I’d bet on Apple, FB, or some new entry (harder without the underlying OS).
DeepMind is the most interesting thing coming out of Google imo.
[0] levels.fyi
It feels like a little trick being played on the employees, kind of like unlimited PTO. I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.
It's a common trick.
In the 1990's Bill Clinton famously categorized people who made $200,000 a year as "millionaires." Why? Because they "should" be able to save a million dollars within five years.
People in power find it easy to play word games with other people's money.
Which place aside from Google?
Also, even with a 1-year cliff, for most people it'll still basically be indistinguishable from cash? Leaving (or getting fired) before you hit the 1 year mark is pretty rare, and after the first cliff it usually transitions to something like every 3 months.
The reason I brought up taxes (which might seem odd to people since compensation usually ignores them) is because they will significantly change the equation for various reasons. (AMT, RSUs taxed as short term gains and not long term, state tax affecting comp regardless of cost of living, etc.)
Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years, but it is useful for comparing offers, which is fine - but then these numbers shouldn’t appear without qualification in the type of discussion where personal finance is involved.
Not to mention that since this is a forum where many people are involved in startups, a 50k salary often (ok, maybe not often but I’m on 1/1) turns into several millions in a few years. Does that mean founders should claim they were making $2 mil per year? I don’t think so - but that’s the only comparison available if you use levels.fyi.
That's not correct. RSUs get taxed as normal income. So whether you get $600k cash or $300k cash + $300k of RSUs, your tax bill is the same. The gain on the RSUs get taxed as short or long term capital gain. That comes into picture when you sell. If you auto-sell, there is no/very little gain, so no additional tax there and for intents and purpose, it's as if getting $600k in cash.
The numbers reported on levels.fyi are not useless. They give you a good idea of what one can get if they started working there at that moment. You can extrapolate more out of it by understanding the stock gain.
This is setup to favor people who don’t understand taxes, so they don’t screw themselves over. It ends up screwing people who do understand taxes.
The gain you get on the stock from vest till you sell is a bonus anyway compared to if you were just given straight cash.
I would advise you to run some actual numbers to get this. I don't need to as I have been getting paid this for last 5 years at Google.
This doesn't make sense as well. You don't need to work at Google for a year to get the first year's equity. So there is no one year cliff.
The frequency of how often you vest is also monthly. Specially at the L6+ levels. So you will lose at most of one month's equity (i.e. 1/48th of the grant) if you are bad at planning your last day. So to put actual numbers again, let's say your offer is 240k cash + 240k RSUs every year. So you vest 240k/12 = 20k in RSUs every month on say 20th of the month. If you leave on the 19th of your 12 month of the employment (i.e. before finishing one year), you don't lose on 240k of RSUs but just 20k of RSUs. So you will earn 220k of cash + 229k of RSUs before you leave.
> You can leave a job (by choice or otherwise) where you worked for a year and were making "1 million a year" with less than $300k in total compensation.
For the purposes of discussing compensation at FAANG & similar, this is basically untrue. If you work at those companies for a year you'll take home (short of a massive movement in stock price) something approximately resembling what was promised to you. Taxes do not change the equation on this, since vested RSUs are taxed as income (_not_ short-term gains; them being the same rate is irrelevant - they are in fact just reported as income on your W2, without being broken out from your salary, it's literally one number). AMT applies regardless of whether your income is derived from vested RSUs or base salary - if you work at Netflix you're probably getting hit too. I don't see how state income taxes are relevant, since, again, those apply exactly the same way to RSUs as they do to salary.
> Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years
Uh, no? You can straightforwardly project your take-home pay over time; if you want to be really precise you can do it as a probability density function to take into account the potential movement of the stock price over time based on the volatility.
This is all a bit of a distraction from your main point:
> I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.
Untrue! Obviously, trivially untrue, as demonstrated above.
In palo alto / atherton no less.
Adhd people can be very focused
Stable products and visions are definitely not interesting to Google.
I'll agree though that DeepMind would not have been able to exist really without Google's ongoing funding and hardware, so maybe it is Google's creation at this point.
The Hangouts > Chat transition is exactly this. Objectively, they've made it worse and more buggy on their own Android platform. Ever since the transition I talk to friends less on Google services. Many of us jumped to Discord
Don't even get me going on the Gmail rollout...
Google was once an innovator (search, Gmail, Docs) but I'm not expecting quality from any of their future product rollouts... especially if it's an existing product.
One nice thing I'll say is Google's data tools and privacy controls are great. It's very easy to export/delete/control your data there from the settings if you dig through them.
The only thing I still use regularly for personal accounts is YouTube premium.
Thankfully no friends use hangouts and I was able to move the stragglers to signal. I personally don't like discord either, but it's harder to get people out of that one (for now).
Docs was from an acquisition.
I think what matters with an acquisition is how it’s managed and how the technology is developed. I think it’s unarguable Google has put significant investment into docs and done a good job developing the product so I have no problem at this point giving them credit for it.
I too don't expect quality from anything Google anymore. It's become an untrustworthy brand.
I don't love Facebook/Meta but it looks like they put a lot of eggs into the Metaverse bucket. Google has never really done that. They have dabbled and because its Google people assume its going to be big or meaningful. But once people internally make enough progress to get promoted and move around internally its not going to continue to be supported without guidance from the top and the top doesnt care about AR/VR/Metaverse. Or at least they havnt until now.
Google does a bunch of random things kind of haphazardly. Whether this is caused by incentive problems around promo or something else I don’t know.
I don’t think they compare favorably to Apple, Zuckerberg, or modern Microsoft. I’d guess it comes from the top.
> It's small groups of people or singular people who make these decisions and those visionaries can easily change their focus or be offered a more compelling role
True! All companies face this problem. Smart, capable people have options and frequently will decide to leave and do something else/go somewhere else.
> but lets not pretend Google is making these decisions to focus on something or not
This is where the disconnect is. As a company you decide what things are priorities, and you build teams to pursue those priorities in a way that is resilient to people leaving - even extremely senior leadership individuals.
If a project withers and dies because a key player leaves, then it never had the company's focus. Part of effectively managing a company is to ensure your most important things don't have a low bus factor (or in Google's case, a bug factor of exactly one).
MS, FB, Apple, etc, all have a record of being able to relentlessly pursue a particular goal despite being subject to the same workforce attrition forces that affect Google.
They did with Google Plus, and they eventually killed it.
Also DeepMind didn't come out of Google, it came out of some British boffins that got acquired for squillions (comparatively, I mean it's only a serious and arguably somewhat successful attempt at building general AI, it's not like it's adtech or finance or something else really important...) and as far as I can see the number one thing Google has done to help them, other than throwing money at them, is to otherwise leave them the hell alone.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the current mainline Linux. There’re issues on desktop, sure. But VR/AR stuff is not similar to desktop, quite the opposite, it’s similar to embedded. For newer mobile GPUs, Linux even support Vulkan in addition to GLES.