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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.
I just can't do it. It's unfathomable. I don't blame the engineers, why wouldn't you do it if you could? But the corporate culture in America must be brought down. It's evil and must be stopped at all costs.
This seems like a good idea. So many companies are foolish and instead of paying for people to stay, they let years, sometimes decades of knowledge walk out of the door to replace them with someone who is cheaper but far less productive. I've watched it happen multiple times at my company over the last year, its mindboggling. Company is now spending way more as other people have to learn and fill in the missing knowledge and domain expertise. Would have been far cheaper just to give those people large raises.
Also the concept of using vesting stock options to hold on to people isn't new, it's called golden handcuffs, but I guess the new part is it being applied to top software engineers instead of executives.
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. Others such as a certain investment bank I worked at were more interested in appearance than output - if you left at 5 they thought you were slacking even if you did twice as much work as the guy who spent most of the day surfing the web but left at 7pm. Sadly this shallow management mentality ended up with me in front of HR despite me closing more bug tickets than almost everyone else in the team. With that kind of small minded mentality its no wonder they couldn't keep the best for very long and IT was populated by people with little coding talend and no life to speak of who didn't mind spending 12 hours a day at their desk.
My nephew worked for one of the mortgage companies that was so instrumental to the economy going bust prior to the Great Recession. He routinely handled paperwork for $1M or less in mortgages, like so many of his coworkers. However, there was an older gentlemen who sat at his desk and read The Wall Street Journal all day long. The paperwork he handled once or twice a month was for $10M+ in mortgages.