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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.
"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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.