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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.
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.
...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?
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.
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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.
California law overrides DNC clauses for anyone but partners or equity stakeholders in a business. So you can't bar an employee from going to a competing business, but you can bar a partner from dissolving the partnership and opening up a competing company.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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.
Yeah, that's one. What do you think the odds are of the same thing happening to every Engineer at Google w/ aspirations of being a CEO?
Low, but that's not really the point.
The point is that if the engineers are paid so well that they no longer need their Google income, they're free to go try to become a CEO of their own mega-successful startup. Whether or not the startup is likely to succeed doesn't change that equation, especially if they're careful to avoid putting much of their own cash into it, so they are still comfortable even if their startup bombs -- as it most likely will.
Another Google-related example of this phenomenon, I think, is the now-discontinued "Founder's Award" program. It used to be that truly exceptional performers could win a Founder's Award which came with a huge cash (or stock, not sure) bonus... like $10M. The theory was that it was a way to convince people that they could become wealthy by staying at Google, rather than leaving to found their own companies. It was quietly discontinued, though, and the rumor is that it's because they discovered that nearly all of the winners took their big pile of cash and left to found their own companies. The sort of people who won the awards were exactly the sort of technically-skilled but entrepreneurial leaders who were well-suited to and interested in starting their own companies. Not giving them a big pile of cash might make them decide to leave, but giving them one pretty much guaranteed it.
So, I guess the ideal compensation approach for retention is to walk the line between paying them enough that they can't leave without taking a pay cut, but not so much that they become financially independent.
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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.