Google drops engineering residency after protests over ‘inequities’
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
This was an incredible opportunity and it's an absolute shame that internal protests killed it. Yes, you get less pay and a smaller stock refresh, but I know a few people who's careers began with this residency and they'd still be struggling without it.
I don't even know how to describe this. You get less pay but an amazing opportunity, and then you look back and are upset that you weren't given more? Google took a large risk on these candidates with the assumption that they'd fail and eventually have to be let go. But they did it anyway just to create opportunities.
This seems at odds with the article:
>Nearly all residents converted to regular employees, according to the presentation
IME the "unique backgrounds" are "doesn't have a CS degree or a couple years of experience at a big software shop".
Try "the interview process is bad and has low recall."
> sooner or later, it will matter to you.
It already matters to me.
discrimination can either be legal or illegal. google legally discriminates by giving offers to those who get the hiring committee's approval. i think getting the hiring committee's approval is a form of legal discrimination.
Right, every nonrandom decision is discrimination, but in the US private discrimination is generally legal unless it effects a protected category; because of the rational basis test, in the US, public dsicrimination is generally invalid unless it meets some bar of justification, but unless a particularly protected basis of discrimination is involved or a particularly important right impinged, the bar for validity is very low (a rational relation to a legitimate government function.)
Just like stores have "up to" 70% discounts. One item is marked off that much, and the rest are given modest discounts.
We shouldn't normalize this number as some plain old average, it'd be aspirational for many.
Using StackOverflow's [0] aggregated statistics of pay based on experience + location we can get some rough estimates
Over a 5 to 10 year span as a developer at Google you'd probably touch: Java, Golang, C++, Python, and some part of GCP (or very similar tech). Pay is also different from market location so if we look only at the USA we can look at SF and Manhattan.
5 years:
- NYC 25% 96k, 50% 126k, 75% 166k
- SF 25% 113k, 50% 149k, 75% 197k
- NYC 25% 107k, 50% 141k, 75% 186k
- SF 25% 126k, 50% 166k, 75% 219k
Some more data can be gleamed from here: https://www.levels.fyi/
500k+ is L6+, while very difficult to obtain, seems doable if you are determined, know your stuff, know how to find the "right" projects, and are also an inspiring leader.
Sure, over the 7 years I've met a couple engineers with a similar trajectory and one with a steeper one. But the vast majority will either take more time to get to L6, or plain decide to stay forever at 4 or 5.
That said, as a side note, I do think articles like this tend to sensationalize Google as a whole as the "bad guy". Try to remember, Google is a huge company with lots of people managing its many parts. I personally feel there was a failing here, but if so, it was the fault of a relatively small number of people, not "Google". Even most of the people running this program were good, and the program itself was great (as you said) other than what I said above. There's hundreds of thousands of decisions happening every day at Google. If just a couple bad ones get to define the company as a whole, then no large company can ever be good, no matter how good all the rest of those decisions are.
The only room for negotiation is being willing to walk (usually because you have an offer somewhere else).
Otherwise, it's not negotiating, it's just begging.
Where? lol
2001: SWE at UCSF, making about $75K/yr. This is roughly triple my graduate student salary and higher than my postdoc salary. 2007: Architect at Genentech. Make about $100K/year 2008: Join Google as L5 with a starting bonus of $25K, $125K salary, and about $100K in stock options. Stock options are refreshed every year. One year, Eric Schmidt gives everybody a 10% raise. I get promoted once. 2019: leave to work at a startup for a year, same base pay as Google, and stock grants that are now worth $1M but aren't fungible. 2021: Leave Google as L6 with base pay of $225K, 15% bonus target (which I get), a $45K annual bonus, and $700K stock vesting over four years. I count this as "around $450K/year total comp" before taxes etc.
If I had managed 2012-2016 better, I'd be an L7 or more, making about $550K/year total comp. However, these are all exceptional situations made possible by the insanity that is Google.
I don't think that's really true.
I'm not arguing that there aren't SWEs whose total comp is $600k. There definitely are. However, those people aren't really SWEs. They're managers, architects, and strategists. They have a lot of people reporting to them, they make decisions about very high level things that are only tangentially related to code, and they work on guiding other engineers to find solutions to hard problems. No doubt being a developer before getting to that role is incredibly helpful and makes you better at it, but if you're earning $600k I very much doubt you're spending more than 25% of your time sat at a keyboard with an IDE open.
If you want to earn that much after a decade in work you'd be much better off polishing your management and strategy skills than learning how to write better code.
And yes, I realise I'm totally falling in to the 'no true Scotsman' trap here. But sometimes a Scotsman is just an MBA in a kilt. :)
So people from underrepresented backgrounds should be paid the same as top engineers regardless of output.
I'm really struggling to see the injustice of this program. It seems to me that axing it only leaves the people who used this role as a stepping stone to reach a full time role with no opportunity to get their foot in the door.
Personally, I don't buy this because the alternative is not that these Eng Residents would have been given entry level roles at google with the commensurate pay and benefits but rather no role at google.
You might not ever catch up to someone who started higher (and certainly won't for the integral of compensation), but the gap should narrow over time.
So ... leave?
Put a couple years of FAANG on your resume to bootstrap and then bail out to the job that pays correctly. That's what everybody has to do to keep their salary from lagging.
If the analysis only includes those who haven't bailed at least once, it's for sure going to have lagging salaries.
A more interesting question would be what those who bailed and then came back to Google are making.
When you converted to being a regular SWE, they gave you a BIG pay bump -- comparable to a new-grad starting salary, but rather higher than average. My comp the year after Eng Res was higher by 20-40% than my friends who started at Google right out of school.
Are you an outlier in the pay increase?
For all of this she was paid £25,000 (USD 35,000) / year.
The injustice is that software engineers and the tech sector in general are being so insanely rewarded as most of the rest of society stagnates and living standards fall (I say this as an insanely rewarded software engineer).
This will not end well.
Google was 51.7% white in 2020, down from 54.4% in 2019 *. The US is 61.5% white, meaning whites are under-represented at Google, and increasingly so. How can one then argue they are favored? Why do reporters not apply even the smallest degree of scrutiny to such claims?
*Ballpark white global population.
I'm also not saying that these numbers prove that Google does favor white workers. Only that they are not sufficient to disprove the idea.
It seems strange to put people in a position where showing a datapoint that would otherwise tend to refute a hypothesis (which IMO should not be assumed to be true in the first place) is not enough to be considered as evidence against the hypothesis being true.
The general trend I see in the community is that there's a strong belief that google, and by extension, the tech industry, is biased in favor of white workers.
At least Census is consistent.
“White Americans” average a little under 99% Eurooean ancestry, but far fewer than 99% have exclusively European ancestry.
Racism is stupid.
* The critics are talking about Software Engineering (~1/3rd of the company?), whereas the source you cited is about all of Google. I wouldn't be surprised if the White/Asian/Male splits are far worse when you only look at software engineers.
* Google has many international offices (e.g. there's > 1000 employees in Google Japan).
It's closer to 2/3.