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What Happens To Google Employees When They Die?
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes Magazine reports that employee benefits of Google are among the best in the land—free haircuts, gourmet food, on-site doctors and high-tech "cleansing" toilets are among the most talked-about but the latest perk for Googlers extends into the afterlife. 'This might sound ridiculous,' says Google's Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock, 'But we've announced death benefits at Google.' Should a U.S. Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade. Even more surprising, a Google spokesperson confirms that there's 'no tenure requirement' for this benefit, meaning most of their 34 thousand Google employees qualify."
My company offers insurance benefits too, but they don't pay all of the cost.
This is mere marketroid speak for life insurance.
My company, in the finanacial sector, subsidizes almost-free life insurance (~$20/month) that pays out 5x my salary - which is more or less 50% over tens years.
Had they need of attracting talent, they could swallow that lously $20 and just market it as FREE MONEY.
Rise of unexplained deaths skyrocket inside the Googleplex.
That's subsidized by the company. Is this really news? It's also not what most financial advisors tell you to get from full coverage if you purchase your own, either. Standard is 10 years of full salary - a Googler can always purchase more to make up the difference.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
and it's part of social security here (of course you get to pay a couple EURs a month for the privilege). But I guess this over-the-top socialist expropriation of financial assets doesn't resonate with the you folks across the ocean... but it does qualify for a good bullet point in the "benefits" employment contract section. Yep, us european are decadent spoilt brats... :P
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Don't most big companies offer a retirement package that give money out for the life of the spouse?
Sure it will not kick in as quickly as this or offer 50% unless you have paid into it for a long time, but a decade is far to short.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Like many people, I too wonder what happens after death, even to Google employees. Do they go to Heaven or Hell? Do they get uploaded to the web? Do they just expire? Inquiring minds want to know.
One thing is for sure, the dead people don't get money from Google because Google is giving that money to someone else.
When benefits (such as health care and pensions) are subsidized by the taxpayers, it makes sense for a company to provide those benefits. But for things like life insurance, where the company bears the full cost, it makes little sense. They should just pay the money to the employees, and let them decide for themselves what to spend it on.
Google could have this benefit in lieu of paying for policies that pay a multiple of the annual salary like some other companies have. Or they could have policies on the employees that pay Google 10x the salary and they're sharing 50% of that as the as the primary benefit, the remainder funding the benefits for children that carry on until they're 19 (or 23)
What's interesting is that the article says the 50% pay benefit is for spouses or domestic partners, doesn't mentioned beneficiaries. If that's accurate then single employees don't have the same benefit paid out to anyone. That would be different than an insurance policy where you can designate the recipient. The article says that this company benefit would apply to most of their 34k employees, but that would only be the case if most of the employees had partners and/or children.
That's essentially a company-paid life insurance policy of 5x annual salary (slightly less, actually, since it's annuitized). When I worked as a call center grunt shortly out of college, we were given a 1x annual salary term life insurance policy paid for by the company. With an option of paying something like $0.35/month for 3x annual salary term life insurance.
This is really not the crazy-off-the-wall benefit that it's being made out to be. It's good, to be sure, but not unheard of.
Ten Google employees die under mysterious, yet seemingly unrelated, circumstances.
Recommended to the spirit in the sky...
1. Marry someone at Google.
2. Hire an assassin.
3. Profit!!!
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
"but the latest perk for Googlers extends into the afterlife."
To extend into afterlife, they would have to do something for you after you died. For example, if they sent you a new Android phone each year into paradise (or hell, should you go there), that would be an extension into afterlife.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They are all uploaded to the Cloud.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I'd suspect that the average age of an employee at Google or most tech companies is so low compared to the rest of the business world that they expect to rarely pay out anything. If most of their workforce were expected to stick around till retirement age and it would actually cost them significant bucks due to natural causes versus accidental causes, I doubt they would be offering this benefit.
Just my cynical 2c worth
I work in the IT wing of a bank. My pay is around 50k and if I die my wife gets 350k plus gets half my pension for the rest of her life.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
While sounding somewhat good, this also has a potential downside.
What I am saying is - if you are working for Google and you have a spouse, make sure they don't want to see you dead, because all of a sudden this may become a lucrative enterprise. I mean, there is clearly a well defined step 2 in the: step 1, step 2, profit! scheme.
You can't handle the truth.
More Google employees dying of mysterious causes than microbiologists. More at 11.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/end-of-life-financial-study-0803.html
Most Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets. Typical life insurance pays less than $250,000 and hardly anything outside of government employees get pensions anymore. Even then, pensions aren't safe as several have been wiped out due to the 2008 stock market crash or through bankruptcy. 401k personal retirement funds are the norm or most people and they have tax benefits along with 25% - 100% matching funds from your employer but more and more people either cannot afford to pay into them or are actively borrowing against them. After 2 years of unemployment, my 401k is empty.
I am 40, employed with a very shaky job at $35k less than I was making before and no retirement, no health care, and am racking up debt to pay for more college as I try to get a masters degree to be more employable. My plan is to GTFO of the US and go some place where quality of life is the focus and not on corporate profits... Mars, maybe?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Just because it is not mentioned in the article, it does not mean it does not exist. 1000$ a month for all child benefiicaries. Some tuition payments are there. What I don't know is, if this is in addition to the standard group life insurance offered at most companies. Typically 3X to 5X salary for between $10 and $25 a month. Typically capped at 1X = 50 to 75K. If it is in addition, it is great, but again worth about 20$ a month. If it is in lieu of, then meh, INBD.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
walmart used to have KeyMan insurance on most of there workers and they got sued as they did not pay out.
Now Google is at least paying the family's but they still may be a some risk under the law and having it on all workers may also be breaking the law.
They mention `Google`, one of the greatest tech companies in the world
and 'check' in one sentence.
FWIW: in other parts of the world we do payments via electronic means all over the continent at lower cost and at quicker speeds.
Why didn't an ex-Googler work on the check-problem yet?
Another potential unintended consequence is that Google will choose to hire younger as opposed to older people. Either that or older people will get lower wages offered to them. More cancer victims will apply for Google jobs (relatively to other companies)? Or will terminal patients be let go (since they can't probably can't work for an extended period of time).
Overall, the benefit seems dubious, as it is a benefit-in-kind and also it is deferred.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Thus is A.I. They simply reincarnate as 0s or 1s and continue taking over the universe.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Great idea. After all, when you die your kids (for example) suddenly no longer require food.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
'This might sound ridiculous,' but suppose the marriage/domestic partnership is in trouble. Suppose the Google employee intends to leave the significant other. Given the decade 50% salary death benefit, isn’t the significant other incentivized to expedite the Google employee’s death?
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Everyone's life insurance/AD&D/long term disability benefits provide the same thing for around $10/paycheck and there is usually a base level provided at no extra cost. The biggest news here is that Google is apparently developing its own reality distortion field.
Google has already chosen to hire younger people, and that is why this benefit looks affordable to them now.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They just terminate and stay resident.
Benefits won't pile up - they have a ten year limit and only apply to people who die while employed. That's very different than pension/health benefits that pay out for years after retirement (so you can't even get out of them by sacking your current workforce, since that triggers them for your current workforce).
They aren't a mining company or some other industry with above average worker death rates, they can just drop the benefits once their workers age enough that the payment probabilities get too high. I doubt (though could be wrong since I can't be bothered checking) that google's employees are unionized to any great extent.
Not sure if they still do, but in the 90's, Microsoft self-insured employees (administered by Aetna, though). Makes a lot of sense when you have a young, largely healthy workforce.
In my evil socialist european country, the surviving spouse gets 100% for the rest of his/her life.
+1
I suspect Google has simply taken out insurance policies against all their employees for between 5x and say 10x their annual salary. Given the likelyhood that few "googlers" will die in a given year, the cost is probably pretty minimal to Google.
Am I criticising them for doing this, heavens no, but this is something the average person could probably set up themselves using life insurance.
Ten years of half pay equals something less than 5x annual pay, given the time value of money - maybe about 3x base salary in death benefits?
What is the real cost of 3x base salary for most employees? Not that much - but how many have such coverage? Not that many I suspect.
The "news" is that Google is doing what a good financial planner would suggest YOU do.
Ken
I said 35K LESS. I used to make 80K. I also have all the debt of someone at that level (about $1400/mth just in debt). A typical Googler pay is around $125k plus. They are at the top of the pay scale. So 50% for 10 years would be $625k PLUS whatever life insurance they had. At that income level I would expect at least $1 million.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I think my missus gets 3.5x my salary as a lump sum.
Makes me wonder when I see she has "innocently" abandoned a pair of her shoes at the top of the stairs..
Most large companies self-insure health benefits in the US. It's not unusual at all; it makes the benefits cheaper; as an added bonus, they become governed by the rather loose ERISA law instead of the (usually stricter) regulations of 50 different states. I'm sure there are other advantages, but you'd have to ask an accountant what they are.
My company does this; they hire an administrator to handle claims, but the funding to pay said claims comes direct from the company's coffers. Why pay an insurance company to assume risks you can easily cover yourself? No matter how sick I, my or any of my colleagues, or our families get, we are unlikely to pose any acute financial danger to a company pulling in $B/quarter.
There is no such thing as a "standard" amount of insurance. Any financial adviser that says such a thing is either lazy (because he doesn't want to calculate your actual insurance needs) or lying (if you don't really need ten years of coverage) or both.
How much insurance SHOULD you get? Enough to meet the reasonable financial needs of your heirs that cannot be met because of your missing presence and salary.
A single person with no dependents can get by with minimum coverage; enough to cover his/her funeral and "wrapping up" expenses. $25-50k would almost certainly be more than enough.
A sole-breadwinner with a large, young, family, may need a policy for 20 years or more of income.
(And although you didn't mention them, I won't even get into how ridiculous whole-life policies are for the majority of people, yet they are very popular with many "financial advisers".)
For myself, the 2x pay that my employer provides free of charge is more than enough. My wife is perfectly capable of doing just fine, financially, without me, and vice-versa.
"What Happens To Google Employees When They Die?"
They become dead. Next question.
Oh, its actually an article? Well then, it should read: What Happens When Google Employees Die?
Considering it's supposed to be an article instead of a thinly veiled slashvertizement, I still say it's all hogwash; Totally just hypothetical conjecture. No one really knows what will actually happen until we test the hypothesis.
Murder?! NO, Science!
They go to the big Cloud in the sky.
Thanks, I'll be here all day. Try the fish.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Where are those mod points when you need them?
That's so stupid I doubt you work for Google
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
What happens if an employee changes his spouse/partner, doesn't record it and dies? What are the implications? What about a person who declares more than one current partner (as some sects might)/ How will the distribution be? OK