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Google Rewards Employees With Millions
iseff writes "According to News.com, the Google guys created a program in November which rewards employees for outstanding achievements. The program gives the possibility of millions of dollars of stock to teams who perform great work. The goal of the program, according to Brin, is two-fold. First, it allows the company to reward 'genius', or whatever they see as genius. And second, it allows them to continue to hire all sorts of employees. According to the article, they believe that a recent grad who would like to work in a start-up will still be attracted to them because of the opportunity to create something great and be rewarded with millions (and without much of the risk associated with startups)."
Now that Ben and Darin work for Google....
doesn't firefox count as an "outstanding achievement" by any scope of the imagination?
Hey, at least they are redirecting their hoarde of gold back at the people who generated it instead of the execs.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the market...
Bubble II
Huge IPO.
Massive employee benifits.
Loads of hype.
Money flowing all over the place.
Zero profit.
Unproven business strategy.
Happy days are here again!
When the next fake boom collapses sometime around 2009 or so, will we all blame President Hillary Clinton for it, the way we blamed Bush for the one in 2000? Will GWB strut around bragging about the "balanced budget" projections at the end of his term which were based on the overly-optimistic economic conditions in 2007? Will the SEC do all kinds of hand-waving, arrest a few dishonest accountants, and try to fool us all into thinking we are richer than we really are once again, while both government and personal debt continue to chronically swell up?
Signs point to yes.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Is this anything new? At this point in time haven't most multi-billion dollar companies devised employee-incentive and bonus systems? Typically these systems are more downplayed though. It seems as if Google is doing a lot more waving of the carrot.
This confuses me a little. Why wave the carrot more?
Is the message that Google is prepared to pay *more* handsomely? Is employee retention difficult for Google? (Are they losing their good people to start-ups?) Is the message that Google is on the warpath for new ideas in the wake of Microsoft Search and therefore needs to wave the carrot more?
Or could it be that there's a little post-IPO depression setting in over there? (Maybe the vibe is that the party is over and the payoffs that were going to happen, already did).
Anyone?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
During my stint at a dotcom we got some exciting perks! First off was free lunch. Now when the company was less than 20 employees the catered lunch was pretty damn good. Then the company grew and the lunch budget stayed the same, so it became cold cut sandwiches every day. And if you decided to venture out in the pursuit of something else to eat - you got dirty looks from management.
Then there was the 3 month sabbatical program. Any employee who made their 5 year anniversary got to take a 3 month paid sabbatical. This was much hyped about in the local press - but then the company was only 2 years old at the time. I think one employee actually did get to take this - but the company exploded shortly after the five year mark.
Or the basketball games on company time - much hyped again by the press as showing how the company cared about physical health of it's employees and didn't want them just sitting for 80 hours a week (how altruistic!). Well, those ended when someone mentioned that injuries while playing basketball on company time were a liability.
On second thought, some Google stock doesn't sound too bad.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
This isn't anything new...non-glamourous companies have been doing this forever, but these "boring" innovations don't make the news.
Ever see a letter drop slot built into the side of a UPS van? That was the brainchild of a conversation between a driver, delayed by people handing him packages en route, and a mechanic, who figured he could just cut a hole in the side of the van. Since this idea ended up saving urban drivers 10-20 minutes per day companywide, the two of them split a million dollar innovation prize. They also got a tiny blurb in the company magazine.
Just because it's not on Slashdot doesn't mean it never happens.
It is good to reward the team that develope a key aspect of your product.
When all the other smart guys could not write code to do the job a friend of mine had a stroke of insight and wrote the entire code in day by himself (only a few thousand lines of code). They had been trying to develope the code for nearly a year. In this case it can be said he is truely the sole developer. In many cases it is a small team of 5-10 individuals.
They company promptly sold the code for $7 million later that year. His bonus was take your wife out and the company will cover the check. A good way to promote smart people to work harder. The smart people are smart enough to know when they have been insulted and leave. All you are left with is stupid people.
I am sure the senior executes recieved a much better bonus.
Needless to say if they would have rewarded him with say $70 000 he would have been happy and continued to work hard for years. At his current job the code he writes generates about $15-20 million a year in sales (but he is part of a small team of developers 50 individuals and equally as many sales staff). He is currenlty well paid and gets extra paid time off after each project (I think last year he had about 4 months off - partly because the team he works on got the project done 2 month ahead of schedule). He has no plans of looking for a job anywhere else.
Lesson learned:
treat your employees fairly and they will stick around. Treat your smart employees with respect and they will never leave.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Well, they'll get a good 4 years from you at least. They are using the classic "golden handcuffs" style of doling them out. The stock doesn't fully vest for 4 years. Who knows whether the stock will continue to remain worth the millions that is now anyway?
Try working in the public sector. Our management is so afraid that the public will see us getting a perk (and then vote down the next levy because 'those Hospital guys did a river cruise!') that the best we get is ice cream once a quarter.
It sucks.
Comment of the year
Actually, that isn't America. In comparison to other countries it awards Great Performers (whatever the market decides that is) quite outstandingly.Some people suggest, that there might be causal connection with the following table:Please note, before I am accused as communist, I don't want to force someone to pay someone less. I just want to suggest that the people think about it.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
according to the now unfindable by google ninetyninezeros blog, they don't pay all that well, they expect top 10% but only pay average salaries.
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/WRJ?subid=6578013
Insightful is still a pretty dumb idea. If you're going to use a different mod, use underrated. That doesn't carry any description, it just ups the score and (as far as I know) karma.
I love this in America... whatever you do don't reward the Great Performers, that's unfair because it makes me feel bad.
First of all, the parent didn't actually argue sypathy with the losers, it was a pragmatic argument about the net effect of such systems. There is some quite thorough research to show that the negative effects of bonus systems etc. can and often do more than offset the extra effort extracted (it may be possible to employ rewards well, but it is certainly not automatic). This may be less of a problem in this case though, since the stated goal was to attact startup-types, not to make your average office guy work harder. But ignoring the possibility as a matter of principle would be naïve and silly.
Secondly: Umm, what planet do you live on, where democratic countries that spread the rewards less than America does are easy to find?
You also, like many who argue laissez-faire capitalism, seem not to understand the concept of "degree". You make like it's either "winner takes all" or the straw man of not rewarding anything. I do understand the argument that if there is no reward people won't put in their best. I don't believe it's always quite that simple, but yeah, some dangling perks certainly can motivate at least some types of people. But sometimes it seems like you guys want me to believe that if the greatest realistic prospect was the get "just" a few thousand times richer than your neighbour, rather than, say, a billion times richer, everyone would just slack off all day. If you subscribe to that for even one second, you should be reminded in no uncertain terms that you are clearly working from conclusions and backwards, and not the other way around.
sudo ergo sum