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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.
It is very unfortunate this post was made by an Anonymous Coward. I would really like to know what alternate form of business operation they would propose to the existing corporate culture.
"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.
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.........
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.
I keep seeing comments about $7 per hour but I don't see where that number came from in the summary or article. (My skinny vanilla latte probably haven't kicked in yet.) Federal minimum wage is $7.25. California minimum wage is $10. Silicon Valley minimum wage is $10 to $14.
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.
That's largely a distinction without a difference. Your market value is by definition what you can convince someone else to pay you. Perception is a part of that. In most cases there is no objective way to value a particular set of skills.
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.
I see this a lot in the United States where a lot of people are rich but then you have crumbling infrastructure and a huge vagrant population.
FTFY - It's just not a California problem.
>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.
I often find myself in "slow periods" in between big projects - I'm not one of these "coasters" by any means (no real equity, and no sense from management that they couldn't throw a rock and find another dozen of me), but there are times when I'm not racing against the clock to meet some arbitrary deadline either. I do my best to use that time to learn as much as possible, so that when the inevitable crunch time comes back around, I'll be able to fall back on some extra knowledge.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
Says the unlucky sod
Your statement ignores the statistics of reality. My wife and I were raised in similar situations to you and now made it to the 1%, but we realize we are a statistical anomaly.
Your upper middle class family that has a kid caught with drugs or any of the other dozen stupid things kids do can afford a good lawyer and a clean record. They can afford the private tutor to make sure their kids gets extra special attention. They can afford foods that promote brain development, and compared to some people, food all together.
You, like my wife, probably had the Single Mother who actually cared. Some kids aren't as fortunate.
What about those poor chinese kids, or indian kids,
You mean the one in a million (almost literally) that have the opportunity to test well enough to go somewhere? How many 'average' Chinese and Indian kids will never travel to the US to get an advanced degree because they didn't place in the top 0.1%? The statistical likely hood of some average Joe from an upper middle class family landing in these positions is considerably higher than a random person near the poverty line of any background.
"They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days"
Working massive numbers of hours weeks is not normal. For a startup, yes...but once a company is out of the "get big fast" phase and actually making money, there's no excuse to burn people out and run the place like a startup. I know younger tech employees want to continue the college dorm lifestyle and live at work, but I dislike the trend of calling anyone who wants to work a sane number of hours a week "coasters."
Lots of big, successful companies have "Distinguished Engineer" positions and use them for different reasons, such as:
- To have a raft of smart people on staff, not necessarily to do nuts-and-bolts work but to provide top-level guidance to those who do
- To have a position that, because of the pay structure of the organization, is the only technical position that pays high enough to reward a technical person for things like inventing the company's cash cow products, etc.
- For vanity or bragging rights...such as having Linus Torvalds or Vint Cerf on your payroll
- And of course, to pay these people enough to keep them from jumping to your competitors
Distinguished Engineers are mostly accomplished enough that they don't really have to worry about finding a job. They're getting paid handsomely, and/or able to live off the crazy amounts of money they've made already. It's basically the prize for winning the meritocracy lottery. It's also the closest any of us techies will get to the level of a corporate CxO -- paid handsomely in cash, stock and free stuff by their primary company, plus getting the salary, perks and influence associated with "sitting" on a ton of other companies' boards. I wouldn't call them "coasters." I'd call them savvy!
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.
Just outta curiosity, do the Marxists have to succeed to see him swing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working and I have eight different bosses So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. So I just do the minimal amount of work not to get fired.
I disagree, but there's something in between what you guys are arguing about. A lot of people who were born "on the wrong side of the tracks" end up doing really well both because they overcame the bad influences of their peers AND because they were raised by someone who valued hard work and education and encouraged the child to do well in school. It's almost entirely parenting.
When you get up into the middle and upper classes, the children can generally see hard work paying off, both in their guardians and elsewhere in their neighborhoods. People growing up in the ghetto don't get that. It could be a long discussion when you get to a lot of the finer points, but people are a product of both their nature and their nurture (how much influence the latter has depends on the former - some people are more easily influenced).
I don't know where I'd be if I wasn't raised in a middle class neighborhood, but if I was surrounded by bad influences and parents who didn't care, I'm certain I'd be a lot less well off. But you are a lot more likely to succeed if you are a hard worker (even more than if you are just "naturally" smart), but it is definitely luck to be born into an environment that actually encourages hard work and education.
Some people still luck into great jobs, and some exceptional people can't seem to catch a break. But here's the thing - graduating high school is the single biggest indicator of success in the future (in the U.S.), but 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.
And let's be realistic in this discussion - we're not talking about Zuckerberg or Gates success, we're talking about being able to support yourself and your family with a decent lifestyle. That's the American dream was - only lately has it become being ostentatiously wealthy.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Whether I'm making a little or a lot (and I've done both), I can't stand having to be at a workplace with nothing to do. The time goes so slowly, and it's pure torture, particularly when I could be doing what I love: engineering.
I have seen people who slack on the job, so I understand they exist -- but I will never understand how anyone can handle doing that. You literally could not pay me enough to put up with doing nothing.
Our economic system requires that a certain percentage of people earn subsistence-level wages. Even if the entire population were highly educated and highly motivated, there would still be a not insignificant number of people making the least amount of money that the law will allow.
To say that a person's income is entirely up to them is such an extreme oversimplification as to border on a lie.
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.
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.........
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.
Right. No Marxist revolutions ever happened right? It was just the will of the people as a reaction to the Fascists.
Fucking idiot. Pick up a goddamn history book that wasn't written by some left wing lunatic.
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....
Other minority communities don't tend to have a culture of poor education and crime. Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.
Both of those could probably use some injection of cultural intermixing with more successful communities. Especially the southern rural whites. They're basically on a death depression spiral right now.
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
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.
"1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing."
Will not happen because CA voters locked down a ton of the housing market with Proposition 13, which in effect punishes you for moving around, and strongly incentivizes not to sell. And ironically, this was brought about by the smallest government policies you can imagine, a combination of ballot propositions (so direct democracy, no government involved in passing it at all) and most city councils voting down construction projects (NIMBY ftw!).
That's the sad part, it will take big government to fix this, because the local government has every incentive to NOT build anything.
I've occasionally been in positions where I didn't have enough work to keep me busy, and I hate it. It's more stressful than being overworked in some ways.
For example, I once started a new job, and almost immediately my supervisor went on vacation for a month. Before he left we went over the project I was going to be working on, and he figured I had everything I needed to get a good start on it while he was away. Well, I finished the whole project in two weeks. So I spent the next two weeks wandering the office and asking everyone, "Can I do anything to help you out? Can you give me something useful to do? Please?" Mostly they didn't, so I sat at the computer and played games. You probably think that sounds fun, but believe me, it wasn't.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Ah, the get-what-you-put-in-it reasoning. Luck is a much bigger part of succes than hard work.
Says the unlucky sod
Also says this very lucky sod. I have made numerous mistakes in my life, including flunking out of college for not attending classes and was still working as an assistant manager at KFC at the age of 24. I pulled my life back together in my late 20's and made a $150k salary by the age of 35 as a software engineer living in a Midwest suburb. Ultimately my own internal motivation pulled me out of my poor circumstances, but it would be ignorant of me to think the advantages of my birth weren't a significant enabler of my success.
The biggest factor is that while most kids get a desire to play/watch sports or hang out with friends from their parents, I got a love of learning from mine. They may not have done a good job of imparting respect for formal education, but they did make sure I knew the value of being educated. I was bought two different encyclopedia sets during my childhood (World Book and then Britannica), was taken to the library weekly, was bought Math textbooks when the speed of education in grade school frustrated me, and was bought programming books when I took an interest there. I had multiple computers as gifts before I was old enough to build my own, and was never significantly punished for taking apart family computers / VCRs / etc just to learn how they worked.
I was also born smart. There is an argument that my reading made me smarter, but overall I have probably had an easier path in life not through hard work but because of genetics. Even if it was my early reading which made me smarter, I enjoyed it so I still don't think I deserve much more credit than another kid who spent his time playing sports. It's not like I felt I was preparing myself for a future career; I just liked reading. That almost certainly has more to do with my environment or genetics than my own free will. Being smart has made many parts of my education and career far easier than most other people. It's not something I have necessarily earned but I certainly reap the rewards.
I also look like both a software engineer without being over the top "nerdy". I can easily just repeat the ideas of my female / minority coworkers during meetings and be given credit for them because I "look" more like someone who should know this stuff. When I explain my 20's to my peers I am more likely to be considered a Bill Gates type who didn't need college than a thug with no respect for authority.
I still had to work hard to get where I am, but no where near as hard as most people would have to if they made similar decisions in life. I am very gracious for the advantages I have been given, and for the opportunities I will be able to give my daughters. I just hope I will not raise them to be ignorant enough to deny their white upper middle class privilege.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke