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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.
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.
There is no doubt that each of us gets a different starting block in life.
But that is life, it always has been.
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.
I've personally known people that started off with WAY less than I had, but they worked past poverty and neighborhood culture and became VERY successful.
Much more successful than myself.
I've also seen kids who have had natural smarts, and come from wealthy families, that ended up nowhere, poor and basically.....your $7/hr worker.
Yes, everyone gets a different starting block in life, be it wealth, family, physical and mental levels.....but it is up to the person to struggle and strive to make it through life.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
It's because, at least in CA, we like to spend tens of billions on high speed rail to nowhere, and billions of dollars on illegal immigrants, and then ignore the infrastructure that would actually benefit ALL citizens of CA...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I believe the OP was referring to poor Chinese and Indian kids that are already IN the US...
His point being, you don't seen other minorities, that may be poor having the same problems the black kids are having.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
if you live in an impoverished area and are not willing to move to where jobs are, you're relegating yourself to a pretty poor life, in general.
Our families are still unhappy that my wife and I moved far from them, but we make tons more than them, even taking into account cost of living. During the last recession jobs in our respective fields bumped all the way up to 4% unemployment in our area. We're back down to critical shortages of people in our fields now, where both of us could have another job within a month or so, should we find we need to change.
Jobs that don't exist where we grew up are paying us piles of money and we have an embarrassing number to choose from. I have no idea what we'd be doing back where we grew up, but it would probably suck, not pay a lot, and not come with meaningful benefits. A lot of people are amazed that we just left our families behind and moved, but I can't seeing not doing that, if there is so much opportunity elsewhere. We love our families, but if they want to live in the middle of nowhere in dying small towns, they're going to have to live there without us. Life is too short to spend it making bad choices because you're sentimental about your childhood.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor