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Inside the World of Silicon Valley's 'Coasters' -- the Millionaire Engineers Who Get Paid Gobs of Money and Barely Work (businessinsider.com)
Business Insider has explored what it calls the "least-secret secret" in the Valley -- "resters and vesters," or "coasters" referring to engineers who get paid big bucks without doing too much work, waiting for their stock to vest. From the report: Engineers can wind up in "rest and vest" jobs in a variety of ways. Manny Medina, the CEO of fast-growing Seattle startup Outreach, has been on all sides of it. He briefly was a coaster himself, and says he saw how Microsoft used it to great effect when he worked for the software giant. He has also tried to lure some "rest and vest" engineers to come work for him at his startup. Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.
They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls. "My days began at that point at 11 and I took long lunches," he laughs. "They didn't want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else. But you have to stand by while they bring people up to speed." Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, both within its engineering ranks and with its R&D unit, Microsoft Research. [...] "You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model." At other companies it's less about defense and more about becoming indispensable. For instance, Facebook has a fairly hush bonus program called "discretionary equity" or "DE," said a former Facebook engineer who received it. "DE" is when the company hands an engineer a massive, extra chunk of restricted stock units, worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's a thank you for a job well done. It also helps keep the person from jumping ship because DE vests over time. These are bonus grants that are signed by top execs, sometimes even CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. "At Facebook the 'OGs' [Original Gangsters] we know got DE," this former Facebook engineer said. OGs refer to engineers who worked at the company before the IPO. "Their Facebook stock quadruples and they don't leave. They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days," this person said.
If you didn't value school growing up, and you are an adult and not able to give more than $7/hr value to an employer, well.......you reap what you sow.
Sorry, the world does not owe you anything.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
How is being born on the wrong side of the tracks, or the wrong color, or to parents without proper connections, 'reaping what you sow'? What exactly was sown? This is exactly the kind of arrogant, snobbish attitude that needs to be addressed.
"And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Heaven forbid someone having a reasonable work-life balance in this day and age.
Still, for many I think this would be incredibly boring after a while. Still, there are golden sign-on bonuses if you are that strong and you need to be bought out of your current position.
The economy doesn't pay people in a manner commensurate with their skills or work product. They are paid based on other humans' interpretation of the potential value of said person's skills or work product, a not subtle difference. The means whereby this valuation is calculated are sometimes crafty and a lot of times stupid. This is why most people don't work very hard - they've already grokked this and don't feel it worthwhile to attempt to find the places where they might have to work to get more money. They are comfortable with what they have, apparently.
If you are making $7/hr, you aren't trying very hard to get involved with this scrum.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Please constrain your comments to the specifics of the post to which you are replying. The parent said, "If you didn't value school growing up". Now a person born a poor black child can do well in school. They can ignore the negative influences of the ghetto. It won't be easy. I wouldn't want to try, but it is possible (having work with individuals that did just that). Given that, what is your issue with the parent comment?
WTF, I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and raised by a single mother who did not have "proper connections" and worked retail jobs her whole life.
Im well into the 6 figures because I learned, used my knowledge, and bring value to the companies I work for.
Personally, I think it is the racist democrats who constantly push the made up narrative about how the poor black kids can not get ahead in life because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, are the wrong color, and have parents without proper connections.
Don't think it is a made up narrative? What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids, or arabic kids? Well they appear to be doing just fine.
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days."
Such a shame. Its as if a business shouldn't be run in startup mode or run-up-to-deadline mode at every possible moment, and people might desire lives outside of work and sleep.
We can't have that.
This quote is an example of how the concept of "fuck you money" arose.
So really your philosophy is to punish people for choices made when they were children? Or in many cases, for the conditions that they lived under when they were children?
I always find it a strange position, because if the world doesn't owe people anything, then you are not owed what you have. You are happy to accept societies help in making sure you hang onto your un-owed wealth though.
>If you start further back, it just means you have to try harder, and it is possible, you CAN see examples of this in life.
Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
People like OP honestly believe that a revolution is coming (and truth be told, they might be right, I'm willing give it a 50/50 chance these days). They also believe (painfully mistakenly) that if the revolution does come, that they will be spared because they gave a thought to the "poor, downtrodden, working classes" back before the shooting began. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), if Antifa gets some actual political traction and starts going door to door carrying out executions, they're not going to pay nearly as much attention to political affiliation as they will to what sort of car you drive. Zuck thinks he's safe because he supported Hillary. He'll be the first one swinging from a lamppost if the Marxists succeed.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
You really want to claim that this is their own doing and not mostly pure luck? For real?
Most of those that "make it big" owe more to random chance and being lucky than any of the "hard work" they put in. Of course it requires you to take an opportunity when it comes, no doubt about this, but saying that people who ain't rich just are lazy bums is one of the worst insults possible when their biggest fault is that they simply never had the lucky opportunity cross their way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Constrain to the specifics because the parent relied on a typical conservative cliche that doesn't even really give specifics? How about the specifics of all the institutional racism? How is that for taking issue with the parent comment?
Of note however is that many of the hardest working people are actually paid the least. You can certainly argue that anyone who has put in the effort to rise above minimum wage can do so, and I would probably agree that for certain individuals it's possible. For the average person it's not realistic however. Furthermore the fact is that there is a finite job pool, so while putting in the effort to advance yourself can pay off for the individual, there will still be a need for the people filling minimum wage jobs; so if everyone becomes more educated and skilled; it will still be the people who are the least educated and skilled who take those jobs.
Minimum wage as it is now is modern slave labor; it doesn't pay enough to reasonably support a single person never mind a family. As a society we should find it ethically unconscionable to force the kind of living conditions many minimum wage workers have to deal with. People need to eat though, so if the choice is working a really crappy job or starving, people will put up with a lot.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I've worked at a lot of companies in my career and some are fine with you doing a 9-5 so long as you get your work done well and on time.
This.
In my own companies, I never cared about how many hours my employees worked, or when they worked those hours (with the exception of positions that require coordination with others outside the company).
What I cared about was that deadlines were met and the work quality was acceptable. As long as that happens, nothing else matters.
When choosing where I want to work, I tend to look at this as well. If a company seems overly focused on "correct" working hour and durations, I tend to pass. I'm being paid for work product, not for how many hours I warm a chair. If a company doesn't see that, it's a strong indication that I'm a poor fit there.
The complaint is really that the economy has artificially low valuations for manual labor of the type humans do, and does not need to devolve into a self-righteous weenie-measuring contest.
I don't know anyone who argues that putting in the time to train up should not be rewarded, but in so doing we seem to have spawned a class of individuals who think everything everyone else does in the GED sector of the labor force is completely worthless and without merit. They fail to see that it is the humility of these people who clean their toilets and make their sandwiches which enables them to excel in their fields. These people don't go to work with the motivation that they can "do great things"... they don't get any of that ego-nourishing fluff. But they put their backs into it anyway, often breaking their bodies over the long term in ways much worse than carpel tunnel syndrome or the back problems from sitting all day.
In many cases these people are looking to better themselves and escape from these thankless occupations, but are kept in their place by the perpetual catch-22 which is capitalism's calling card: you don't have enough resources to get enough resources to improve your life.
Meanwhile the highly educated elite essentially do the moral equivalent of putting the cherry on top of an ice-cream-sunday that someone else scooped into the glass, the glass that someone else washed, the ice-cream that someone else made from the milk that someone else farmed, and these cherry-placers declare to themselves and the world "look, I made you an ice-cream-sunday."
Someone had to do it.
Absolutely yes people should have to LIVE WITH THE LIFE THEY HAVE LIVED.
I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them. Then they want to complain about the pitfalls of living that lifestyle and expect the government to put them on par with me once they figured out they don't want to live with the consequences. Fuck that.
I didn't/don't get to "call in sick" (as in fake sick), I don't get to take random thursday/fridays off with little notice to make short vacations or just hang with friends. I spent summers and lots of free time to be where I am today and to take that away from me because It was in a time past is bullshit. Everyone wants to be forgiven for past mistakes and look forward to a bright future but the fact is the past matters. I am NOT OWED what I have but I have earned peoples FUTURE trust and respect because of my PAST performance and the skills I possess. If you don't have a positive past with tons of knowledge and smarts then why should people treat you as if you have things you don't have. I am not "owed" anything. If no one wants what I have worked to build - I get screwed. Tons of
These asshole minimum wage workers that complain have no fucking clue what it is like to have real responsibility. In another life I would trade a blue collar "livin' the life" to what I have now even though I am making 5x as much. Having free time can save you a shit ton of money too... home cooked tenderloin steak $5-10, restaurant tenderloin steak $50 - $100+. I only make 5x as much and after taxes, probably 4x as much so having free time can actually allow me to eat better for less money.
That kind of bullshit is exactly what's wrong with America.
"If you didn't make good decisions when you were at an age where your brain is not developed, and everyone makes shit decisions all the time, then you're fucked" is just not an acceptable statement. Especially this applies when most of the people making those bad decisions are living in a home where their parents just don't give a shit, and never point out to them that school actually matters (or anything else for that matter). They're often living in a home where they don't even actually have a real bed, and hence doing this on shitty amounts of sleep. They're often doing it in a home where there's a very real chance that they'll get the shit beaten out of them, or have to witness the shit getting beaten out of someone they care about. They're often doing it in a home where there's a good chance that they won't eat.
The level of stress that the poor are under is huge, expecting a 12 year old, with an undeveloped brain to make a good decision that affects them for the rest of their life is ridiculous. Then telling them "well, you made your bed, lie in it" and giving them no assistance is even more so.
That doesn't mean governments (or private organizations) can't lend a hand. Daycare, for instance, can be invaluable to parents struggling with multiple jobs. I am all against hard-handed legislative hammers and think the "war on poverty" has mostly been a waste of time and money. But people tend to take it too far where any government action, even mostly positive ones like subsidizing daycare or giving health insurance to poor children, are cried out as "government intervention bad!!!!".
Look how they defunded SNAP recently....
I don't know that the valuation is artificially low. I think, in this particular case, the market is pretty efficient at pricing out the relative value of cleaning toilets vs technical work.
The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not. If one person does work that sells to the whole world and the second person does something that's valuable to maybe 10 people in the building, the valuations for the former vs the latter is obviously going to be really off.
Of course, the self-righteous can always come up with some conclusion of "you don't really deserve that!". People on all sides think that, rich or poor. But that ignores the need for practical, not-subjective ways to improve people's lives.
I spent my youth and college years bettering myself. Working the summers for experience and studying when not working. Then I immediately transitioned to a full time job and worked my ass off. You then expect me to feel sorry for someone who spent that time partying, having a grand time, taking copious mini-vacations and partying on weeknights because their job doesn't require much of them
No, we expect you to "feel sorry for" the people who also spent their youth and college years bettering themselves, but did not have your luck.
Because those people vastly outnumber the ones like you who did get lucky.
Want an example? My career as a software engineer exists because I graduated college near the beginning of the dot-com boom with a degree that isn't directly related to computers or software (still a science discipline though). Companies were desperate enough that they gave me a shot. By the time the dot-com bust happened, I had amassed enough experience for my degree to not matter much.
If I had been born 5 or so years later, I would have graduated into the bust. And that would have crippled my ability to start my career, most likely to the point where it could not have happened - it's not like I could afford to go get a second degree in CS and still eat.
That difference has nothing to do with working hard. It is luck. And I'm absolutely sure delving into your history you could find examples where your current situation is dependent on a roll of the dice. That friend/acquaintance who gave you an internship or other start. The cop who let you off with a warning instead of planting evidence. That time a close relative did not get sick and need you. And so on.
The Calvinism behind the philosophy of the US, where working hard means you will succeed, has a giant flaw: It ignores luck. Largely because acknowledging the affect of luck requires admitting that it's not all about hard work. Sometimes the hard workers get screwed. And sometimes the successful are handed their success with minimal effort.