Hacker News Reader

Comment by hfthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Great post because sometimes we forget how easy some of our jobs are.

One thing that bothered me about the article and your post, however, is the "google chef" comment is bugging you for the wrong reason.

You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly, if you believe that merit and contributions as an employee is what justifies the rewards of equity appreciation.

That's not how the world works. Warren Buffett did not lift a finger building railroads, soda pop, and newspapers. That's not why he is rich.

Pincus wants you to think of this portion of your compensation as an employee, instead of an investor. Charlie made money because he became an investor, not because he was a chef.

View on HN

> You and the OP are in agreement with Pincus implicitly

No they aren't. They're arguing independently of that. In fact, the OP explicitly mentions that he's not commenting on that. What the OP was arguing was that _if_ you were to give compensation to people based on their contribution to the company, it would be absolutely absurd, and insulting, to claim that the original Google Chef did not contribute substantially to the company.

We are using two different interpretations of what they meant by 'contributions to the company'. In terms of well-being and quality of life to the staff, the chef made tremendous contributions, sure.

But in economic terms (what I believe Pincus/Zynga meant), no, the chef did not contribute substantially to revenue/profits the way engineers and sales people did.

I don't think Pincus is saying chefs are not important in the qualitative sense (that their contributions don't matter as much as engineers) - I believe he's saying they do not contribute enough economic value to generate a 20 million dollar pay day. And he's right - the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much.

But he's wrong for lumping economic contributions as an employee (charlie the chef) and asset appreciation (charlie the investor) together.

> the labor markets don't pay chefs anywhere near that much.

Well, they did at least once.

And how do we know that the Google Chef didn't contribute enough economic value to generate $20 million? You can't say that just because he's one level farther removed from the final product. If he helped enable the company to recruit talent and helped enable that talent to produce then he very easily could have been worth $20 million.

>You can't say that just because he's one level farther removed from the final product.

Indeed. It'd be like arguing that an engineer who goes into management is now contributing less to the company since they are no longer writing code.

>But in economic terms (what I believe Pincus/Zynga meant), no, the chef did not contribute substantially to revenue/profits the way engineers and sales people did.

It seems that this is the point that you disagree with the OP then. The OP's point was that what the Chef did to build the value Google was equal to that of any engineer of the company.

"As someone who was there in the early days I can tell you that Charlie Ayers contributed more to Google's success than I did, and I was a senior software engineer."

But in economic terms (what I believe Pincus/Zynga meant), no, the chef did not contribute substantially to revenue/profits the way engineers and sales people did.

I think you and Pincus are lumping together the typical market value of a chef, on average, with the specific contribution of this particular chef in this particular situation. Ron has argued pretty forcefully that Charlie did, in fact, contribute very substantially. His contribution was indirect, okay, but lots of people's contributions are indirect, including senior management's!

Look at the picture at the time Charlie was hired. It's true, Google could probably have hired any number of mediocre or even pretty good chefs without offering them stock options. But somehow they determined that Charlie was exceptional, and they decided it was worth offering him options to get him on board. There are, after all, some chefs in the world who own several restaurants and are fairly wealthy.

But he's wrong for lumping economic contributions as an employee (charlie the chef) and asset appreciation (charlie the investor) together.

This point I agree with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com