“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work | Hacker News Reader

“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

businessinsider.com

487 pointsSQL2219318 comments

There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different groups.

Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant).

Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing:

> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted.

At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors.

Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are normal for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?

Yes and moreover, engineers are expected to have an upward trajectory until they reach senior level. Edit: I'm not sure what happens these days if someone doesn't get promoted in a timely manner.

Clarification: "Senior SWE", the formal rank, at Google is indeed a plausible terminal level. If you get there, they'll let you stay indefinitely. But it isn't particularly senior. If you start at Google straight out of college, it's two promotions up, and you may not have supervised anyone higher than an intern.

Thanks for that (as you surmised, I meant "senior" in the broad sense). For those following along, new college grads usually start at Level 3 ("SWE II"), and "Senior SWE" (Level 5) is considered "high enough". Explicitly the guidance for L5 is that: "All Google engineers are expected to reach this level".

What are levels 1 and 2?

From what I understand, the levels exist across all job ladders, but the SWE ladder starts at level 3, except in rare cases involving acquisitions. Facebook is the same way, and Amazon starts at level 4.

Data center engineers, IIRC.

Usually companies try to make it so that levels mean roughly the same thing across all professions, so 1 and 2 or 3 mean "almost no experience". So while there might be people at level 1 and 2 in the HR department, or receptionist, or other professions where there is extremely close supervision, they don't hire anyone at that level for engineering. Often management also has a similar level system, but starts at a yet higher level (in the likely case that they never hire engineering managers straight out of college).

That's so confusing for students and new graduates. I would imagine a large number of students aren't applying for those jobs because they think the jobs require more experience than they do, shrinking the talent pool from which companies draw.

The numbers aren't advertised that way, and also Google is inverted in that you apply to Google and then after meeting a hiring bar for a level they match you with a specific role.

Right they aren't advertised that way, but they can certainly be interpreted that way.

There's rarely any sort of explanation of the numbering system in job posts. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a III requires more experience than a I or II.

By not advertised I mean it simply isn't in the job posting. You apply to google and they talk to you during be process about the level.

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-e...

https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/?&src=Online/House%20...

Yes but I haven't been talking about just Google, and I have been talking about applying in the first place. My point was that some people may not apply, thinking that those jobs require more experience than they do. Think entry-level vs. junior.

That doesn't explain why the bottom rung of software engineers has the profession-specific label "SWE II", though. Entry level at eBay is also "Software Engineer 2".

I've seen it like that before because it gives hiring managers scope to create different types of job. They might have to hunt for talent at a certain price/responsibility point, but having extra steps on the scale downward allows them to open up a position at a lower price point if needs must. If that rung didn't exist, it's be a much harder ask to get a JD approved in a large co.

Also, a number of places need a few spine points below someone's normal band for probationary periods (I once started a role at a lower salary and they bumped me up to my real one on probation pass), or other reasons.

Most of it comes down to internal processes for job creation and sign off.

Engineering interns might be level 2.

I think so. Also engineers in Google India used to start at level 2

Apple has a similar system: I've never met a level 1. Level 2 SWE is kind of entry level, level 3 is mid-career, level 4 is senior. It's pretty achievable to get promoted quickly up to level 4. Some people even come in at level 4 if they come in with experience. Unfortunately level 4 where most people's careers and raises (and stock, from what I hear) come to a screeching halt.

I understand there's a level 5 that takes about 10x the effort of going from 2 to 4. You need to be pretty much a world renowned wizard to get there. I think a SVP needs to approve 5's. The vast, vast majority of SWEs will never make level 5, and managers are discouraged from promoting people to 5 unless they are super ultra mega stars.

Yes, but: 1) promotions are not particularly easy. they are approved by committee, ie not because a manager happens to favor an employee 2) Senior SWE itself is an Individual Contributor role (some say the optimal level if one wants to remain an IC). Only at the next level is leadership required 3) There is a HUGE jump in compensation between Senior SWE and the next level (Staff). Senior SWEs are not pulling anywhere near the $1M/yr referred to in the title

Even staff probably isn't 1m...maybe 800 total

Right. The article instead repeatedly referred to the Group B candidates as making upwards of $600,000:

> "Engineers get paid $250,00 to $600,000 range, but there's no sense of urgency."

> "estimating that very senior engineering positions can command up to $400,000- $600,000 in total compensation at X, including bonus and stock options.

(though now that I quote it, those are all data from the same anonymous engineer working at X)

Perspective for those outside of CA, to be in the top 1% you need to be making in excess of $450k / year.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/top-one-percent-every-us-stat...

Also by "they'll let you stay indefinitely" you mean there is no expectation of any further promotion. If someone starts slacking, that would theoretically show up in perf

At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

Well that's a profoundly sad and depressing answer, hoping to never end with that kind of thoughts

It's a lighthearted joke.

Indeed, he said it jokingly.

I ain't buying it. I don't know the concrete person, that's a fact.

I spent my younger years in much more social jobs compared to programming in cubicles (thank the gods I work remotely for 5+ years now) and out of probably 200+ men I've heard joking about horrible wife and kids, I can assure you no more than 5 were really joking. And I don't mean offhand conversations -- I am talking about people who I've chatted with between midnight and 4 AM. (It was a job with wildly varying schedules)

"Joke" in the marital context usually means "I am too scared to confront my wife so I'll pretend I am light-hearted and make-believe I am just joining the popular marital jokes club -- while secretly I am hating every second of my home life".

Sorry for cynicism. It's what I found during my whole life. Anecdotal evidence for sure but, my $0.02.

My experience - also anecdotal - supports this. Only a small minority of people who 'joke' about their home life are actually joking. See also:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

Yep. People use the joking form of expression to tell truths they wouldn't dare saying with a straight face while the other side knows they're fully serious.

Social stigma and dogma are to blame for this.

(Off-topic: one of the reasons that the love between me and my wife hasn't at all eroded -- it even got stronger -- after 3 years and a few months is that we're very honest with each other, even for the unpleasant truths. It's not about blinding your eyes; it's about being real plus being loving.)

Also, it's only been three years. Give it a few decades.

I had a failed relationship that lasted 8 years before. But I know what you are talking about. Time can kill love.

I do believe we're on the right track however. We are sensitive to the relationship killers and we are actively addressing them. Being inert is not our thing.

I think that's the actual reason for doing well, ie addressing problems. (Lack of) honesty is just one of those.

>after 3 years and a few months

That's not long at all.

From my subjective experience, most relationships' future is known no later than year two.

Of most relationships maybe, but not of most marriage type relations though. People marry and divorse after the 5th and 10th and 15th etc. year all the time...

That's a sad reality. If my father hadn't died 16 years ago, my mother would have divorced him.

People change. Sometimes a lot. You've fallen in love with a certain person and one morning, decades later, you suddenly realize this person is no longer with you.

I've also learned that a big reason why some people are workaholics is because they don't want to go home. Working late at the office gives them a good excuse.

That's a sad and miserable existence. :(

I'm one of those. I live with roommates who do nothing but party all night (it's school vacation right now here, and I've started working full time last year). It's excruciating. They don't know what I'm going through, act like it's not that hard waking up every morning at 7AM and coming home to a balcony full of people I've never met, having to have small-talk with them (or feel like I need to when I just want to go to my room). They act like they have it the worst because they need to go to school still and I mean, you're working! Ain't that the best?

I stay in the office until ~9PM. I go to the nearest coffeeshop to allow me to say "I've been working late, I'm tired, I'm gonna sleep. See you tomorrow". Well, that and I'm addicted to weed because it allows me to just not THINK about how sad I actually am. I'm not married, but I "have no home" basically.

That got way too personal. Contemplating on just not hitting reply. Still gonna do it. I mean, it's great for my professional life. It's not so great for my (mental) health.

Move house. I know, I know "It's not that easy I'd have to search for a place etc" but what if you were evicted tomorrow? What course of action would you take if you had to?

Do that.

If mosquito bites are a problem, you eliminate the mosquitoes - you don't skin yourself.

Back when I worked at Boeing, there was a story from a gate guard (checks badges of people coming in) that an engineer he knew drove up to the gate one day, stopped, shook his head, did a U-turn, and drove off.

He was never seen again (and abandoned his family).

That sounds more like burnout.

I buy it. Relationships are hard and marriages are harder, even for partners trying to make things work. It was shocking to me that my friends who are married also have their own struggles. In hindsight, it is normal. I used to think, "well, those guys should have a better marriage", and now I realize how difficult it actually is, and how widespread. The parents from Rick & Morty? Yeah.

My wife and I had tried a lot of things. What seems to be working is applying the practices laid out in "Crucial Conversations". That has been helping both at home and work. It isn't magic sauce, though it helps that even after all that, we still want to try. It feels like the eigenvector is pointing towards a better relationship.

(We both work from home).

Absolutely this. Crucial conversations should be mandatory reading for anyone entering into marriage. Fantastic book. And not just for marriage either, just good life skill on how to approach tricky subjects.

Go read it. Honestly :)

Agreed. A friend of mine's got married recently. That was the wedding gift I sent them.

Not sure I follow. Your reply reads like "marriage is yet another job, you must invest the proper amount of hours in it". If so, I disagree.

If not, what were you trying to say? And apologies if I misread your comment.

In general, I agree with the notion that relationships need "work" -- but in my case the "work" is basically not allowing certain relationship entropy events to ever happen (or to never last more than a few days). Me and my wife are real and sometimes brutal with our honesty with one another, we're down-to-earth and [mostly] humble, and we never, EVER, go to sleep angry at each other. That "formula" has worked wonders so far.

Thanks for responding. Not sure why you got downvoted.

I don't equate work with a job. By "work", I mean that you have to put effort into the marriage. A marriage is not the same as a romance, and should also not be conflated with love.

That you and your wife are honest with each other and make an effort at not going to bed angry with each other is aligned with what I was expressing.

On the brutal honesty thing: it sounds like it works well for you and your wife, and that is great. It doesn't work so well with my wife and I becuase we suck at crucial conversations and we are now just learning how to have them. One key thing about the teachings in crucial conversations is to recognizing the false dichotomy of speaking truth and having a good relationship. It is possible to do both. It sounds like you and your wife are already doing both.

I love reaching out when a possible misunderstanding is in progress. Appreciate your reply.

You're very correct about the false dichotomy -- it's happening way too often and too much people fall into that trap. It's saddening for me to watch, especially having in mind that me and my wife are doing both.

But as she would say -- "yes, me and you are far ahead in that regard but it's very likely that the people who just discover this aspect are far ahead in other regards, and we're likely very behind in those".

When I worked at Microsoft, people joking called the Red West campus "Red Vest" because it was home to fun projects (like internet and Xbox) that attracted people who had vested enough MSFT options that they didn't need to work.

that's really sad. it's like they've been domesticated.

> The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

I am not sure whether I should fear sorry for the kids or for the father. Having father that jokes about not liking you must sux.

I've been in that position, and yes you are spot on.

I once interviewed with a team leader and two of his engineers. When I asked "What qualities characterize a valuable member of your team?", one of the engineers described how hard they work: they work so hard that the team leader cancelled dinner with his wife on their 10th anniversary so he could work late that night. The team leader was beaming with pride. I felt sorry for all of them and especially for that guy's family.

I dunno, you could take it lightheartedly. It's good for a relationship for the partners to have their own interests and have some time apart.

Unless his kids are more like him than you and can take a bit of joking.

> In particular, I found this quote disturbing

Indeed. But this is the world we're in, where coming to work and doing the job you're paid for because you have a life outside of work is considered toxic.

"Rest and vest" also happens for startups early employees who stay through IPO and are still vesting their initial grants. Generally, they've built up enough domain knowledge about the mostly-hacky systems that they are valuable enough for that knowledge alone and don't have to work very hard.

> In particular, I found this quote disturbing: "There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted."

Jesus, yes. What kind of sociopath thinks that someone who works normal hours and gets the job done is a problem? I work to live, I don't live to work.

> They just do a 9-5

I agree. How is working hours defined in your contract (9-5) nowadays considered coasting? And why couldn't I get promoted by not working overtime?

That sounds unfair. When you sign a contract it doesn't say you need to work overtime and burn yourself out to get promoted.

There has been a worrying trend in our industry I have observed when working normal hours is not considered enough anymore and unless you put in hours of overtime every week you are considered a slacker.

Also, the first engineer mentioned in the article is in no way coasting, but sounds like she's recovering from a burn out. It is incredibly important to let burnt out employees rest and recover.

I didn't understand why she was "livid" that her manager told her to take some time off, on full pay, to recover.

That's how workaholics work and why they burn out. Work above everything.

Groub B was part of the reason for Nokia's fall in mobile phones.

Nokia decided to develop incentive system package for key employees and it totally screwed up work atmosphere at the senior level.

Once Nokia stock skyrocketed, Nokia workforce was divided into two with system that was not all clear. Sudden multimillionaires and those who didn't get anything extra often working side by side. One group started to take it easy, or leaving the company. Others were bitter because they had to work with millionaire coasters who were suddenly more opinionated because getting fired was not an issue.

The most ironic thing was that MIT economist Bengt Holmström was a member of Nokia's board of directors when it happened. He received Nobel memorial price for economics last year for developing contract theory and researching incentive systems within companies. He knew it was overly complex and inefficient system, but nobody was interested to know what the number 1 guy in the field was thinking. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/in-nobel-prize-lec...

Very senior engineers make seven figures at Google?

It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder. Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in 2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-)

To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.

The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.

You don't want to know how many of your taxpayer dollars went to pay me for helping to shepherd purchase orders through the JPL bureaucracy.

:-(

Working the bureaucracy is often much more difficult than the engineering part. In my company the tech leads spend more on figuring out what documentation to produce and how to store it than either writing documentation or producing software.

It was the OP who wrote he "spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it." I would feel all the worse knowing my pay was taxpayer funded.

That's why you have project managers. They (or at least good ones) handle the process and the politics and clearing the runway for the devs to do what they are good at.

The same thing happens in most big organizations, government or not.

From your linked blog post:

> The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The two are not the same. And second, we're assuming that best (or even standard) practice is an invariant with respect to the task, that the best way to write a word processor is also the best way to write a spacecacraft control system. It isn't.

Well said. I think I'm going to have to hold onto this argument for a rainy day.

Thanks for the kind words.

Its great that they make the distinction. But I also hope that they do update standard practices as well. i.e. not allow their codebase to become un-maintainable, use good distributed VC's etc.

I worked at another FFRDC, and had a similar experience. MTS-A (the equivalent of 'Principal' at JPL, I assume) was basically reserved for lifers. Likewise, the promotion requirements for engineers was the same for that of researchers (i.e. published white papers, presentations at academic conferences, etc.) - and was not particularly well mapped to any actual day to day work done by engineers.

One of the labs?

> To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.

Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).

> So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.

It is no fun for most people, through there are exceptions. It might sound like weird analogy, but similar depression happen to women who stayed at home. The feeling like parasite is one of contributing reason I think all the wanting to go to work. (I haven't had experience with long term work where I do nothing, only a bit of experience with the other.)

> Every time I hear how someone had to threaten to leave to get recognition/raise he deserves, the believe in meritocracy dies a little in me :).

Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.

I don't think I've heard of an industry that managed to solve this problem.

> Well, there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices. It takes you leaving (or a threat of you leaving) for people to realize that your contributions are important to the operation.

I'm not sure I follow. If threatening to quit is sufficient in making your work visible, then your work should've been recognized to begin with.

And if it takes you quitting for people to notice things falling apart, then the threat wouldn't be enough regardless.

If people came out of the wood-works to ask you not to leave, it means you were doing good work that people saw, but you weren't sufficiently rewarded for.

> there is this problem with all support and maintenance tasks: if you do everything perfectly, no one notices

Yet, this is also true for Ops, design, security... and also nurses, electricians, plumbers, a lot of "traditional" engineering, accounting... essentially most jobs, perhaps.

What exactly does "meritocracy" mean to you?

    Employee: "Hey boss, you should give me a raise."
    Boss: "Why?"
    Employee: "Because if you don't then the opportunity cost 
               of working here will be too great for me to 
               stay."
    Boss: "Oh.  Ok.  Here's a raise."

The above seems like a perfectly reasonable conversation to me. And I can't see how else it should work. What it takes to retain an employee is so widely variable that it really can't be up to the employer to determine how much to pay each person they want to retain.

Can confirm.

But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around.

Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.

And for a rich company, I suppose keeping them around stops their competitors from hiring them a while.

The article explicitly mentions this.

Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that reflects badly on me or modern journalism.

I'd also add, coming from a startup to a big company can be incredibly frustrating, and a lot of high performers can be quite demoralized by the bureaucracy and pace (even while they're being paid well to be there).

It's not nefarious, but it's clearly a money spent not optimally.

This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance. Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a startup in that regard.

There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.

I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth that much?

An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent.

Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.

What was the XXX figure? It'd be interesting to know.

I don't know, but "Surely you're joking, MR. Feynmann" contains an anecdote about a bidding war between Caltech and another university, at the end of which he turned down an even bigger offer in order to be at Caltech.

Wikipedia claims that Feynman's first job after Los Alamos was at Cornell for $4,000 per year (~$54k/year inflation-adjusted). This claim is repeated in many sources, including the book "Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman".

That book also makes the claim that in the 1960s (perhaps as early as 1960 itself), Feynman's salary crossed $20,000/year and that he was the highest-paid member of the faculty. Inflation-adjusted, that is at most $165k/year.

Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.

I've been in those jobs before. (Though never paid as much as your examples.) The only way I stayed sane was to basically take Coursera classes and teach myself things while being paid to do so. It felt enough like work and was obviously an incredible opportunity to be paid to learn.

You do start to go insane and there is an effect on your resume/CV as the black hole widens there.

You sound like my colleague Michael. It is you? ;) Essentially we were doing Coursera stuff together.

Are you guys hiring? :)

I am not. My email in my bio might make you think that!

I worked alone in a lab doing it, none of my co-workers were interested at all.

You could spend the extra time learning about new technologies and languages. Become an expert at Haskell or AI. Since you're probably in America I suppose they'd sue you if you started working on a side project but you can at least get thoroughly prepared for one!

Nah, go for gold. Learn math and physics!

Good point. Might be harder to disguise as coding though!

Take notes in LaTeX.

Well, as someone who can not sit doing nothing, I accumulated a lot of knowledge. I did Coursera courses, studied some courses at university, studied for a total of 5 boat- and radio licenses (Europe...), I did about 6 IT certifications that I prepared for at work, set up complete mail servers and recently dove into the topic of data science.

Did you learn how to self-host your own email? If so, I'm very interested in learning how and which resources did you use.

It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.

I agree, but there is something I just can't make sense of. I would love to just work my ass off for 4 hours a day but you won't get through any part of an interview if someone finds that out.

For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc.

The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.

That. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.

It's the same in the UK. If you average it out, it's probably closer to 5 hours of work per day though (3 seems a bit low?).

> I changed the positions because the workload was so low

I knew someone who basically took full advantage of this. He was a contractor too, but just added a clause that he'd be allowed to work from home/remotely. So he was doing multiple gigs simultaneously; so instead of making $100/hr (or thereabouts, I'm not sure about the exact numbers), he was making $400/hr. It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.

I'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time. It sounds great in theory but I feel like it would just tangle you up in a web of lies.

I ain't a swindler for sure but I had to do this several times during my life, in order to provide for my family, to kill debts, to fix health problems and a load of other things life loves to hit you under the belt with.

That perfect storm you described indeed happened several times and I was indeed lying about it but you know what? I was willing to own up to every single promise and engagement I made -- and I did, even though it took a toll on my mental health and work motivation.

And no, I wasn't living large at all at the time.

> I'm curious if people that do this ever get a "perfect storm" of all clients having unplanned work at the same time.

That is why it is a good idea to make the acquaintance of some subcontractors that you can further contract the work out to if a "perfect storm" happens.

The next step after that is telling the various people you work for that, actually, you've got subcontractors doing the work now and your job is to manage them. At that point, boom, you've just built a development agency.

There was play about that; a guy dating 3 stewardesses, then commercial jet flight is introduced, and he has to juggle them all until his scheme crashes down. Pretty damn funny play.

"Boeing, Boeing"

Ha ha, thanks!

It's probably not legal to do what he was doing, but he sure was livin' large.

Of course it's legal; a contractor is not an employee, they are a company in their own right. A company can manage its operations however it likes.

I also had a similar cushy contract a while ago. I was 5 years out of university, but I was the most senior developer and effectively in charge of training everyone else - who were mostly juniors with absolutely no clue what they were doing. Eventually I felt I was stagnating my career prospects and switched. I'd be happy to do the same if I could work with peers who were at the same level as me though.

And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-(

I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road.

I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the right thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO.

Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly.

I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off.

That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.

I had $30k in Sun stock at one time; lost it all.

A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it.

I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!

The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either.

All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.

I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust, wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).

except tech has been the driver of growth since the last economic crisis.

Sure, but on average, everything is doing well since the last economic crises. There are dot-com tech stocks that never recovered. I'll only buy funds or dividend paying stocks, though mostly everything is in a 401k (which rode out the crashes quite well).

>Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.

>They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.

This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.

So working 9-5 is "coasting"...? Fuck you. I've got kids.

I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s.

If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.

There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life.

I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.

I feel the same. I will stop coding when they nail shut my coffin.

It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home-improvement projects that had been planned but never executed.

"I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."

I agree that having a purpose is important, but I disagree that that purpose should necessarily be work.

I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot.

You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year...

Well, that seems like a better plan.

For me retirement means not having to worry about income ever again, not to stop working.

I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends.

The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.

Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.

>I'd structure my days very differently

What would your restructured day look like?

I think I would definitely put more effort into establishing clearer space/time boundaries between work and home. I live near a local library and might turn it into an office of sorts so that I have a place to go, people to interact with and so on.

I'd definitely put more effort into making sure I'd wake up, shower, and dress for work during work hours and then stop at the end of the work day.

Basically, better discipline, more delineation.

I used to go out in the morning to a local Starbucks and do email and planning tasks plus also get some social interaction. That worked really well for staring the day with a clear boundary.

At the end of the day I'd walk up to the train station (through a park) to meet my wife, so I'd have a clear boundary on both ends of my day. It worked really well while I lived there. Now I'm in a small town and it's a bit harder to do something similar.

That's great advice, thank you.

I do this. I work from home mostly as my companies office is an 8 hour flight away. I have a standup first thing in the morning and try get a bike ride or gym session in at the end of the day. I also have a table in an office that is a 40 minute bike ride away however I feel better and more productive when I work from home with this schedule.

One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work.

It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.

In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.

Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense.

Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.

The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly.

These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.

It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.

And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade.

But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?

I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...

The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?

Google has such a vast amount of data on users that its search really can't be beat right now. If you're fully in the ecosystem with mail, maps, contacts, calendar, smartphone, apps, etc. you're going to get better results -- not to mention switching could mean giving up these integrated products.

So if we break up Google, this harms consumers by stopping the integration.

No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work between the best services from different companies?

We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling them with their good ones.

I'd say it has too much data and it is already hurting search results. You get tons of unrelated stuff.

The barriers to entry in their fields are huge.

- As you mentioned, in anything social, the network effects are immense. - In anything where inputs are fuzzy and machine learning is required, the biggest data corpus wins (language recognition, image recognition, video recognition, translation, self-driving cars, payment fraud detection, etc etc). Open training corpuses won't ever be as extensive or fast to access as the proprietary hoards that the Big 5 US tech giants or the Big 4 Chinese giants have. - Given their value-add in terms of phone OSs+cloud storage+apps+mapping, Apple/Google/Facebook/MS get data that anyone else will never get. 24/7 location updates PLUS your full contact list PLUS most of your photos with pre-tagged content - enables targeting and monetisation of a vast scale and scope.

Basically, the antitrust issues are already so huge that I would not be willing to bet on firms outside the Big 5 in any profitable area that touches tech - whether it is self-driving taxis, cord-cutting smart TVs, home automation - and probably also online payments eventually. They will not just eat Uber's lunch and Netflix's and Spotify's, but eventually also that of the cable-cos and of the VISAs and MasterCards -- just like Tencent and Alibaba are demonstrating on the Chinese market.

> But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?

What makes you think labor compensation in tech is commensurate with the leveraged value-add? I think you're generalizing too broadly.

The vast majority of tech workers, even at the "Big Names", are not anywhere near a position where they can "rest and vest". Also their compensation per unit of added value really isn't comparable to their similarly skilled/socially connected peers in finance. A "rest and vest" Google Engineer whose blood, sweat, and tears made Google a multi-billion dollar product might make in the very low 7 figures per year, while a moderately skilled investment banker earning his bank tens of millions of dollars in a year might make a similar salary.

You are right that compensation is uneven in every industry. You are also right I am generalizing a bit too much.

My main point, though, is more that in tech/finance it is very possible for compensation to be (largely) commensurate with leveraged value-add. Whereas in professions like teaching and firefighting, it is simply impossible.

You can teach and firefight anywhere on the planet.

You can only work for the GAFA in a couple of cities, that happen to be the most expensive in the world.

The parent's point, I think, is that teachers and firefighters (in this country) are rarely (effectively never) compensated according to the value they provide. I happen to agree with that point.

Even in the US. I doubt that's a general truth. The 4 million American developers outside of the GAFA and HN circle have nothing outstanding.

By the way, in the country I come from, they are both compensated more or equally than developers.

GAFA?

Yeah, compensation matches the number of people you reach in the moment, rather than the impact of that reach. Those who reach millions of people (rockstars, football players, the person who designed the curve on a button at a hot tech company, vacuous reality TV stars etc...) will earn relative to the audience size at the moment of earning rather than the value-add-per-person.

Teachers and firefighters have immense value on a very small number of (often unappreciative) people directly. The outcomes from that value might be immeasurable, but at the point of delivery, society doesn't value it highly enough for heft compensation at present.

With respect to your final point about teachers, firefighters, and doctors (please keep in mind I'm not against what I'm about to say) it comes down to the public nature of these jobs. When it's tax money, it's everyone's business. When it's a corporations money, it's only their business. Now obviously it's more nuanced than that, companies receive tax breaks and what have you, but I think that is largely to blame. Software engineer salaries aren't a matter of public discourse or political whims. Doctors, teachers, firefighters, and police officers are.

I think you have a point about the public nature of these jobs. That said, I picked these 3 somewhat at random. And though teacher and firefighter salaries are very much set by state budgets in the US, doctor salaries are not. (They are, instead, mainly set by a complex interplay of state funds, insurance company profit margins, and hospital/practice competition for doctors.)

Take, for two other examples, commercial airline pilots ($75k-125k per year) or paramedics/EMTs ($36-50k per year), neither of whose salaries are set exclusively by state budgets.

Consider this note I just found in researching EMT salaries: "Private ambulance companies generally have the lowest rates of pay, but may be more likely to hire newer or less experienced employees. Many EMTs start with private companies to get their feet wet. Government agencies such as [...] state ambulance services generally pay the highest, but they’re more competitive to get into and may have higher education requirements."

The State and Federal Governments already provide health insurance for a majority of citizens, and we seem to be rapidly headed towards some version of "single payer" universal health insurance. I think we'll start to see much more political pressure applied to physician compensation in the future.

Our human instincts can't deal with how many people there are in the world. A doctor can only treat one person at a time; even one who was saving a life every time they operated - let's say twice a day - would probably be saving less person-hours than someone who can make Google's results 1% faster. Our instincts recoil at the idea that that's more important (mine included), but our instincts were formed in a time when we lived in tribes of at most a few hundred.

You really think a single engineer's marginal contribution to speed improvements of Google search results or engagement improvements in Facebook's newsfeed are of similar value to highly-technical life-saving treatment, delivered at scale in hospitals?

Certainly, I could imagine the latter being devalued, at the physician level, if there were good automated alternatives. But, there aren't.

Does your opinion hold of engineers working on Snap and Instagram?

> You really think a single engineer's marginal contribution to speed improvements of Google search results or engagement improvements in Facebook's newsfeed are of similar value to highly-technical life-saving treatment, delivered at scale in hospitals?

It's not "at scale" though if we're talking about a single doctor, is my point. Of course saving a life is more important than saving one person a tenth of a second or making them slightly happier - but if you do enough of the latter then it adds up to something just as important as the former.

> Certainly, I could imagine the latter being devalued, at the physician level, if there were good automated alternatives. But, there aren't.

There's a limit to how much impact one doctor can have. A "10x doctor" can't save that many more lives, because they only ever save lives on a 1:1 basis.

> Does your opinion hold of engineers working on Snap and Instagram?

Yes, to the extent that they're actually enhancing people's lives. I've known Snapchat bring a lot of happiness to people, in a very human, social-based way; I don't know Instagram well enough but I'd imagine it's similar. It's certainly possible for well-paid engineers to be producing things that negatively impact other people (e.g. "dark patterns" in UI), but I think that's very much the exception rather than the rule.

Capital.

For physicians, is this really a 12-17 year training or just an artificial structure to defend lower salaries?

The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella.

None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures.

But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to.

What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...

I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers.

It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.

These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services (mail, ad analytics, etc).

The fact that they have a the market position and capital to buy up human resources and waste them simply to keep competitors from being able to develop products goes to show that they are abusing their monopoly positions. Wouldn't it be better for the economy & society at large if these talented people were working hard at building new & better products?

Alas, the employee would have to act ultimately.

People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?

Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society.

I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc...

His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money.

So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

> So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

Forever. There are 7 billion people in this world. If it's not you or me, there will always be someone else.

But most contributions to society are about labour saving - if we don't think that kind of life is valuable then surely those contributions aren't really valuable either.

If I spend more than a week without getting meaningful work done, I get extremely depressed. I love the thrill of building projects and creating business value.

You'd actually have to pay me more to do nothing than to do something.

True. The issue then becomes: what could they be doing for society? This takes more ingenuity and leadership.

Noam Chomsky visited Google and basically asked this question.

Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.

Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.

This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.

> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted.

Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract.

Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.

The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run than the reality.

I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.

I agree. I've worked with people who actually put in 8 hours of work a day on a regular basis, and it had a huge impact on my desire to get things done. Also, working with Germans.

> "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.

Is this really prevalent at Google?

edit:quotes

My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.

Reminds me of the common saying,

"The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."

Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead.

I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting.

Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.

Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the company to try and get promoted.

There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other.

I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows.

Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.

One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.

What risk? What end of career? Maybe that's the theory but a failed CEO who destroys a company will cruise into another CEO job in practice... or even make a run for POTUS.

Well, at my current position I am certainly resting, but not vesting, so I'm torn about what to do. On one hand, I have lots of time to do my own projects, but instead I've been very lazy and mostly read HN :/ and on the other hand, I am at the low end of the pay spectrum for my experience. I'd rather be paid more, but I don't want to have to work harder for it than I am now.

Wow, I am silly.

Edit: I mean that the company has not IPO'd and I don't own any stock/equity as a remote contractor.

I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered to care. Not limited to Google of course.

I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim the fat?

I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.

I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between them, they could perform his duties, no?

Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are quite good also, a very good speaker.

Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.

Economists call this the principal-agent problem. When/if we figure out how to have public corporations without boards of directors who are scandalously traitorous to the common stock investor, most commerce will move to that new model.

Sorry, didn't mean to be a grammar-nazi. I think their job means much more than meets the eye. The guy is directly lobby-ing the US president, and highly ranked officials around the world. Mistakes at that level cost quite a lot. It might be the case that some professors can be up for the job, but would anyone take a chance?

> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services. I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.

I'm getting more and more confident as time goes on that a machine could perform his duties. It seems Bridgewater (for example) agrees with me.

They'd probably be less apt at directing the company to commit crimes, but I digress.

A large part of a CEO's job at such a big company is maintaining relationships especially with various regulatory agencies. There's no way a recent graduate could manage that.

No way, Jamie is one of a kind. Just like you couldn't replace Elon Musk with 100 random MIT grads.

That's definitely one way. I'm not sure if that happens intentionally at my company, but the severe lack of documentation lends itself to creating a culture where a select few who have been around for 5+ years tend to know exactly where to find everything, who to talk to, etc. And that's very valuable in that climate, even if they do little coding themselves.

All's good when the stock price is inflated. The reckoning (cost cutting) will come.

Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.

They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...

Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the companies do.

Or maybe they'll entrench their advertising monopoly and perhaps gain a few more in driving cars and so on, and then they'll coast along as rentiers?

> she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it.

> As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.

> after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work

Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.

Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.

It says the stock was from a recent acquisition and the article context is about vesting. One can surmise her stock is tied up in a vesting schedule and thus illiquid for now.

It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.

How?

Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.

Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.

It can be worse, like being trapped making $8 an hour at some supermarket.

Not sure how "She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock". One has to do really risky/dumb things with stock options to get into that scenario

All you have to do is execute them and hold. You owe taxes. Look up dual basis.

Like I said, risky/dumb things

To realize the benefit of ISOs you need long term gains treatment. That requires you "prepay" tax when you execute. It's the difference between 20% and 33%+ effective tax rate.

Just to be clear, sounds like you are referring to the company that was acquired (not Google, whose stock is liquid). Few startups have Early Exercise of stock options. For those that do, if one has the cash to do the exercise and the willingness to put the cash into that illiquid startup stock, it behooves them to do it as soon as they can, so that there is no difference between their Strike Price and the Fair Market Value, so the tax owed is $0 when they file their 83(b) election. If Early Exercise is not available, one could exercise the options as they vest, but that is entails both the risk of both owing taxes (since FMV would be higher than strike price by that time) in addition to putting cash into illiquid startup stock-- all for a potential benefit of slightly lower tax rate (33%+ vs 20%) when the hope of both appreciation and liquidity is realized. That's the risky/dumb thing I was referring to. Alternatively, they could simply hold the option, which costs them nothing, and just pay the normal taxes (33%+) when exercising and selling.

"Alternatively, they could simply hold the option, which costs them nothing, and just pay the normal taxes (33%+) when exercising and selling."

This forfeits the tax advantages of an ISO. You don't need early exercise, you exercise when they vest, hold them for a year, and sell at long term treatment.

Google is sounding more like IBM every year.

Did IBM pay well back in the day?

Oh yes, glorious 80s

Still does for the right positions. Research-directed ones pay exceptionally well.

There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden

[2] http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/

In the 80s and before IBM was THE place to work. Pretty much like Google or Facebook today. In the 90s they slowly started to cut retirement benefits and other perks and now it's not a great place to work at as far as I know.

I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work. I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave. 4 month after that the startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding.

So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is no free lunch".

Legendary slacker story: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chin...

Don't work hard, work smart :)

Is it unethical to keep a chair warm when my boss didn't give me new tasks to do?

For other areas of life (immigration), I need to get more years of continuous relevant work experience.

I come to an office every day, but my boss just doesn't have enough to keep me busy. My job title is "Project Engineer", which is vague enough to cover everything from DLL debugging to Node.JS programming to network monitoring to evaluating Advanced Planning systems. The latest task is to do some online course in machine learning, even though he didn't specify how the company will need it.

On bad days, I feel useless. But I reconcile the situation to myself by saying it's basically a "basic income" (the salary is not high; the minimum that people on my visa can have). I could think about changing after I have the years of work experience, but years just come with patience, not with productivity. I feel like my situation isn't "fair" because my friends are so much more stressed, but I need the years, not the results.

I also do a lot of side projects and post them online (e.g. learning Chinese - http://pingtype.github.io ), but my contract and visa specifically state that I can't have any other paid work. So all my projects must be free and open source.

If another rest-and-vest person wants to comfort their conscience, I suggest reading more about Basic Income theories.

I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And, yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way. I think it's soul-sucking depressing.

This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.

That's what I'm doing now. It's ok, but it's against my contract to get paid for those projects. So I have to give everything away for free, open-source!

Sounds great, but that also means my marketing budget is zero. I can't find users. I've put in all this effort, but nobody knows about it, and it feels all like a waste of time. But you know, I still get paid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Me too. Felt guilty, but I changed my job later. Cannot stand this.

> "They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"

Worthless slackers.

Edit: Never mind all that, I didn't get the joke. My apologies. In my defense, text doesn't convey emotion very well.

Leaving up the post for my own shame.

What, because they work 40 hours per week?

I have a 4x10 schedule (including a weekend day) and I work exactly my assigned hours. The company is paying me for those hours and nothing more--exceptional circumstances excluded, of course--so I feel no qualms about sticking with that. I get to have a life outside of work, too.

I believe that was sarcasm

I also got the same idea.

I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all.

Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all.

Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.

Unless you hold up a sarcasm sign here you will downvoted into oblivion.

I tend to find typical instances of sarcasm(especially in written form) so unfunny that I don't even recognize them.

That being said I had no problem seeing sarcasm in this example, chiefly because the language was obviously different(how often does one use the word "worthless" to describe people?). I guess it makes for a useful rule of thumb regarding what could be reasonably considered sarcasm.

There are no verbal or visual elements in written form. We are strangers across continents and cultures. Usually English is not our first language. People reading may be in a different mood or mindset. Etc etc. The Elders of the Internet were right to give us smilies :)

It's just Poe's Law coming into play. It can't be avoided really.

Hell, people can't decide if The Prince is a satire or not.

The Prince is easy once you've read Discourses on Livy.

Sure, but look what we have here? A number of people who clearly can't pick up on quite obvious sarcasm.

Sarcasm and satire are very effective ways of communicating a point. The above comment added only 2 words to draw attention to the absurdity of that statement.

Only working 8 hours? How dare they? /s

That quote is super cringe worthy.

The article is very unclear, they also quote:

>"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.

Probably a lot of cherry picking going on.

I don't think its that surprising. Essentially what happens is, engineers do a good job and keep getting promoted. If their service is required/essential, they continue to get funding etc. until they reach such a stage that they know their systems through and through. They're also at a point in their lives where other things take priority (most of the times its children).

I don't particularly find this situation to be bad. They are doing the tasks assigned to them, and there is a defacto agreement with the management that they have other things to take care of as well, but will get a ton of shit done when they do work.

They're not really contradictory. A 9 to 5 day can easily turn into 4 hours of real work. Show up, eat breakfast, spend some time reading HN, an hour of work, lunch, an hour or two working, grab coffee, play some foosball, another hour of work, go to the gym, time to go home!

Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day, and that's assuming a regular schedule, adequate sleep, good nutrition, no major emotional upsets going on... Now, that is work. No checking Facebook. No checking email. Process optimized so there are no long periods of waiting around.

I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work. That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.

Agree. If I'm at work it seems I can't get shit done due to innteruptions. If I'm working from home I burn out after 4-5 hours due to zero interruptions. I don't know where the happy medium is.

>Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day,

What makes you say that?

Measuring myself for a decade and a half, and some data from colleagues measuring themselves on my suggestion, and watching youngsters that I was mentoring.

Also depends what you call work. Actively coding is not the only work engineers do, particularly if they are senior.

As a senior engineer, communicating to those less senior is typically much more important than coding. That's how a good senior engineer force multiplies their knowledge and levels up the entire organization.

How dare they work what is written in their contract.. its almost as if they think it's some kind of business arrangement. :P

So...the age old concept of "Fuck You" Money?

This is more an indictment of the work hours/pressure on average engineer.

I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs.

It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long that you have no idea what is going on and where.

I notice ther was no mention of amazon, but that is a large tech company with 10s of thousands of engineers. Anyone have an amzn rest and vest story?

I think that's culturally impossible. Amazon's a bit of a snake-pit and there's no way such behavior could exist in that environment: it'd be painting a giant target on your back.

So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more than 1M a year are at each of these companies?

And can they use one more?

Thousands minimally; soon tens of thousands.

I think it's not only engineers. I know several people who are either corporate lawyers or other long-time managers who pretty much go to meetings the whole day because they have nothing real to do. They all are pulling good money but feeling like they are not doing much seems to take a psychological toll.

What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money on, than actually taking their money.

Well, this highly connotates with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045

Sad to see tech giants not recapturing carbon with their unlimited money.

Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient?

They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired.

So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.

> They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired.

The conventional term for this is "up or out".

Yes, but why aren't other companies do this?

Because that's also a mistake: the problem there is, you cannot keep a person doing something they're optimal for if you need to continually promote them.

One of the holy grails of effectiveness at doing stuff is having some comprehension of your boundaries. To categorically disavow even the concept of boundaries is catastrophically silly.

Up-or-out relies on a constant intake of new staff. You'll have to do a lot more hiring, and you're applying a pretty strong personality filter on the company.

And as Applejinx says, the fact that someone isn't suited to the role above them doesn't mean they aren't suited to their current role. Up-or-out means tossing out the guy who knows his job well and is doing it well to replace him with someone who's never done it before and needs a training period; this is significant overhead applied to every job in the company.

No. The partner model is different. Tech companies are keeping talent on the bench. McKinsey and co turn over hardworking younglins.

Different from what I said?

Oh no. Companies like McKinsey / Accenture etc are not more efficient. Their bureaucracies and inefficiencies are way worse than tech companies like Facebook or Google.

I see.

The whole up or out principle sounded rather efficient to me.

Why are programmers called engineers these days? An engineer has an engineering degree and does something completely different than computer programming.

Having interacted with various P.E.'s and been mostly disappointed with their work (seriously these guys are worse than architects as far as having creativity pointed only toward fuck-ups that the client would never want), I wonder why programmers/coders/whatevers even want to engage in this pretense. Why not call ourselves "code lawyers"?

It is the common use of the word engineer and not the legal one.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/engineer

Where do I sign up for that job?

This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost half of Google's and Microsoft's).

The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement.

I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do.

>"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year.

Called it a year ago [1]:

>I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662

A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around, spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate it was after years of this kind of behavior.

I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common.

I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].

[1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-ove...

Apple's a big company with a lot of business units that are pretty hermetically sealed from each other. Various different people I've met who work at Apple have had very different experiences there.

I thought the people who were resting and vesting at Google were all making new messaging programs? They are up to 3 or 4 now?

Honestly it's the opposite. The way you get noticed and promoted at Google is by building something new, even if Google is already doing something else in that space. That's part of the reason there's so much duplication at Google.

The VIPs (Vest In Peacers) are more inclined to do the easier thing of adopting and building on what's already there, which is of course the better thing: virtue of laziness and so forth.

(source: xoogler)

I know. I left off the /s. Sarcasm and the internet do not go well together :)

I reckon Dr. Dre might be on a bit of a rest and vest deal at Apple too.

Dr. Dre has actually been working for Apple. He's had a show on Beats 1 since Apple Music launched. There were also reports of him starring in a show about his life and career that would be for Apple Music.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/curator/the-pharmacy-with-dr.-dr...

Every time I read one of your comments, I know it will be about your employer, how great its products are, and how great its business is; even when the article, like this one, is not about your employer.

Yes, we know that this sort of thing is rarer outside of Internet companies. Yes, we know that Jobs's Apple and Pixar notoriously initiated no-poaching agreements with other Silicon Valley employers that depressed salaries for their workers. After Facebook broke the cartel for Internet companies, compensation skyrocketed, and it's possible to be paid well at an Internet company doing nothing so long as you aren't doing something for a competitor.

I don't work for Apple.

Or, as a recently bought out/retired colleague remarked, "My job now consists of being home all day and trying not to piss off my wife" - a much harder endeavor than any engineering project I can think of.

Sounds like love and respect are long gone from that "relationship".

Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children, which makes things harder.

They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company enjoyable.

I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?"

People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out there.

Are you really surprised that people can't get along when they re stuck together 24/7 all days?

That's what happens when they retire.

Surprised? Absolutely not. Even the greatest love can wither away if there's no diversity in the way a couple spends their life.

Stasis is death, movement is life, applies to all areas of human life.

My wife and I recently took a trip together involving hours of driving throughout western Europe. We were glad to find we enjoyed just being together, even at the end of the trip.

I think it's important to keep building that relationship (courting) throughout the working years, not just to avoid hitting retirement and thinking, "What am I going to do with this person for the rest of my life?" but also just to enjoy all the years along the way!

You wanted to be together enough to get married - isn't it worth investing time and effort to keep enhancing that, rather than just letting it wither?

"We were glad to find we enjoyed just being together"

Currently. Feelings towards people change constantly. They can hit extreme levels on either side at any moment.

Yes, but we are 20+ years in, and excited to continue...

Seems like a house - if you don't do maintenance, it gradually deteriorates until it becomes unlivable, but with continual maintenance and improvements, it can last forever...

Sometimes. And sometimes it's better to walk away from the mortgage and file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, there's no way to predict which choice is right. I think "The Money Pit" has some solid guidance here but I haven't watched it in many years.

You are right. We can never truly know from the start, especially having in mind that we grow and change all the time as well.

I've had a failed relationship which lasted 8 years and I know the struggle and the bitterness.

I have however confirmed the old cliche that love can bloom any time at any place as long as one is with an open mind and open heart and doesn't hold grudges to the world at large.

Thank you for articulating my exact thoughts.

I also feel maintaining the relationship is extremely important. We the people are instinctive beings and some of us have very curious character flaws. If we let things to entropy, no relationship can hope to survive. No exceptions.

As I shared in another comment in this sub-thread, I found that being honest (but not brutal; give your opinion and feelings openly but caring for the other person's feelings!) and never going to bed angry with each other have not only prevented the relationship from rotting away, but also improved it by a lot.

> "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?"

Not all conflict is borne out of character flaws. Put me in the same room as an extrovert - be it in a workplace, boardgames night, or whatever - and I'll appreciate and respect their ability to keep the conversation flowing naturally. Put me in the same home as an extrovert, and that same habit will drive me mad. I need my occasional peace and quiet to recharge and focus! And perhaps just as much, they'll need someone to keep talking!

Or, it could have just been a joke.

If you disappear for 7 or 8 years to dedicate yourself to the next few versions of Windows, don't be surprised that your spouse is a stranger.

Perhaps the wife like the time she had alone in the house. Even if you love someone deeply, it's still good to have time to onesself.

Agreed. It's good if people discuss these specifics of their character before moving in to live together though. It helped me and my wife a lot.

She is less extroverted than me and sometimes she wants to be left alone for several hours. I grew to know her very well and she needn't even say a word -- I can recognize by her posture, facial expression and what she does currently that she is in the introspection mini-period, and I simply don't at all interact with her until she's done, at which point she comes to me and often times she says "thank you for knowing me and being considerate".

My original point was more along the lines of "always be very honest (in a thoughtful and sensitive way) with your spouse".

This is a thing with a lot of couples when they retire. They're not used to being around each other 24/7 and drive each other crazy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/divorce-after-50-re...

In Japan, they call it Retired Husband Syndrome, and it affects 60% of older women there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retired_husband_syndrome

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943938 and marked it off-topic.

This actually dates back decades. DEC invented "no output division": a team comprised of senior but bored people who would be unfashionable and dangerous to kick out. You give them some bullshit bling project and segregate them well from people who are actually doing meaningful work so that they don't get in the way. It's better if they do something meaningless for you than something meaningful for a competitor.

These also exist at Google.

"It's a defensive measure."

"That's Microsoft Research's whole model."

It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a bit like gender bias.

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