Google engineer earns $150K works 1 hr/day, spends rest of time on his startup
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!
2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.
Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.
This new silicon valley era is weird.
I remember back when I felt Google was invincible but it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Can’t wait to see what succeeds them in search.
Some remember Google as being fantastic when they joined in 2005 and then going downhill after. Some think the peak was in 2009. Some in 2012. And I'm sure there are engineers joining now who, in ten years' time, will be reminiscing about the golden days of 2023.
In reality, I think we tend to rationalize our decisions to join a company by imagining it's better than it really is, and then rationalize our decision to leave by imagining it's worse. More often than not, the only real change is that we've grown tired of the workplace and need a change of scenery.
Those who joined big-tech early-ish in their career likely see the state of the company at the time as way better than what they're used to. Then it gets worse.
It doesn't really matter where you enter in the history of the company, the culture is almost always going to be the best as you know it when you join and get worse over time. Very rarely does the opposite happen.
I watched enough of the recorded Bedtime Stories (or whatever they called them, it was basically a bunch of nooglers in jammies listening to a distinguished engineer talk about the old days) and talked to enough old timers to learn that the period after the early search engine problems and ad revenue problems were solved, so about 2002-2004, was definitely a highlight that was better than my time.
For example: the microkitchens were all loaded to the gills with tons of amazing snacks. By the time I arrived they were downsized for cost and health reasons and when I left in 2021 they were only a shadow of their previous self.
My point is that some of us did research and saw that the earlier days before our tenure were even better.
Charlie was still present in his cafe (or its predecessor) and often cooked a whole cow for lunch every day. By the time I joined, Charlie's was just a long line for crappy food.
I've heard mixed results about the very early days- absolutely thrilling, but totally terrifying and stressful.
Sorry Business Insider. If you're trying to get me riled up that a 900 billion dollar company can afford to pay to the equivalent of $375-750/hr for an engineer, sorry. Even at the bottom of the bell curve, he's bringing in more value to Google than that.
Average revenue per employee is just that, an average. It also includes work that was done in the past and keeps paying dividends even though the employee might not even be there anymore.
This is more messed up than the rest of the article. You need to have a serious failure of processes and/or extremely low expectations from your interns if they can work 10hrs/week and get a FTE offer afterwards.
Which is to say nothing of the value proposition of having experienced person taking hours out of their day to mentor someone with a limited shelf-life.
He's either very gifted or got a manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer", which is the part that is a failing in processes in my opinion.
When you've got plenty of money in the budget it's not beyond poor managers to hire more for no other reason than to grow their "kingdom", as a bigger headcount equals bigger importance.
I was given a project complete opposite of "discrete assignments, less ownership and global thinking". I am really happy with the project I was given and the outcome of it. The objective was purposely vague which allowed me to take control: Designing the implementation, consideration of alternatives, setting up experiments, creating feature review documentation. I had to reach out and interact with people from multiple teams. I feel like I really got to experience the FTE life in my short 14 weeks.
It's important to note that Fortune is a blogging platform now and anyone can write an article there.
Those agreement are often scarecrows. They aren’t valid in california afaik, and surely they aren’t valid in most of european nations.
He's effectively banking that Google will be so big they won't notice - just like only working 1 hour per day.
There's a process where you declare this work. And if it gets approved, you have ammunition to back you in a court case if it ends up going to such lengths.
I have had projects approved - questions that get asked are about e.g. conflict of interest or actual competition.
Google actually doesn't want to own your fruit-stand-in-the-park business.
This is intended to prevent situations like the zuck/winklevoss case (just to name 1 publicly well known example).
But when someone is spending the time Google pays for to work on a startup, I would THINK they would care about that. Or maybe Google's internal processes is okay with them doing 1 hr/day of work "as long as they're getting done whats expected of them."
The decision is not made based on whether the work is a "startup" or not. It's not even clear what a startup is - some companies that are worth more than $1 Billion are still somehow "startup".
It's based on conflict of interest, legitimate business competition, leaking/selling sensitive information, and other concrete criteria, in my opinion, are quite fair.
It does not depend on whether it is a "startup" or not
How many engineers work 12 hour days and come in on weekends, all unpaid.
If you are applauding these guys while maintaining that being forced into the office is a crime against humanity, you may want to do some introspection.
Devon, in his 20's, makes $150k per year, was an intern at Google.
You don't think the people at Google could narrow it down a bit and figure out who it is?
They have changed the name to protect his identity. The rest of that likely describes hundreds or thousands of people.
If this one person got away with all this at Google, then there's reason to suspect many more are. The entire program at Google might be under strict review going forward because of this article. Time will tell..
You're confident Google couldn't figure out who Devon really is? It is Google after all.
If he's keeping up with his tasks and Google is satisfied, why work more?
it's so obvious to me that I can't believe people need proof, I don't even live in SF and I know plenty of engineers with cushy lifestyles working < half the day at FAAMG. are yall just closing your eyes and justifying this amongst yourselves or something?
If you're not denying the staff to your potential competitors by keeping them on payroll then are all of them actually worth keeping?
I'm having trouble trying to parse the meaning of this metaphor.
Google is large enough to impact local labor markets for specific roles.
If you tell the world that you can make $200k at Google to dick around all day, you’ve now caused your competitors to need to pay developers more money to attract talent and make them perform at a high level.
It's a bonus if they ship anything useful, and you have in theory increased the odds of that happening by hiring so many of the talented young programmers that graduate every year.
in the end it seems a failed management to me.
It looks like they are doing nothing.
The way I see it, the more value extracted from Google by its employees, the less resources will be available for Googles adtech business.