Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers.

People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-Google.

View on HN

Google does indeed deserve kudos for being an early adopter of great benefits, WLB, cool offices, etc. But I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for "sky high" compensation. I had a classmate with competing offers from both MS and Google back in 2007 - the Google offer was pretty close to MS's offer, both at the time and over the prior decade.

A big reason why silicon valley comp rose so much in the last decade was because major companies were previously colluding to suppress worker wages. And yes, this includes Google. It ended in 2009, and that's when tech compensation really exploded. See link at bottom.

If anything I would give Facebook far more credit. They were willing to pay more than any other major tech company. And more importantly, they also refused to participate in the aforementioned cartel, which resulted in a ton of poaching atcivity which drove up market wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

it also exploded due to the growling size of such companies and dominance relative to overall US economy, especially post-2008 in which there was a void filled by the collapse of the housing, auto, brick and mortar retail, and financial sectors (except for Walmart, biotech, payment processing, and information tech, everything else weas hurt badly). such companies play a much bigger absolute and relative role, whether it's shopping, cloud and data infrastructure, advertising, AI, etc.. Companies need to pay top dollar for top talent to get products to market before an equally-sized trillion-dollar competitor does. Due to network effects, speed is of upmost importance.

Agreed on many counts but they did collude (with Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm allegedly due to bullying from Apple) to suppress poaching workers from each other. I'd say Facebook played a huge role in refusing to collude (as can be seen from this exchange between Sheryl Sandberg and Jonathan Rosenberg [1]) and thus driving up worker wages due to competition.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-r...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34227388 - Steve jobs email asking Google to stop poaching from apple and them agreeing

Yes, no. They are also a major proponent of open office space, and (at least the group that I worked for was) very intolerant of remote work pre-pandemic. It was very grating to see all these showy spaces (cafes, gyms, theaters, climbing walls, ball pits etc) that were featured in the REWS (Google Real Estate and Workplace Services) newsletters, with absolutely no focus on the overcrowded open office spaces that engineers were forced to work in.

I left Google for Netflix mostly because of my inability to work remotely for Google, and the group I work for in Netflix being remote friendly.

Netflix is one of the few companies that imo, unequivocally have a better culture than Google (despite working for the latter). However, it's a much smaller engineering org so I don't think it would scale as well.

Yep. In fairness the offices generally have many quiet spaces to escape to, if you are ok working on a laptop.

How senior do you have to be generally to get your own bonafide private office?

From what I can tell there isn't any company wide rules. In my building there are directors who sit out in the open, some who have private offices.

Some non manager software engineers share offices with one or two people, and some managers share an office with someone.

Sounds like if an employee really really wants an office, they can be eligible to share one, but it's not the norm. It's actually pretty quiet though in the "cubes" since there are so many meeting rooms to pop into for discussions.

I found this even weirder, frankly. Everyone is sitting out there in the open, but it's impolite to talk, and most people have headphones on. Strange vibe to be in a giant room full of people that is basically silent, IMO.

I don't think I ever saw one. The director of the product I worked on (comprising a few hundred people spread across a few offices and countries) sat a few "pods" over from me for awhile. He did have priority use of a 1:1 meeting room though.

I'm fairly certain I've seen pictures of at least one corner office though, on Google's campus in Mountain View.

Very possible! I only went there once, and only went into a couple cafes in the main buildings.

> People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day are all thanks to Sergey and Larry in the early 00s wanting to build a Disneyland for nerds. They were so successful at it that the rest of the industry had no option but to emulate them. Being a software engineer was nowhere near as enticing a job pre-Google.

Were you working in the Valley? Because a decade before Google I co-founded a company and while we didn't have in house chefs (we were a bootstrap) we had the rest. And not because we were special -- the three of us who co-founded the company were used to those things from our own prior employers.

There were certainly some bare-bones companies earlier in my career, but there were also some - Thinking Machines comes readily to mind - that were pretty famous for pampering employees like this. Also, even at the bare-bones companies, people got offices or at least cubes. Of twelve employers in my 30-year career, only two had open offices and less than half of the rest involved sharing with one other. In 2000 I was in the middle of a four-year stint alone in an office with walls, which seems almost unheard-of now. It wasn't until I started WFH full time (2014 I think) that I was able to recapture that experience.

How would you rate it? How does it affect your productivity? Collaboration, any influence? :)

I'll assume you mean offices rather than WFH, since the latter (and its many confounding factors) has been discussed extensively here already. Personally, I was just happier in an office, even if shared with one other. Cubes were second, open plans last, though there were a few times when I appreciated being "in the fray" with everyone else either way. Eliminating the constant sensory assault just makes focus easier, and at the end of the day I could go home with lower cortisol levels. Collaboration was never an issue, as long as there was some space nearby for it and people were willing to use it.

Obviously it can be easier to slack off in an office, or there could be conflict with one's office-mate, and so on, but overall I think offices were worth it. I've also been told by multiple CFOs that the reason for cubes and then for open plans has mostly to do with cost and how various kinds of space are taxed. Every one admitted that the productivity/collaboration claims were just excuses. Which brings us back to WFH vs. RTO, I guess. ;)

Huge productivity enhancer. You can always collaborate with someone either over the net or by just walking over and talking in the same office.

While in open plan you're always "collaborating" with everyone within earshot (I also get distracted by people moving around behind my screen).

There's a reason why open plan was mostly abandoned in the 60s, an no good (non short-sighted) reason why it was resurrected in the '00s.

What was the actual reasoning? Like, Zuck is a survivor and genius I respect (he's not perfect tho obviously)...but why does he do open plan at FB? Why did any of the tech companies do open plan? Are they thinking about it? Do they measure it? What's the rationale?

> a Disneyland for nerds

Another side of “for nerds” is that early Google managed to attract employees from academia. I remember the buzz in the academic world when a professor (Matt Welsh) gave up tenure at Harvard to join Google: some others followed. Even more, it attracted top students who otherwise had their heart set on academia: within the (delusional) world of students who consider being a professor as the highest ideal, I remember hearing the opinion that if you can't get a tenure-track job, Google is a pretty good second choice because it's “just like a university”: you had (so the story went) freedom to do whatever you wanted, smart peers, “talks at Google” from the best speakers, … and there were perks (free food, laundry, etc) that appealed to students.

I myself ended up joining Google when my academic path was interrupted, despite thinking I'd never do that. Google employees were already complaining in the early 2010s about the changing culture, but there was still enough of it left, and by all accounts, early Google was a magical place.

I joined google after self-interrupting my academic path. Later I realized that Matt Welsh was the guy who wrote the first Linux manual I ever had (https://www.mdw.la/papers/linux-getting-started.pdf) which was pretty much the gateway for me learning what I needed to to work at Google.

My goal in joining google was to treat it as academia and use my position there to return to a stronger position in academia. I didn't manage to do this, but I was a more productive researcher as a SWE at Google than I ever was working in academia.

For a while Google wasn't just disneyland for nerds- it was nerdtopia. It was the first place I worked that had more people who were more nerdy than me. At first that was great but eventually it got tiresome.

Do any companies today still have this culture?

R&D in pharma/biotech can be like this. But there are fewer and fewer free-wheeling R&D groups in industry these days, probably because people saw Xerox PARC and thought it was a waste of money (a single invention at PARC paid for all of PARC).

>But there are fewer and fewer free-wheeling R&D groups in industry these days

This was true going back to the 80s. If anything there's been something of an uptick in companies with money to burn.

I recently joined and was shocked how much freedom they give senior engineers. It's really different than most big companies.

OpenAI seems like it from the outside.

I'm not sure how much of it is Google and how much is just a broader collection of SV companies, but engineering salaries, including software, in general were much more conventional professional salaries until at least the dot-com era. I started with a computer company for about $40K in the mid-80s (with a grad degree) so a bit over $100K today with nothing special with respect to other benefits.

One thing that has definitely happened (at least where I am) is that other professional/office salaries seem to have stagnated somewhat and not kept pace with inflation, while tech salaries continued to climb upwards. Until recently, anyways.

It's clearly more complicated than this, as people are pointing out, but I think your point is directionally true, and worth making. Maybe somebody else would have raised the bar, maybe the bar wasn't raised as high as was claimed, maybe they even raised the wrong bar. But, Google did pressure many other employers to change in a generally positive direction, so I'd give them that.

Analogously: I'm not a fan of Starbucks coffee, but I recognize that (where I live) specialty coffee places mostly did not even exist before SBUX popularized the idea that coffee didn't have to come out of a #10 can. You can raise the level of competition while not being the best yourself.

Hmm, I still fail to realize that, as except flexible work hours, none of this is matching my experience as a software engineer. I live in Europe though.

It's not that I complain of my situation: I'm healthy, have a loving family, and work with a great team which is full of kindness and which is part of an international group, something that let me exchange with people from all around the world as part of my job in a full remote position.

So this is just to say that not all SE live in this ultra-privileged bubble. :)

The food is designed to make you work late and law firms and consulting outfits will realise this too if they haven’t already.

Law firms do this already. On site doctors too = no reason to ever leave!

(Also, in NYC, call the car service to go home late at night.)

Not at Google. The food is there because they have to spend all their money on something, or risk being singled out as a monopoly.

That sounds conspiratorial, but it's really the only thing that makes sense to me.

I suggest doing some math. Just back of the napkin.

On what?

Cost of meals vs cash flow. The thing you were commenting on.

Yes, meals are just one of the many expenses.

How does spending money on whatever have anything to do with monopoly?

Reduces profit margins

You really need to read some mid-90's books like Microserfs or some of the early Mac histories for some historical context. None of this was new or particularly unusual in the valley at the time.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs.

One of the thigns that attracted me to Silicon Valley was the book Hackers, which has this classic line:

"During this period when everybody at Apple was celebrating the increasing revenues piles of money that would make many of them so rich that they would be beyond millionaires, in the ozone of Croesus Mode, where wealth is counted in units of tens of millions John Draper was at home, playing with his Apple"

"wealth is counted in units of tens of millions" how cute!

Google has lost lawsuits for colluding with Apple to suppress the wages of its employees

Most of what Google did was copying other companies, like Genentech (I've worked at both, twice). It's almost as if Google got a list from Genentech and then just added 25% to everything. There were a few benefits that I haven't seen anywhere else, such as the death benefit, which led me to joke that I was worth more dead than alive.

You say it like paying 25% more than the prevailing wage is trivial for any company to do. Yes all they did was spend more money on talent than everyone else, and that's exactly what boosted the market.

Many companies in the bay area pay 25% more than prevailing- it's called "the bay area tax".

We are talking about the bay area. No one – IBM, Cisco, Apple, Oracle, HP, Novell, Intel, Motorola, 3Com, Yahoo or any of the other big industry players that employed software engineers – paid anywhere near the salary and benefits of Google.

When I chose to return to Genentech I had an offer from Apple and it certainly met or exceeeded everything in my previous Google offers. This is consistent with my read on other employers like Facebook and Microsoft.

> sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day

Most of us never have and never will. This hasn't become the standard just a perk for a small subsection of mostly American FANNG employees.

As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.

I would trade in these shitty open offices for the cube farm from Office Space though…

haha I have thought about this. I saw office Space right before I got my first coding job. So I expected the lifestyle of the typical engineer to be in line with the 'drive an old car, live in a small apartment' representation in the movie.

Twenty something years later never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd have insane compensation and perks and yet an even shittier desk situation than depicted in that movie lol.

Two comments:

1. They wanted to encourage people to work later

2. Where the f%%% was all that stuff when I was at AWS /s

I did work remotely the entire time I was there (my department didn’t have an RTO mandate). But I did travel to corporate offices in DC, Nashville, Dallas, Seattle and San Francisco after Covid lifted and I was…disappointed.

100%. My dad was an electrical engineer in the 70s and 80s and ended up transitioning to sales, given that it paid much more.

Is that not still true. I have many acquaintances with EE degrees that left to work in software because of the comparatively low salary.

By 1998 many of the things you mentioned where common in Silicon Valley. So, Google was hardly the first company to pay very well or have great perks.

Historically a huge range of perks have been tossed around including some that have gone away like company cars due to tax code changes that eliminated the benefits. There’s long been ebb and flow around what perks are common, and which ones stick around as the company grows.

One that I wish caught on was Microsoft being rather famous for offering engineers an actual office with doors that closed.

I'm curious about this. Was it true that engineers in the Valley made good money before Google and the like?

I joined the industry after the dotcom boom, and I got the impression that older companies such as IBM were very very mediocre in pay, nothing like Google.

Was that not always true? You see that many people who joined after the IPO were able to retire after 15 years at Google (or Amazon), did that really happen at places like IBM for the average senior engineer?

You'd here about engineers who sometimes became multi-millionaires from an IPO that went well, but now people can become multi-millionaires from W-2 RSUs and a little bit of stock growth.

IBM wasn't Silicon Valley. IBM was IBM, and then there was Silicon Valley.

IBM is cut from a very different cloth than Silicon Valley companies that were actually founded and ran in SV in the 80s / 90s. I wouldn't use them as the measuring stick.

Microsoft was pretty well known to pay really well too (granted out of Seattle / Redmond, but they grafted the SV culture really well). They also had perks and bonuses and big stock grants. Netscape, Yahoo! etc. They all had some variation of this going on.

It’s hard to do direct comparisons when most of this isn’t public information, the job requirements are so different, and inflation plays such a big role in these comparisons. A dollar is nominally worth 1/2 what it was in 1995, but if you’re looking at housing etc the difference is much larger.

My understanding is adjusted for inflation the minimally skilled developer was actually better off on the mid to late 90’s. The median developer was in a roughly similar situation. The elite’s pay was comparable, but today we have a larger percentage of people in that elite category.

PS: IBM isn’t Silicon Valley. Many developers today are still making sub 120k, but that’s really not what we’re talking about.

Netscape and SGI are two good examples that were making people into millionaires in the 1990's. Not to mention all the "Microsoft millionaires" (stock options, baby)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/secretaries-get-rich-in-the-in...

Engineers in Silicon Valley did well, but the multiple over other work wasn't as high. I think that's still true for many employers in Silicon Valley- they pay better than average, but when you factor in all the details (long commute, high prices for everything, decaying infra) it's not really a premium.

I seem to recall that at one point Microsoft guaranteed to match Google's offers, because Google had clearly figured out how to hire the best engineers.

It certainly doesn't seem that way now, unless there is a massive skew in titles (maybe an L4 at Google is given Senior Engineer 2 at MSFT or something?)

A L5 at Google typically makes more than all principal engineers at Microsoft (levels 65-67)

Lol that explains my interview with them.

> the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lots more that you enjoy every day

Just a reminder that outside of SV/FAANG (so, 99% of devs?) all of that is not even close to be a reality.

I've never lived in SV, but many many companies at least attempt to offer some of the perks big tech companies have come to be known for. It suddenly wasn't enough just to have free snacks and coke, companies started offering more free meals (if not every day), larger bonuses, better workstations or laptops, etc. It really did resonate out to the rest of the industry.

And how were the conditions 25 years ago for these same developers? Just because everyone doesn't get paid the same doesn't mean the overall compensation in the profession hasn't gone up.

I'm not sure how much it has relative to other engineering and arguably comparable professions more broadly. Maybe somewhat? But $100K+ as an entry-level in enterprise IT is probably pretty solid.

There are dramatically more software developers today in the US than 25 years ago. 1.6 million with a median salary (before benefits) of $109,000. So the field got a lot larger in terms of labor (2-3 fold depending on how you want to count it), while simultaneously paying so well - a particularly remarkable thing. Those jobs tend to come with good benefits as well, including nice health insurance (which is obviously extremely expensive in the US).

Granted, this is peak software developer and we're just starting on a downslope for the profession (both in the US and globally).

I partially agree; they did make a big splash with all of those benefits, but also Google excludes 54% of their workforce (TVCs) from these benefits. Its a bit of a stretch to say tech workers owe Google for these benefits at other companies. To me, they're a shrewd US corporation (not that there is anything particularly wrong with that) where I don't see a lot of "goodness".

Check out the movie AntiTrust from 2001 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

This showed the crazy perks before Google became the powerhouse.

The spoiling was already quite obscene during the Dotcom Bubble 1996-00. IPO valuations were directly related to the number of programmers in a company, so they did everything to hire and retain staff.

Wait - you guys get sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships?

I would say 2004 google (ipo) is very different from 2011 google (lary is back as ceo) vs now in terms of employee friendliness

Yea. Was there myself and so 'tis true

Reminds me of those old movies with a map of the world that is 99% the USA

Also didn’t Google engage in a wage fixing cartel?

Yeah.

thank you oh benevolent Google, for allowing supply and demand to set labor prices after the DOJ shut down your wage fixing scheme

Reply on news.ycombinator.com