(More seriously, I'm again going to suggest that employers should develop a football transfer-style market for programmers, along with football-level salaries)
Actually, the closest existing analog to that would probably be Game Dev Tycoon.
As part of this hypothetical game you would have to develop technology, by building research centers and creating (sorry, I meant recruiting) Data Scientists and Engineers.
As the player keeps expanding, he would pass from the "mvp age" to "seed round age", then to "series A", "series B", "series C", until they get to the holy grail age of "IPO".
But as with any good RTS, the player would have to compete with other players. This will mainly be in the form of a priest^WCEO which will travel to the other startups to 'wololo' Engineers and DataScientists so that they work for him.
Another interesting option will be, the "secret agent", a guy (Eng, DS or Admin) who you can disguise as a unit from another player and leave in the middle of the enemy's Plex so that he believes that it is one of his units. Once the enemy player starts directing your 'camouflaged' unit you will be able to get new information about the adversaries.
Should make an interesting game haha.
There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low, and yet here we are with the labor movement trying to double down on a 19th-century solution to our 21st-century problems. The concept of organized labor is more beneficial today to robots than it is to Americans -- robots, and imports from developing nations.
We won't even get into all of favors the labor movement hasn't done itself on various topics, either, like union leaders paid executive-like compensation or the Teamsters' ties to organized crime.
I can't believe that we're on opposite sides of the teachers' union issue.
Moreover, they're probably the only employers in the county (maybe the whole state) and the entire business has ultra-long highly-scheduled hiring cycles -- none of this "can you start tomorrow?" business like you get in tech.
That is a recipe whereby good performance is not linked to good pay at all and has very high potential for abuse. Would you trust someone employed by that sort of a bureaucracy to evaluate your performance at your job? I'd prefer not to, myself.
So there are a few ways to approach this. Teachers could just sit there and take it -- you can understand why they don't care to do so, surely. We could structure the system to have a lot of objective evaluations to curb abuses -- an approach still fraught with many issues (standardized tests and certificates which fail to capture many of the most important aspects of pedagogy). As a final set of options, we could either try to ameliorate some of the worst of all this by restructuring the system to have more options and employers for teachers (charter schools, private schools, etc), or we could double down on the status quo while avoiding any evaluations on teaching whatsoever, leaving failing schools in place to ruin the lives of entire generations of students (blaming either Funding or Parents).
It is mostly in the choice of the last option over the penultimate option that there is a major problem -- teachers' unions paying dues to spend on the election cycle to elect union-friendly politicians. This means that the right sort of incumbent essentially gets to spend tax money on his own campaign, and it goes downhill from there into an orgy of corruption, power games, and detachment from responsibility -- aka "politics".
Average, possibly, but that's definitely low for certain sectors, eg workers on an H1-B visa. It also doesn't help when firms collude to make switching firms even harder, eg: when Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay agreed not to recruit each other's employees.*
To think organized labor is antiquated because the economy has moved on from single-company mining towns is naive. The simple fact is that corporations don't have your best interest in mind any more than you can claim you always have your employer's best interests at heart.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Li...
This is true. It also applies to the labor union, and to the government.
That reason is solely because those with the money and power started a huge smear campaign against organized labor, and tried to get people to see them as "moochers".
Yeah, it sure is great when I'm not allowed to adjust my own monitor due to union rules. Only facilities is allowed to do that!
Divide $14Bn net income by 53,600 employees gives about $260k. So GOOG could roughly double their salaries and remain profitable. Is that enough to overcome anathema?
Edit: the real thing is that athletes' past performance is very rankable - Moneyball etc passim. Winners are paid on an exponential curve. Programmer performance is not only not rankable, it's barely measureable and interviewers have to resort to silly tests. So it becomes worthwhile to poach people that have already been through someone else's FizzBuzz filter.
The nearest thing to the transfer market is the acquihire/acquishutdown.
That doesn't make any sense. If Google disburses that $14B Net Income as salary/bonus to the employees, the Net Income would be $0. One can't have it both ways, unless you illogically count that money twice.
Besides the issue of recategorizing "net income" as "employee expense", Google wouldn't have new money to invest in the business as an ongoing concern. That $14B can be used in future years to invest in driverless cars, satellites, global internet hot air balloons, acquisitions of other companies, or whatever ambitious plans they have.
Disbursing the Net Income to their employees means Google would cease to exist as a viable ongoing business.
One can also look backward and see why and how companies get formed in the first place. If angel investors and venture capitalists knew from the beginning that Google was going to disburse all Net Income to employees, they would have never invested $$$ in 1998 to let them grow. Angels and VC's are not charities and they want ROI -- because things like pension funds that utilize VC's want an ROI.
From that birth of the company, the chain of events continued: a big reason why Google has $14B of net income in 2014 is that they did not disburse the net incomes to employees in previous years 2013, 2012, 2011...2000. They were able to spend previous profits to build new datacenters, offer 1 gigabyte GMail accounts, acquire Keyhole maps, etc.
Yes, there should have been an "up to" in my previous comment. Obviously there is a tradeoff between investing retained profits, returning money to investors, and increasing staff compensation; that's what Ford v Dodge was all about.
I understand that you said it was a rhetorical question but I'll attempt to answer anyway.
To the mindset of Larry Page and the board, they are building the business by paying the $124m to those executives. They may be proven wrong but that is how they think. Those payments are not gifts. They are not a free ride to let the executives slack off. The compensation is to prevent key people from leaving and incentivize them to create additional value. This is another component of "building the business" and they would hope that $124m will multiply itself if the managers execute the business plans in a competent manner.
(Btw, I didn't downvote your posts.)
And they wouldn't be building the business by paying more for engineers instead of whining about H1-B restrictions?
Sure, they would be but like any business with a finite amount of money, they apparently feel they get more bang-for-the-buck by paying $124m to executives rather than divide that $124m as a +$3100 pay raise to all non-management employees.
They also feel that paying $124m to key people is smarter than reducing Net Income by billions to afford paying $300k/year salaries to all non-management programmers.
Google may be wrong with the above analysis but based on their actions, that's what they think. Like many other companies, it is implicit in their thinking that there is a law of diminishing returns if they pay much more in programmer salaries than they're already paying now. (Therefore, they think the bigger levers of growth is paying the management team to execute their business goals.)
Since we don't have multiple alternate universes to experiment which scenario would be the best, we can only approximate which profits-vs-compensation structure would be the most effective by looking at different existing companies.
Gravity Payments has a lot of recent press for setting $70k minimum wage. If they can compete and grow to be on par with, or beat other companies like PayPal, Apple Pay, Stripe, etc AND their unconventional salary structure is credited with making it happen, you'd have some evidence that Google Inc's compensation system is wrong. On the other side of the coin, when some observers see that founder David Price is giving up money to pay employees more, they would assume he does not have new business ideas that could use that money. It may be unfair to view it that way but it's a market signal nevertheless especially since another CEO like Jeff Bezos is reinvesting virtually all profits back into Amazon. The market thinks "Jeff has new ideas for putting capital to work; David does not."
[1] Though IMHO both belong in the "expenses" bucket, not the "investment" bucket.
No, what happened was 2 separate conversations took place because one topic morphed into another.
My original reply to pjc50 was over the formal accounting label of profits-vs-expense. His scenario of paying out the Net Income while still retaining profits is mathematically impossible -- unless you do Enron type of accounting. (pjc50 later clarified he didn't mean all of the $14B would be paid to employees.)
On the other hand, I interpreted pjc50 and your usage of "building the business" as a different topic that transcends accounting labels to talk about what's good/bad/effective/moral/whatever for the business regardless of what bucket it's in. In other words, I took a charitable reading and basically agreed that expenses for employees can also "build the business" -- I simply put it in a larger framework of business "priorities" because they have finite resources.
What right do we have to exclude people who aren't citizens?
We also have to look forward. Tech companies generate $500k per engineer even while those engineers are managed by idiots-- people who don't understand technology, don't value the wrong term, think "Scrum" is a good idea, and likely failed out of the mainstream business culture ("MBA culture") and are using the Valley as a second act.
Imagine what value the top software engineers could produce if they were managed well. And then imagine that software engineers would be even better at their job if major decisions were made by the right people.
This industry is running at 5% of its max potential, if that. Not only can we capture significantly more of the value that we create, but we can add substantially more value if we man up and learn how to take charge.
Really? Is that an American thing?
If you rank footballers by skill, and programmers by skill, I bet you dollars to donuts that on the same rank the programmer earns way more (in general) than the footballer.
Top programmers' salaries are just way less publicized than top footballers earnings.
Why would we need a transfer market? Would would we want our employers to capture that value?