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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

After this Google started giving $1K in cash every christmas and one year gave everybody at the company a 10% bonus. Those times are gone.

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And in 2009 they gave everyone a phone (Nexus One or G1, I don't remember) for Christmas instead of a $1K cash bonus... and then that one guy complained loudly (on eng.misc?) that he didn't need a phone and didn't want this phone, and the phone would impact his taxes even though he never asked for it, and complained that the phone was a terrible gift and even worse than a gift, and people told him to just donate it to his damn family and he would yell "but I'm still responsible for the taxes on this thing!" even though it was clearly explained that he wasn't. Over ten years later, I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.

the first time it was a G1, that would have been my first year so I think it was 2008. That wasn't the best phone (although I loved the keyboard). I ported a physics engine to it, and it ran, but the phone got very hot very quickly. The next year was the nexus one, the excitement was palpable. The nexus one was truly sexy at the time, definitely the first android phone that I loved.

As for that Googler- well, there were always a bunch of people there who had some or another circumstance that made them incompatible with the larger Google culture.

> I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.

But I'm assuming he did great at the whiteboard interview! Being sarcastic but I've always been surprised how some really terrible personalities are hired because they aced the tech quizzes.

People change after they’ve adapted to their new circumstances.

A Google onsite has an entire interview dedicated solely to Googliness and Leadership (which is supposed to fill this role).

That was only introduced 2018 or so

Before then, every interviewer was expected to give feedback on such capabilities through asking questions about the candidate's history.

Opposite of what I saw in my time there. Interviews focused little if at all on the person’s actual history and experience. Just pre-baked questions. Maybe I was surrounded by idiot interviewers.

The $1K christmas bonus started no later than 2002.

You say those times are gone, but have you seen what FAANG pays people now?

Yeah, back in the 2000s or even early 2010s a $1K+ employee holiday bonus would be a "holy shit!" event that would make the news. Doing so today, even after adjusting for inflation, would be met with "yeah, whatever" by everyone, including new grads.

I don't get the phenomenon of piddling bonuses. I worked for Amazon in the 2000s. And we got an employee discount.

10% off anything on the site.

Capped at a maximum of $100 / year.

This is a discount that feels like they're going out of their way to spit in your face. What if you raised my annual pay by... $100? Who would notice or care?

for good or for bad, one of the things amazon does is focus on providing benefits that can apply to ALL employees, i.e. the six figure devs all the way down to the fc employees.

Amazon would notice because paying their whole workforce $100 extra per year would cost them significant money whereas that sum of all those discounts would work out to a small fraction of that amount.

"Significant" is possibly mis-reading it. They only do significant things if they have existential risk or an FEC reporting obligation. On Amazon's revenue, payrise is only "significant" if its company wide, above CPI. If they can pay box shifters less than 50c rise, they will do it. If they can pay coders 10%, they will do it. They won't pay box loaders and coders 10% unless the unionisation drive makes them.

Seriously? $100 per employee is almost too small to figure. Scale here. Amazon did $150b in quarterly revenue. QUARTERLY. it has 1.3m employees worldwide. $100 per employee is 0.001% of the quarters revenue.

It doesn't move the dial.

There was never a dollar minted that Jeff Bezos didn't like.

Profit margin is about 10% so it was more like 1/10,000 revenue

Wages don't get paid out of profits. They're paid out of revenue.

Did you mean that markup is about 10%?

A increase in wages comes out of profit (and adds to costs). Revenue is irrelevant to if a company can afford wages.

I meant that Amazon profit is 10% of revenue.

I agree. When I got there, I was stunned that that was the perk instead of "Free Prime membership" (which has about the same cost but just feels better).

There's a simple reason for it. This perk is a 10% discount on Amazon products, which means (1) to get $100, employees will have to spend $1000+, which not everyone will do, and (2) the total cost to Amazon is still less than $100, since a lot of the cost is their own profit margin.

On the other hand, Amazon operates Prime at a loss, since 2-day shipping is ridiculously expensive. It uses it as a way to get and hold on to new customers, but you don't exactly need to do that when the user is already working for Amazon. So offering that as a perk would end up costing the company more than $100/employee.

As I recall it was a silly thing where you received the bonus as physical cash (ie paper money) and you could still receive other comp like stock or a monetary bonus to a bank account.

I remember. Didn't they hand out cash? And there was concern around having that much cash at HQ. What a time.

That sounds really fun

Google gave out a $1600 cash bonus to all full-time employees at the end of 2021.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-promises-employees-16...

That was pay, not literal "cash" like the $1000 was.

Wasn't the year of the surprise 10% only because the unlawful collusion between Google, Apple, and others was on the brink of becoming public?

And it wasn't a bonus but a raise, which is notably different.

After this Google realised they would need to compete with Facebook on compensation and today employees at either company are paid a lot more than equivalent employees 15 years ago.

But Google at the time had huge revenue and profit compared to Facebook which was just getting started with monetization. Even today Meta/FB is not nearly close to Google looking at the revenue and profit. Google can always pay more if they want to.

That's when the cash bonus ended, not started.

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