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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.
"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.
"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!
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.