aren't 'creators' of course neglects a few things:

a) the role of management is necessarily one step removed from direct project output, so yes, they'll probably do less direct work on the project

b) that 'creators' can (and do) move in to management

c) there is no creativity involved in taking uncertain inputs and turning those into the direction & vision of a project

d) that shaping a project's output to maximize outcomes is something that can net a lot more value than adding another 'creator'

e) that 'creators' sometimes don't care about the project outcomes as much as the process

f) that 'creators' may not have experience in the various domains their product or service is ultimately being provided in, and thus may not understand or pick the right constraints to apply during their creative process.

...among many other possible misconceptions.

I've seen this in the education world myself, where teachers (who are similarly front-line workers) were skeptical of management and the viewpoints of those outside their domain being able to add value. 'But they're not educators' was the statement I heard a lot.

Your view of creativity is quite narrow.

This is a very high school perspective to take on the difference between developers and executives.

I imagine you'd rather live in a world ruled by programmer-kings who are the only people capable of creating value, while all the other peons toil away in the service of their creation with their inferior, bogus skillsets.

You've got an important point here, so it would have been much better to make it substantively and without snark.

I say it's an important point because it was a big one for my own growth. I think many programmers (and many HN users) tend to feel that way, and not without reason. What's needed is patient explanation, not oppositional dismissiveness. Unfortunately the latter takes a lot less time.

Fair point, Dan. I'll remember that for next time.

Executives create the organization itself. A company has many moving parts, each with their own constraints, their own goals, and their own limitations. We talk about building a company because all these parts need to be shaped in such a way that they work together towards a common goal. This is not just difficult and cross-disciplinary, it's also intellectually challenging work, and as real a form of creation as writing software. Companies don't create themselves, and people don't automatically organize themselves. You need people who specialize in this, if you want it done well; you need executives.

Sure, we roll our eyes at the nonsense language executives spout, and at the political games they play. And yet good executives create functional companies with a good corporate culture, where good engineering can take place. You might ask yourself: if everything is running smoothly, what do we need the executives for? Much like the IT guy who doesn't get appreciated for preventing disasters, the work executives do is invisible when done well.

Besides, the line between creation and facilitation is a blurry one. Without salespeople there is no budget for programmers to create things. Does that mean salespeople as non-creators are deserving of our disdain? Or should we just appreciate them for fullfilling a vital role within the company? Suppose that executives were non-creators (and they're not), why does it matter? They're nonetheless vital for the company's success.

The best execs are responsible for a few things:

1. Creating and Maintaining a vision for the future of the company based on industry experience, research and hypothesis.

2. Keeping all of the teams and players up to sync on that vision.

3. Driving the development of that vision from day to day and pivoting when needed.

So while they might not be "creating" code, it is important to note that code alone doesn't make a company and leadership is essential especially the larger a corp becomes.

A key aspect missing from your list: Always Be Closing. Good execs are always selling, internally and externally. Your list mostly concerns the internal aspect of being an exec, but a huge part of it is selling externally. Whether they are the ones actually closing the deals or moving things along doesn't really matter, the point is they're always selling.

And at the end of the day, what's going to make or break your business is how much product you're moving. Execs are hugely important for this, in addition to all the points you mentioned.

I just realized the genius of the name "Alphabet".

By investing in this company you are "betting" that they will be able to generate "alpha" ( in the financial sense )

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp

This was called out in the announcement of the company:

We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/google-alphabet.html

...Oh hell, I just thought it was because they had such a big portfolio of endeavors.

Now it just comes across as tacky.

I thought it was because Umbrella corp was taken

Yeah, they said that in the original press release.

You could also consider Google as Alphabet's primary, or "alpha" bet, but Google is also investing in a variety of "other bets". The name also provides for cool URLs, like https://abc.xyz.

Serious (and off-topic) question: did Silicon Valley name Hooli XYZ as a nod to that domain name? A whois seems to indicate that the domain was created a year before the second season of the show, when Hooli XYZ made its first appearance.

I'm pretty sure it was just an obvious play on Google X. But googlers are not without a sense of humor.

http://hooli.xyz/

A beta-bet, if you will.

Alternatively they could have named themselves "tautology"

I'd interpret the content of the article as the opposite of the title: "One (the only?) reason staffers didn't quit Google's car project before now? The company paid them so much"

Multiple big players want to get into autonomous cars (and other vehicles -- this is the same space as military contracts for drones) and Google's executives were in total disarray. You'd think they'd lose out but instead they successfully hit some giant milestones by throwing enough cash at the problem.

I mean, if the staffers had been paid poorly, wouldn't they have quit without waiting for that 16x bonus that only comes after meeting the division goals and then waiting four years?

I think the article is overemphasizing the money that the people earned with the project but instead people got disillusioned with the project and since they amassed enough money then that is why they departed the project. They even state this in the article.

That's a bozo of an excuse if I ever heard one.

Lack of vision, lack of direction, failure to set expectations or execute a plan, better opportunities elsewhere, poor management... those are all reasons for brain drain.

Gave them too much money? That's absurd.

Honestly, it looks more like a propoganda message to pre-explain shrinking bonus money.

And a million MBA heads just bobbled as they agreed, "Yes, yes, we pay engineers too much! Mwaaaahahaahahaa!"

"F- you money" is the amount of money that allows you to do what you want, i.e. leave when things do not go your way. This must mean the staffers did not want to be there for some reason or another.

This is interesting because they were helping build the future. It's easy to see why people might not be excited or passionate about the next CRUD app but self driving cars seems like a passion project to me.

Many of these people are passionate about building the future. ...that's why they left Google.

Bear in mind, many of them are still working on self-driving cars, they just went to work for other companies. If as you say, it's a passion project, they are going to go to whoever they think is best equipped to accomplish the vision. Especially since money is no longer an issue for them.

In an alternative universe:

1. the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed

2. the cars were a big hit, and

3. there are articles about how far sighted Google was for letting the research project have these startup like returns.

...the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed...

Have onerous regulations been a problem for robocar development? If they were, I sort of think I would have heard of it, particularly here on HN where such vehicles are a common topic of conversation.

If there weren't these rules about not killing pedestrians or ramming buildings I could make a robot car myself! Another small business smothered in the crib by government overreach.

Right. California has liberal rules on autonomous vehicle testing on public roads. You have to get insurance and report accidents and disconnects. Only Uber whines about that, but Uber whines about everything.

Deployment is something else. California's rules for autonomous vehicle deployment are out.[1] There's a third party testing requirement and a three-year transition period during which autonomous vehicles can only be leased, not sold outright, and drivers require an autonomous vehicle certification. That's about what Volvo is doing with their test in Sweden.[2]

Nobody has technology good enough yet to turn loose on the general public. Google/Alphabet/Waymo seems to be getting close, but everybody else is at least two orders of magnitude worse on disconnects per mile.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/dbcf0f21-4085-47a1... [2] http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slat...

This is the point I was making, although this is a more amusing way of making it.

I didn't say they should not be relaxed, by the way.

I do think at some point there will be a big public fight about what we are willing to accept.

I have heard it said that even current self-driving tech is safer than humans. But I haven't looked at the stats myself.

Sorry! To my embarrassment, your irony overpowered me.

The impression I got was that Google got a sort of "first mover disadvantage" - they did all the leg work (and provided the reputation) to get legislators to come up with frameworks for issuing approvals and whatnot.

That's not to say the regulators were obstructionist or anything - but these things can be difficult even when there aren't any obstructions.

Google has routinely claimed or indicated that regulations are a significant roadblock[1][2][3][4] for self-driving cars. I would argue this is a misdirection, as regulations would not be an issue if the cars were safe to drive.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-hit-r... [2]https://www.texastribune.org/2013/02/21/googles-self-driving... [3]http://time.com/4152958/google-california-self-driving-car-r... [4]http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-selfdrivingcar-idUS...

As usual it sounds like the story is more nuanced than the headline.

A more accurate phrasing might be "One reason staffers quit google's car project? The company structured their pay so that an intermediate project milestone was treated like an IPO event."

It's not that the employees got rich so they no longer cared about money, it's that they basically got their maximum bonus from Google, so they were better off taking their talents elsewhere to get the next big payout.

Given that their CFO discussed these payouts on the earnings call of a company with $6.6 billion in operating expenses, it sounds like these were entering the $100million range. Makes sense given that Google was trying to recruit and motivate people to work on startup projects, while overall Google market cap wasn't going to grow exponentially the way that a 2011 facebook or uber might. It probably wasn't a bad idea, they just executed in a way that only incentivized employees to get partway done.

Agreed. If they were told to hit a certain set of milestones, and they did, I don't see why its an issue after the fact. The people that received the bonuses did their job and deserve what they were promised.

After hitting all those milestones and not seeing a car on the road, I can imagine that as a reason to be disgruntled and wanting to move to another company.

Did they pay F-You money to the engineers or the management? Because no matter how much you pay its not going to be enough to make one retire (in 5 years). Unless of course they really paid 10s of millions. That means if they are really paid, employees would rather not leave.

The main reason its a sieve is that they realized they could make more money by leaving. They saw examples with Otto and others.

I'd be comfortable retiring with a "mere" $2 mil bonus payout. But I'd also stay on at a job I enjoyed, especially something as important to society as self-driving vehicles.

Maybe in a decade when this is all water under the bridge we'll get the real story about what sort of drama went down to cause all their top people to flee.

It may be been banal. Now that the visionary part of the program has been executed, and with development more or less on rails, it's possible there simply isn't anything exciting left for the top guys to work on. That and they're all extremely valuable to car companies who would rather not get left in the dust.

Crazy thought... If this is even possible, create a standard for everything key employees should know. Pay people great, but not GREAT. Bank up "eff you" money for them. If they want to quit, they get the banked money as long as there are enough people on team to carry on without that person.

Might not be practical for a number of reasons. Just sounds interesting, without having put any thought into the idea beyond the time it took me to write this comment.

I wonder if companies will ever take a page from the public sector and offer crucial employees pensions based on staying on for a long time.

I don't know that that can work in the tech sector — you'd have to scale down "long time" to accommodate higher pay (and thus earlier retirement) and even then I'd be wary of taking a job if I knew the pay was heavily backloaded.

How many companies will still be around in 50+ years?

But they also got the best people in the industry and the results they wanted. Engineers that may have ended up working at Lyft, Uber or other companies.

This just in, startup type incentives does work and also produces startup like effects including bouncing around more than they would like.

I really enjoy the tone of this article. It's written like they are tracking down the steps that led a company to dump toxic chemicals outside a grade school. Considering I see Google self driving cars self driving all over the place and I don't recall seeing that before 2010, maybe the idea worked?

Isn't there an on-premise labor economist on the payroll? I mean, a bachelor level econ student could have told them this. Interesting still, is that there is real-world proof of an upper limit to pay in this industry given the a typical labor-leisure curve

Clearly you can't pay commoners too much. Only upper class people should get upper class money. One has to maintain the social order. God forbid those people who all "quit" use their newly earned capital to start their own enterprise.

Please don't post snarky rants to HN. Doing so pulls discussion quality below the level we're hoping for.

Excellent journalism - anonymous sources speculate as to what might have caused people to leave a company.

Also pushes the new business-friendly narrative that it's good for companies to pay their engineers less.

Well done, I hope the author's boss is proud.

You don't feel this is a strong argument in favor of the de-regulation of minimum wage? Freeing businesses from the growth stifing yoke of employee voluntary attrition?

Ughh... reading this is ridiculous. Do we think bankers' salaries prevent them from staying at banks? Doesn't the first sentence answer the question of what really happened?

     > For the past year, Google's car project has been
     > a talent sieve, thanks to leadership changes,
     > strategy doubts, new startup dreams and rivals
     > luring self-driving technology experts.

Poor leadership & competition. Easy to point fingers elsewhere, but everything we know about motivation says that autonomy, making a difference and a whole host of other "soft reasons" are the factors that drive it forward.

The people who left didn't STOP working on self driving cars. So they still love the work and are engaged by the dream of doing that. So theoretically - if Google had adapted to their needs & wants they could have retained the employees. Instead poor leadership drove them out the door.

But the anonymous sources are saying that the only problem was that Google was too generous. Clearly we should believe them at face value.

I am all for higher salaries but there is some truth to the dangers of overpaying. Give me 5 million dollars and you will never see me again. Give my CEO 5 million dollars and he'll keep going. On the other hand, give me 250000 dollars and you will have a very happy and loyal employee.

I doubt very much that you would quit after getting a 5mm bonus. I've seen some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

I think a more typical response would be, "Hmmm. That wasn't so hard, let's see if they do it again next year." And when they don't -- that is typically when you walk.

Really, because $5M seems like an enormous fortune to me. It's an amount you could stick in a savings account yielding only 1% interest and pretty much live the rest of your life with a decent lifestyle somewhere with a low cost of living. OR, you could quit your high-stress job and augment that interest with a more fulfilling career.

I can pretty safely say a single $5M bonus would amount to an instant lifestyle change (namely less pressure to work) for me.

5 million before taxes is 3.5 after taxes (probably less). If you want to stay in the bay area, another million goes to a reasonable house (probably more). That leaves 2.5 million. For anyone under 50, a reasonable withdrawal rate is more like 3%, or 75k per year. Taxes and MRO on your house are at least 15k per year. Private health insurance for a family is at least 30k per year. Which leaves at most 30k per year for everything else. Plus, if you have a family, there is still college that needs to come out of the 2.5 million at some point, so the "everything else" budget will go down into the 20s. And last but not least, social security is based on last few years wage earnings, so, by the time you are old enough to collect, you will only get the minimum having not worked for a decade.

I think I would keep working.

The trick is you don't move someone to that bonus immediately. let them rise to that level incrementally and make them fight for every step. In the mean time they will be upping their lifestyle until $5 million just doesn't seem like that much anymore

Or put it all in the market in highly diversified low-ish risk mutual funds, withdraw 4% per year and live a lavish lifestyle.

So assume you get a bonus which allows you to maintain your previous salary with just interest income. The problem is the cost of your leisure time (as measured by the cost of foregone wages) just went up dramatically, so the leisure has to be worth that much more to you for you to take it.

Two things to note: 1) this is different than winning a lottery, because with a lottery there is no expectation of a change in wages; 2) your first week of leisure is worth much, much more than your 50th, as is your 1st dollar worth more than your 5 millionth. There is some level at which you stop working. I think it's much higher than you realize.

> I've seen some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

That's anecdata. Not everyone is the same. I know friends who would quit in a heartbeat and pursue other passions (music, teaching, non-profit work, etc.) if they got F-you money.

Everyone is different, and I realize that the actual number doesn't matter, but most people able to make 5MM in bonus on wall st wouldn't consider that amount anywhere near "F-you money".

I would quit after even less money. I would dabble with tech but no way I would ever go into an office again. Some people like CEO's genuinely seem to enjoy business but I personally don't.

If I pay you $5M and your job is "work at this hellish call center" then yeah, you probably will take it as a lottery ticket and get out. If we make the CEO miserable (every day you must call each board member individually and explain why the company's stock has not gone up yet), I bet they quit too.

The important factor here isn't the money.

1. If you work at Walmart you'll quit whether you're happy or not

2. If you work at Waymo you'll quit only if you're unhappy

I think part of the problem in this case was that it didn't seem likely they would get such a big payout again.

On Wall St, there's always a bigger bonus to aim for at the same firm next year. At Google, if you wanted to take your big bonus and turn it into more millions, you'd better try starting a new business.

5 million dollars will look great only until you have them. Once you get your 5, your next target may be 25, then 125.. x=5*x. Engineers who work to create amazing things, work to get a kick out of creating cool stuff.Same case with CEOs. money feels great, but never enough..

Some people may be wired that way but plenty are not. Especially in the US people believe that it's in human nature to always want more but I think it's only a small percentage that are wired that way. Most people are happy living a stable life where their basic needs are met. The top guys should be happy about this, otherwise they wouldn't find employees that are willing to work a for a stable salary.

You're probably right on, despite the down-votes. This is almost certainly a Submarine Article [1] pushing the tired "engineers are overpayed" narrative. Wonder who's funding whatever PR firm put it out...

1: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The problem here isn't that such things don't exist (no doubt they do) but that readers frequently confuse that with what feels like it simply has to be true based on the strength of their pre-existing opinion.

The usual path from "I don't like X" to "X is objectively false" to "no one would ever X in good faith" to "How much did they pay you for X, asshole" (not that you said that, but it's the flamewar end-state) never actually consults with reality. Since substantive discussion depends on looking beyond our pre-existing opinions, this is a problem for substantive discussion. Worse, it feels like being a champion of truth, so a lot of intense energy flows into it, so flamey passion goes up as substance goes down—a perilous combo.

I don't know what a full solution would look like, but at a minimum, HN comments on such issues—if they're to be good HN comments—need to show some sign of breaking out of that self-referential cycle. That's why we tell users that they're not allowed to accuse others of astroturfing or shillage without evidence, and always add "an opposing view is not evidence".

Is it even possible to have a high quality discussion of an article that itself is based on speculation from unnamed sources? This content could easily have been automatically generated by a bot, for all we know.

I don't know if this is a submarine article--it's impossible to know for sure, of course. It really, really reads like one though, and if pointing that out is unacceptable, then feel free to detach my comment and mark it as off-topic. I won't be offended.

Almost certainly, you say!

It's hard to think of something Paul Graham wrote that has done more damage to discussions on HN than his piece about submarine PR pieces.

When people thought that every published article was some journalist independently deciding something was newsworthy and thus writing up their neutral research on it, they were wrong.

When people thought every published article was some propagandist's attempt to sway public opinion, they were wrong.

But the second view is a lot less wrong than the former.[1]

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell.

[1] Didn't feel like following Asimov's pattern for the third line.

That doesn't mean they aren't real. Did you see that article on cursive writing? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193539)

The submarine piece was a submarine piece to try to get people to generally ignore the press for anything substantive and instead elect Trump as president.

are you saying that the post you responded to did damage to this discussion? I think you should justify that claim. what damage? to whom?

I think that your comment might be the damaging one because it attempts to delegitimize the opinion of another community member without any reasons given.

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