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Engineers On Google's Self-Driving Car Project Were Paid So Much That They Quit (theverge.com)
According to a new report from Bloomberg, most of the money Google spent on it self-driving car project, now spun off into a new entity called Waymo, has gone to engineers and other staff. While it has helped retain a lot of influential and dedicated workers in the short run, it has resulted in many staffers leaving the company in the long run due to the immense financial security. The Verge reports: Bloomberg says that early staffers "had an unusual compensation system" that multiplied staffers salaries and bonuses based on the performance of the self-driving project. The payments accumulated as milestones were reached, even though Waymo remains years away from generating revenue. One staffer eventually "had a multiplier of 16 applied to bonuses and equity amassed over four years." The huge amounts of compensation worked -- for a while. But eventually, it gave many staffers such financial security that they were willing to leave the cuddly confines of Google. Two staffers that Bloomberg spoke to called it "F-you money," and the accumulated cash allowed them to depart Google for other firms, including Chris Urmson who co-founded a startup with ex-Tesla employee Sterling Anderson, and others who founded a self-driving truck company called Otto which was purchased by Uber last year, and another who founded Argo AI which received a $1 billion investment from Ford last week.
Remember kids, economics is not science.
Doing what a retarded 12-year-old can so.
If they were only quitting because of financial security there wouldn't be a single CEO still working in silicon valley.
More likely there was something wrong in the work environment.
That combined with lots of money means they will move on to more fulfilling things.
It's why daily documentation is so important. Any new engineers they hire should be building off the work that the first batch did, using their documentation that was PR'd.
If Google is actually screwed by this, then they're badly managed.
...as in Waymo than we should have paid them.
So the engineers met the goals that earned the money. Google presumably didn't randomly set milestones, so the things they wanted they got. Headline makes it sound like there was an "oops," but I'm not seeing evidence of it.
Also, with the amount of money being thrown around at anything involving startup+AI+"silicon valley," I'm surprised anyone still works at google. If Google hadn't paid them an absurd amount of the even more absurd money they have on hand, would they have ever gotten anyone competent to work on it?
Google will be screwed just because they suck at everything.
They say that all these engineers made "Fuck You" money, so they quit working on self-driving cars.... and promptly moved to other start-ups working on self-driving cars. I would make the case that clearly Google didn't reward them enough. After all, why would you leave the huge resources Google will throw at the problem in favor of going it alone, if not for the bigger payday.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
if someone at Alphabet is playing 5 dimensional string theory Mahjong and seeding the rest of the car industry with experts in order to make the future happen sooner.
He's an engineer by education and became a CEO of one of the largest corporation of the world. He happens to be one cabinet position I have some hope for even though I don't approve of Donald Trump. Tillerson will act based on facts and not emotion.
They went from Google engineer to CEO of their own company.
Employees stay when they are:
* Paid well
* Involved
* Challenged
* Appreciated
* Valued
* Empowered
* Chained to their desks
I'm surprised they didn't retain those employees via do-not-compete clauses in their compensation contract. It sounds like most of them took off to do the same thing they were doing at Google... which would be a blatant violation of a DNC clause.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I would like to say "F you" to Google, too. Should I? Is it safe?
A single person attracted by cash is a contractor or mercenary. In the same way people work for the US gov as a contractor. Its all about the cash until they have enough cash to retire or can create their own company.
Never allow your bands cash flow to be another persons life style enabler.
Don't hire single people. They have too much freedom to save and the smarts to think about the next job or their own project or brand.
Not just day dream like average workers, they can save and create their own job. Stop funding that ability.
When looking for staff, consider the people around the selected worker and what they need.
Would a selection of nice, local company homes in a good part of the city help? That really, really good private health insurance that covers everything, all the time with none of the expected questions? Private education? Holidays options that only a company with international connections can make happen?
Further education?
Project within projects to keep that one needed worker intellectually engaged. Have other staff create a project just for them. Avoid that sheltered workshop, busy work, side ways promotion feel, make the worker really think they are really working hard to something vital.
Drop in the reward, something really earned. Keep it random so the worker feels like they earned it and are moving up.
So the worker can tell people they really accomplished something none of their colleagues could or did.
Do such things cost a company a lot? Make the loss of that free lifestyle, support and needed health care be very difficult to rationalize to the people around the worker.
Cash is just too tempting to move on with given staff skill sets. Get that loyalty feeling up.
Another option is to show what trying to start a new job will be like.
Say a worker walks out.
Show what the outside world is now like, trying to start their own brand, how fast savings get lost on a dream. Still trying to find another company to work for or with...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Workers at the company where I used to work told tales of the early days working there, when the company was new and flush with investor money and new clients coming in left and right and there were no products shipping. They had to code all of it, which wasn't terribly hard early on.
Anyway, the early employees spoke of being wined and dined all the time, catered food brought to the office all the time, and of receiving massive bonus checks for doing essentially nothing. They were raking in so much cash, they simply called it Stooopid Money and went nuts with it.
By the time I started there, the bonuses were all gone and the parking lot was full of luxury cars as each employee had tried to outdo each other. We still got catered lunches occasionally. That was all. Just sad whispers of how much they used to make in bonuses.
Sig for hire.
They don't suck at everything; they just suck at managing. Its because they think their excellence in academia and theory means they don't have to learn from lessons in real life. They're constantly reinventing the wheel when it comes to business and human resource management.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Ruth Porat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Google to Pay New CFO Ruth Porat More Than $70 Million": https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
She's worth 10's if not 100's of millions of dollars and yet she's still working. This is just a salary bargaining ploy nonsense. That's why the article doesn't make any sense.
They are leaving because they know the product has very little chance of surviving competition and the level of liability is too high for all the problems the system has.
You can't stimulate talent with pay. Only repetitive work is stimulated by pay increase. As long as needs are covered, creative work is stimulated by protecting creative freedom, and by the clear understanding of the significance of the problem. See -> "RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think the real reason the engineers left is they basically achieved all the easy wins that got them money that they could. After that they left because without the bonuses they were on ordinary money for extra long hours and with probably no equity in the end product they wanted a better deal so they left.
When my Bonus Multiplier reaches 16x I expect to receive an extra ball. But then, I am old. Very old.
Rather it is the overall work environment.
From what I've read, and from the very few first hand accounts from Google employees I've heard, the work environment at Google pretty much sucks unless you are running a successful project (i.e. *THE* project leader). This is little different from being CEO of your own company.
Maybe the issue Google - like very many other employers needs to understand - is that the vast majority of people really do work to live, not the other way around. The idea that it's considered normal to do a 60+ hour week is just bullshit. All the free ice cream in the world doesn't compensate for that.
Someone is likely to lose their job for not getting noncompete clauses signed before this program went into effect.
Also, in SV you take the info you learn over time while collecting your pay and working with others to your new company and try to sell the new company for even bigger piles of cash. It works even when you aren't yet profitable and when you can't finish. Remember the dot com bubble?
This is the proof that, given financial security, people will work more, not less.
Google created innovative, exciting, productive environments that attracted top talent and took off. Then they decided they wanted to be something else entirely, lost what made them attractive to top talent and now they can't figure out why that talent is leaving. "Must have paid them too much"
Yeah, OK.
They didn't quit to go work somewhere else unless that "somewhere else" either paid more, or wasn't such a slave driver, don't be ridiculous. How many actually quit to just lounge away by the pool? Not many, I'll wager...
Everyone sucks at managing.