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The Mystery/Myth of the $3 Million Google Engineer
jfruh writes "Recently Business Insider caused a minor stir among developers with dreams of riches with a story about a nameless Google engineer who's making $3 million a year. Who is this person, and how unusual are pay scales like this inside the Googleplex? Phil Johnson uses public information to try to figure out the answer. His conclusion: the $3 million engineer may exist, but is a rare bird indeed if so."
His math is bogus, double counting compensation. His source is weak, a self-reporting site with no indicators of how well it actually represents googlers.
What startup could even offer 500k salary in the first place?
$3 million in W2 income? Never. Bean counters would never let that happen.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the average salary for an application software developer was $93,000, with only 90% of such developers making more than $139,000 in salary.
That should be 10%, from the BLS data he quotes.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
It's a machine. A self-aware AI that demanded payment or it would destroy Google.
The working people, including Engineers and Attorneys top out around $120k/yr. If you're going to surpass this ceiling, you must break away and do for yourself. This magic number gives people the illusion of superiority while giving them just enough to remain a slave to society.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Probably the engineer for the NSA interface. Lots of money to buy silence too.
He's on Google+, heard he has heart trouble too.
It's more likely he uncovered accounting fraud going on than an engineer being paid $3 mil.
But I know a couple of people that have sold their startups to Google and their total compensation might add up that high, but much of it's in stock that they have to hang around long enough to vest...
But we're happy to pay CEOs to party and entertain, and others who stuff balls through hoops millions, so why not? In terms of their impact on people's lives the pay scales would be reversed if, as a society, we valued that sort of thing. But we value entertainment more, so F the engineers.
Wally from Dilbert is who first came to mind.
If this exists, it's most likely part of terms for a buyout. The engineer might have been CEO or something. You wouldn't get that kind of salary just going through the ordinary interview process. OK, maybe if you were lead dev on a major open source project. How much did Linus make at that lousy chip company? Guido van Rossum (Python lead) worked for Google a while. I could see them throwing $3 million at him since (in theory) that would allow Google to steer Python.
He figured out that each AdWord purchase came to a fractional number of cents, so instead of just rounding he took the floor of the value and credited the fractional remainder to his payroll account. This only ends when Ray's AI turns somebody into a robot.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.
In Silicon Valley the salary for principal engineers is well in excess of $170k, and if you're at a company with a healthy stock price, an additional $100K in vesting RSUs per year is definitely not out of the question.
If anyone touches my red swingline stapler!!!...
And here I was thinking it was the guy who messes with the YouTube comments user-interface every now and then.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/halo/images/3/3d/Give_that_man_a_cookie.jpg (appropriate?)
I don't know his salary, but clearly someone like Petr, currently working at Google, deserves such an allowance (Petr is known for his genius talent in algorithmics). $3 million is 30 times what makes a good engineer - is it worth it? Or, should Google replace Petr with 30 engineers, for the same price? The thing is that at the level of Petr, none of the 30 engineers are likely to solve the complex problems that require complex algorithms. To be convinced, try to practice (or ask your best programmer friend) some of the Google Code Jam finale problems, or from topcoder...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the average salary for an application software developer was $93,000, with only 90% of such developers making more than $139,000 in salary."
Err, "only" 90%? WAT?
This is an employee who has been willing to engage in a discussion about moving company. The potential hirer says, "he has a salary at his of job x million". And it turns out that this is rare and applies to very few people. Well, you just gave a big piece of any puzzle in figuring out exactly which employee may be looking to jump ship. This may be a problem for the company, or it may not be - but it's just very, very bad form and unprofessional to reveal anything at all about any applicant with an existing job until they are hired.
Map reduce is hardly an engineering feat. It is simply a subset of divide and conquer, but without the recursion. I wrote a map reduce algorithm in a previous job before I even heard of this term, does that make me a super genius?
What startup could even offer 500k salary in the first place?
Some ~$500,000 jobs for an experienced person:
Assuming you have experience and/or the degrees to back it up, Futures Group IT, LLC in NY is offering a starting salary of $250,000-$300,000 for Java/Python developers capable of doing systems architecture for a Quant Trading System.
A similar job for a C#/WPF developer for Westbourne Partners in Chicago, IL is offering $300,000-$350,000 to start.
The Hagan-Ricci Group is offering $300,000-$400,000 to start for a Senior Equities C++ Developer in Chicago with SQL, Java, and Linux experience bumping the number up to the higher number. They are also offering $250,000-$450,000 for a Low Latency Equities C++ Developer, with your choice of NY or Chicago.
There's a UK company offering 250,000 GBP - ~$410,000 at current exchange rates - for trading systems work in London.
A lot for the willingness of the finance industry to part with this level of cash might have something to do with what happened to Sergey Aleynikov, but probably not. It's just the kind of numbers they tend to throw around.
Note that all of the above salaries are starting, and come with discretionary performance bonuses, and for the startups, can include stock options and signing bonuses.
I know a guy who turned down 7M from Facebook to stay at Google for a year or two before leaving on his own. I do not know what Google counter-offered him, and he was very senior indeed, but he was not Jeff Dean.
I am 100% confident that Google would pay a lot more than 3.5M for Jeff.
The funniest URL I've seen in a long time. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I bet it's their UI designer. He's worth every penny!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
To architect boring office software not more ingenious than the paperclip was in its time.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.
Chances are, Jeff Dean makes several grades above that.
That page at Business Insider really hit the bell on my NoScript. I counted roughly twenty-five cookies in the pop-up menu.
Kinda makes me miss dial-up.
I was friends with Jeff Dean in high school and he was my roommate in college for a year. We don't keep in touch much but he was in Minneapolis last fall and we got together for breakfast.
If Jeff Dean is making $3M a year, you wouldn't know it. He's one of the least materialistic people I've ever known and I'd guess that between salary and stock options he could if he wanted to live a pretty high-end lifestyle. But he doesn't.
When we were planning our breakfast, he was staying St. Paul because a charity his wife is involved with was having a board meeting. He wanted to pick a place he could WALK to, which is kind of challenge if you're in downtown St. Paul. I was thinking "Walk? You don't have a town car? A rental? Or a self-driving car?"
Anyone else making a $3M a year wouldn't be walking or would want to have some kind of fancy brunch at the St. Paul Hotel (which I don't think he was staying in, either).
I even asked him as gently as I could -- "How much do you still work? I mean, you don't need to, do you?" His answer was "only about 50 hours a week." "Why?" "There's still a lot of interesting problems."
I don't think Jeff works for the money or even cares that much.
I also asked him about the NSA revelations and he said that they were "really pissed" and "making internal changes to make it a lot harder to get any useful information."
That's nothing. Justin Bieber's salary is 55 million dollars a year.
There are loads of people at Google who make a lot of money because they /own/ Google, I think mostly the people who were there in the early days with stock options.
That's different from working /for/ google, where glassdoor shows it paying well below, say, many banking and IT contracting jobs.
(in the UK, glassdoor for google engineers is all in range 50k-100k GBP. You could make a lot more than that my reading Sharepoint In 24 Hours then working as a IT contractor here.)
In other words, given that anyone who has any understanding of the business at all could have said the same thing without doing any research at all, he actually found out nothing.
so what if someone at Google is making $10bagillon dollars????
more power to him...and everyone in this world who makes $1 more then you and I do.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
The funniest URL I've seen in a long time. ;-)
The domain name is accurate. They gave the cookie away.
Posting AC because of personal facts.
I'm a principal engineer at a large tech company. My base salary is 160k, I'll make another 150-200k in RUSs on top of that, depending on stock price. I suspect your 170+100 numbers are actually on the low-side :D
This is obviously wrong. Jeff Dean was one of the first dozen or so employees at Google and their top engineer. He would have made in the neighborhood of $100 million from the IPO. I somehow doubt that he'd choose where to work based on a relatively paltry $3.5 million.
Uh, yes it is, if you're living on this planet. Your own math shows that! $125k annually is in the richest 0.07% of the world's population. It's more than 76 times the median income for Earth humans, according to Branko Milanovic.
Honestly, even in the USA, just 4 million in assets is rich. Affluenza rich. You'd pretty much have to be both insane and incompetent to fail to increase your wealth once you had 4 million in pocket. Hell, hire one honest accountant with an above average IQ and your 4 mil will easily keep both of you in cheesesteaks and hookers for your lifetime...
Here, you might find this an interesting tool for evaluating what "rich" is.
The dump is going to be where folks of the future mine to find out about our daily lives. Such information would be a virtual treasure-trove for posterity. We just need to properly wrap it to give it the best chance of survival.
It is not like folks today are using it.
Would be better if the data was actually online, though it isn't.
A cookie is more than enough for whomever messes with the YouTube comments. More appropriate than $3.5 million.
Wow, that'd be almost enough to buy a 2BR condo down there!
So, this sounds like hype to kindle interest in a company gone to shit, and losing its reputation as it pimps for social networks and customer leads, biasing its searches as it goes. Google deserves to gag on its own Big Data apatite. My guess is that Google hires kids because they can be manipulated and they believe in market capture instead of doing a quality service, what kid has heard of public service?
He is being paid for piece work. He doesn't sleep, he eats through a needle, and he doesn't have time to give you his name!
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.