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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.
"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.
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.........
"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.