Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

When companies pay each engineer X and earn 10 times X on each engineer, this is inevitable. Near as I can tell, this is a strategy that is helping engineers retain more of the value they are creating.

If the difference was more subtle such as 2 to 3 times X, then the incentive to go through this much trouble to retain much of the value you create is much smaller.

View on HN

nit: self-driving talent doesn't currently earn anything, but rather holds some long-term strategic value

I would summarize this effect as BigCorp HR being much more disciplined/constrained on individual compensation than the M&A department. Naturally, well-positioned and clever employees will capitalize on this.

I'm pretty sure there are differing accounting/tax consequences in each sort of spending.

In light of this observation, Google's current lawsuit could be viewed as an attempt to deter employee defection by signaling liabilities for potential acquirers, which will suppress the valuation of any acquisition.

Google was already at the center of the high-tech employee wage-fixing earlier this decade, so filing lawsuits to create deterrence wouldn't be that surprising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Or the lawsuit could be viewed as an attempt to deter industrial espionage by a competitor within a hot field.

Between these, which do you think is more likely?

The one they were convicted for before and are therefore known to do ?

either way, google needs to tread carefully. more people are starting to recognize google as a monopoly, and if that continues they will either be broken up or turned into a utility.

Wasn't Google recently on the opposite end of this? They paid their engineers so much that some of them left because they had the financial security to take riskier options.

The logic on this statement doesn't really check out, as if this were the case it would be impossible to retain CEOs, they would all leave after a month. Yet somehow companies do so ...

But it's 100% true: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14599186/google-waymo-sel...

To be honest, I don't have any idea why ANYONE keeps working after they have F-YOU money, CEOs or otherwise.

At some point, the work becomes the hobby. If you had fyou money, what would you do? Presumably not sit and stare at a wall all day. You'd do something you enjoy I assume. And for some, running one of the world's most powerful entities is enjoyable.

I could definitely keep myself entertained. Maybe that's why I don't have f-you money.

I'd just learn.

Learn everything.

I have a goal, it is to be better than average at every "skill".

and then what?

lol, you know its not possible to learn everything! There is no "then what?". Then entropy catches up with us all and we die eating at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

If your job involves hearing smart people talking to you about amazing ventures before getting into a fancy restaurant the night before you take a plane to some foreign headquarters it earned the right to be called a hobby.

Consider the possibility that what you may perceive as work, someone else considers play with certain benefits.

If you have certain goals in life e.g. building certain large infrastructures, it might be beneficial to do these in an existing company than starting your own or doing it in a nonprofessional environment.

Plus, yes, there are other goals than "not working".

Because in most cases, your needs rise together with your salary. Once you start earning 200-500k/year, you just get a house/car/boat that costs nearly that much to maintain. Obviously there are people who keep their cost of living low and stash that money in a saving account so that after 10 years they can realistically stop working altogether, but that's not the pattern that I'm usually seeing.

> The logic on this statement doesn't really check out, as if this were the case it would be impossible to retain CEOs, they would all leave after a month.

Or, CEOs don't have the same set of options engineers have, or, CEOs are drawn from a pool with different preferences than engineers have, or...

Well, lots of other reasons your dismissal of the claim about engineers based on CEO behavior is unconvincing.

The general point is valid, though, and often comes up in discussions about basic income or similar programs: if the hypothesis is that someone whose needs are already met will refuse to work, then we can look at the existing population of people whose needs are already met as a way to verify the hypothesis. And we find the hypothesis is falsified by observation: some people who don't need to work don't work. Some people who don't need to work do work.

A lot of comments suggesting this is cynical compensation arbitrage by the DeepMap founders. I don't buy it.

I expect a startup was the only option to execute on the idea with a decent level of autonomy. Google/Alphabet already have well established teams in the areas of mapping & autonomous driving so you can't just go ahead and start your own multi-engineer effort.

I believe it's both actually. With the exception of maybe a few small corners, Google no longer has the reputation of a place where you have autonomy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com