19 ms·

“Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

487 points by SQL2219 9y ago

lettersdigits 9y ago
> "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described. Is this really prevalent at Google? edit:quotes
- muzz 9y ago
  My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.
natch 9y ago
I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered to care. Not limited to Google of course.
zw123456 9y ago
Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead. I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting. Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.
- mavhc 9y ago
  Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the company to try and get promoted.
  - gorbachev 9y ago
    There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other. I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows. Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.
- technofire 9y ago
  One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.
  - gaius 9y ago
    What risk? What end of career? Maybe that's the theory but a failed CEO who destroys a company will cruise into another CEO job in practice... or even make a run for POTUS.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"It's a defensive measure." "That's Microsoft Research's whole model." ?
IBM 9y ago
This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost half of Google's and Microsoft's). The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement. I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do. >"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year. Called it a year ago [1]: >I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662
- aetherson 9y ago
  A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around, spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate it was after years of this kind of behavior.
  - IBM 9y ago
    I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common. I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2]. [1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-is-said-to-be-developing-a-curved-glass-smart-watch/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-oversee-car-project-1469458580 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-ove...
mklarmann 9y ago
It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a bit like gender bias.
YANT2017 9y ago
This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance. Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a startup in that regard. There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.
k__ 9y ago
Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient? They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. The conventional term for this is "up or out".
  - k__ 9y ago
    Yes, but why aren't other companies do this?
    - Applejinx 9y ago
      Because that's also a mistake: the problem there is, you cannot keep a person doing something they're optimal for if you need to continually promote them. One of the holy grails of effectiveness at doing stuff is having some comprehension of your boundaries. To categorically disavow even the concept of boundaries is catastrophically silly.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Up-or-out relies on a constant intake of new staff. You'll have to do a lot more hiring, and you're applying a pretty strong personality filter on the company. And as Applejinx says, the fact that someone isn't suited to the role above them doesn't mean they aren't suited to their current role. Up-or-out means tossing out the guy who knows his job well and is doing it well to replace him with someone who's never done it before and needs a training period; this is significant overhead applied to every job in the company.
- sjg007 9y ago
  No. The partner model is different. Tech companies are keeping talent on the bench. McKinsey and co turn over hardworking younglins.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
p0nce 9y ago
Sad to see tech giants not recapturing carbon with their unlimited money.
WalterBright 9y ago
I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth that much? An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent. Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  What was the XXX figure? It'd be interesting to know.
  - mac01021 9y ago
    I don't know, but "Surely you're joking, MR. Feynmann" contains an anecdote about a bidding war between Caltech and another university, at the end of which he turned down an even bigger offer in order to be at Caltech.
  - somecontext 9y ago
    Wikipedia claims that Feynman's first job after Los Alamos was at Cornell for $4,000 per year (~$54k/year inflation-adjusted). This claim is repeated in many sources, including the book "Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman". That book also makes the claim that in the 1960s (perhaps as early as 1960 itself), Feynman's salary crossed $20,000/year and that he was the highest-paid member of the faculty. Inflation-adjusted, that is at most $165k/year.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-( I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road. I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the right thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO. Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly. I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off. That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.
- madengr 9y ago
  I had $30k in Sun stock at one time; lost it all.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it. I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain! The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either. All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.
pixelmonkey 9y ago
One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work. It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance. In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines. Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense. Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance. The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly. These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt. It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well. And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade. But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?
- IBM 9y ago
  I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism. [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/antitrust-better-deal https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...
bane 9y ago
I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends. The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around. Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.
- RSchaeffer 9y ago
  >I'd structure my days very differently What would your restructured day look like?
  - bane 9y ago
    I think I would definitely put more effort into establishing clearer space/time boundaries between work and home. I live near a local library and might turn it into an office of sorts so that I have a place to go, people to interact with and so on. I'd definitely put more effort into making sure I'd wake up, shower, and dress for work during work hours and then stop at the end of the work day. Basically, better discipline, more delineation.
    - jdswain 9y ago
      I used to go out in the morning to a local Starbucks and do email and planning tasks plus also get some social interaction. That worked really well for staring the day with a clear boundary. At the end of the day I'd walk up to the train station (through a park) to meet my wife, so I'd have a clear boundary on both ends of my day. It worked really well while I lived there. Now I'm in a small town and it's a bit harder to do something similar.
rb808 9y ago
Google is sounding more like IBM every year.
- home_boi 9y ago
  Did IBM pay well back in the day?
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden [2] http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/ http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/
  - edoceo 9y ago
    Oh yes, glorious 80s
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Still does for the right positions. Research-directed ones pay exceptionally well.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    In the 80s and before IBM was THE place to work. Pretty much like Google or Facebook today. In the 90s they slowly started to cut retirement benefits and other perks and now it's not a great place to work at as far as I know.
freyir 9y ago
> "They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days" Worthless slackers.
- techsupporter 9y ago
  Edit: Never mind all that, I didn't get the joke. My apologies. In my defense, text doesn't convey emotion very well. Leaving up the post for my own shame. What, because they work 40 hours per week? I have a 4x10 schedule (including a weekend day) and I work exactly my assigned hours. The company is paying me for those hours and nothing more--exceptional circumstances excluded, of course--so I feel no qualms about sticking with that. I get to have a life outside of work, too.
  - thisone 9y ago
    I believe that was sarcasm
    - Zyst 9y ago
      I also got the same idea. I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all. Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all. Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.
      - tnecniv 9y ago
        It's just Poe's Law coming into play. It can't be avoided really. Hell, people can't decide if The Prince is a satire or not.
        sverige 9y ago
        The Prince is easy once you've read Discourses on Livy.
y_u_no_rust 9y ago
it's going to be fun watching all of this burn to the ground
cylinder 9y ago
All's good when the stock price is inflated. The reckoning (cost cutting) will come.
- tanilama 9y ago
  Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...
    - tanilama 9y ago
      Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the companies do.
- rwmj 9y ago
  Or maybe they'll entrench their advertising monopoly and perhaps gain a few more in driving cars and so on, and then they'll coast along as rentiers?
geff82 9y ago
Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.
- ashark 9y ago
  It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.
  - kentt 9y ago
    I agree, but there is something I just can't make sense of. I would love to just work my ass off for 4 hours a day but you won't get through any part of an interview if someone finds that out.
  - shostack 9y ago
    For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc. The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.
    - 9y ago
Swizec 9y ago
> she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it. > As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes. > after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.
- hendzen 9y ago
  Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    It says the stock was from a recent acquisition and the article context is about vesting. One can surmise her stock is tied up in a vesting schedule and thus illiquid for now.
  - lisper 9y ago
    It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.
    - Kiro 9y ago
      How?
      - lisper 9y ago
        Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago
  Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume. It can be worse, like being trapped making $8 an hour at some supermarket.
- 9y ago
capkutay 9y ago
These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services (mail, ad analytics, etc).
- scurvy 9y ago
  This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.
- hendzen 9y ago
  The fact that they have a the market position and capital to buy up human resources and waste them simply to keep competitors from being able to develop products goes to show that they are abusing their monopoly positions. Wouldn't it be better for the economy & society at large if these talented people were working hard at building new & better products?
  - ws_jl 9y ago
    Alas, the employee would have to act ultimately.
    - hendzen 9y ago
      People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?
      - sjg007 9y ago
        Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society. I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc... His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money. So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?
icelancer 9y ago
>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. This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.
NTDF9 9y ago
Reminds me of the common saying, "The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."
hendzen 9y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim the fat?
adamnemecek 9y ago
So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more than 1M a year are at each of these companies?
- thrill 9y ago
  And can they use one more?
- patio11 9y ago
  Thousands minimally; soon tens of thousands.
boulos 9y ago
There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different groups. Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant). Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing: > There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors. Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are normal for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?
- scurvy 9y ago
  At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"
  - yulaow 9y ago
    Well that's a profoundly sad and depressing answer, hoping to never end with that kind of thoughts
    - dsacco 9y ago
      It's a lighthearted joke.
jokoon 9y ago
I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.
- chillacy 9y ago
  That's definitely one way. I'm not sure if that happens intentionally at my company, but the severe lack of documentation lends itself to creating a culture where a select few who have been around for 5+ years tend to know exactly where to find everything, who to talk to, etc. And that's very valuable in that climate, even if they do little coding themselves.
- m-j-fox 9y ago
  I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between them, they could perform his duties, no?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - samsonradu 9y ago
    Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are quite good also, a very good speaker.
    - m-j-fox 9y ago
      Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.
lisper 9y ago
It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder. Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in 2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-) To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened. The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.
- js2 9y ago
  You don't want to know how many of your taxpayer dollars went to pay me for helping to shepherd purchase orders through the JPL bureaucracy. :-(
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Working the bureaucracy is often much more difficult than the engineering part. In my company the tech leads spend more on figuring out what documentation to produce and how to store it than either writing documentation or producing software.
    - js2 9y ago
      It was the OP who wrote he "spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it." I would feel all the worse knowing my pay was taxpayer funded.
loeg 9y ago
Where do I sign up for that job?
asah 9y ago
Can confirm. But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around. Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.
- antod 9y ago
  And for a rich company, I suppose keeping them around stops their competitors from hiring them a while.
  - aisofteng 9y ago
    The article explicitly mentions this.
    - antod 9y ago
      Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that reflects badly on me or modern journalism.
- zilchers 9y ago
  I'd also add, coming from a startup to a big company can be incredibly frustrating, and a lot of high performers can be quite demoralized by the bureaucracy and pace (even while they're being paid well to be there).
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  It's not nefarious, but it's clearly a money spent not optimally.
ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella. None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures. But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to. What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...
joejerryronnie 9y ago
Or, as a recently bought out/retired colleague remarked, "My job now consists of being home all day and trying not to piss off my wife" - a much harder endeavor than any engineering project I can think of.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  Sounds like love and respect are long gone from that "relationship".
  - frenchy 9y ago
    Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children, which makes things harder. They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company enjoyable.
    - pdimitar 9y ago
      I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?" People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out there.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        Are you really surprised that people can't get along when they re stuck together 24/7 all days? That's what happens when they retire.
        pdimitar 9y ago
        Surprised? Absolutely not. Even the greatest love can wither away if there's no diversity in the way a couple spends their life. Stasis is death, movement is life, applies to all areas of human life.
jaequery 9y ago
I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs. It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long that you have no idea what is going on and where.
seattle_spring 9y ago
I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.
- trelliscoded 9y ago
  I agree. I've worked with people who actually put in 8 hours of work a day on a regular basis, and it had a huge impact on my desire to get things done. Also, working with Germans.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think it's not only engineers. I know several people who are either corporate lawyers or other long-time managers who pretty much go to meetings the whole day because they have nothing real to do. They all are pulling good money but feeling like they are not doing much seems to take a psychological toll.
user5994461 9y ago
> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract. Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run than the reality.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
liveoneggs 9y ago
to all of the lottery winners out there- Fuck You > sincerely- > the wage slaves
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please not rant on HN? We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion here.
ghettoimp 9y ago
So working 9-5 is "coasting"...? Fuck you. I've got kids.
- avs733 9y ago
  I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s. If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.
kelvin0 9y ago
Legendary slacker story: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chin... Don't work hard, work smart :)
WalterBright 9y ago
There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life. I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.
- shoefly 9y ago
  I feel the same. I will stop coding when they nail shut my coffin.
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home-improvement projects that had been planned but never executed. "I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."
- jasonkester 9y ago
  I agree that having a purpose is important, but I disagree that that purpose should necessarily be work. I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot. You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year... Well, that seems like a better plan.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  For me retirement means not having to worry about income ever again, not to stop working.
shoefly 9y ago
This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  That's what I'm doing now. It's ok, but it's against my contract to get paid for those projects. So I have to give everything away for free, open-source! Sounds great, but that also means my marketing budget is zero. I can't find users. I've put in all this effort, but nobody knows about it, and it feels all like a waste of time. But you know, I still get paid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tanilama 9y ago
  Me too. Felt guilty, but I changed my job later. Cannot stand this.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
Why are programmers called engineers these days? An engineer has an engineering degree and does something completely different than computer programming.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Having interacted with various P.E.'s and been mostly disappointed with their work (seriously these guys are worse than architects as far as having creativity pointed only toward fuck-ups that the client would never want), I wonder why programmers/coders/whatevers even want to engage in this pretense. Why not call ourselves "code lawyers"?
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  It is the common use of the word engineer and not the legal one. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/engineer http://www.dictionary.com/browse/engineer
peterburkimsher 9y ago
Is it unethical to keep a chair warm when my boss didn't give me new tasks to do? For other areas of life (immigration), I need to get more years of continuous relevant work experience. I come to an office every day, but my boss just doesn't have enough to keep me busy. My job title is "Project Engineer", which is vague enough to cover everything from DLL debugging to Node.JS programming to network monitoring to evaluating Advanced Planning systems. The latest task is to do some online course in machine learning, even though he didn't specify how the company will need it. On bad days, I feel useless. But I reconcile the situation to myself by saying it's basically a "basic income" (the salary is not high; the minimum that people on my visa can have). I could think about changing after I have the years of work experience, but years just come with patience, not with productivity. I feel like my situation isn't "fair" because my friends are so much more stressed, but I need the years, not the results. I also do a lot of side projects and post them online (e.g. learning Chinese - http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io ), but my contract and visa specifically state that I can't have any other paid work. So all my projects must be free and open source. If another rest-and-vest person wants to comfort their conscience, I suggest reading more about Basic Income theories.
jayd16 9y ago
So...the age old concept of "Fuck You" Money? This is more an indictment of the work hours/pressure on average engineer.
0xbear 9y ago
This actually dates back decades. DEC invented "no output division": a team comprised of senior but bored people who would be unfashionable and dangerous to kick out. You give them some bullshit bling project and segregate them well from people who are actually doing meaningful work so that they don't get in the way. It's better if they do something meaningless for you than something meaningful for a competitor.
- fh973 9y ago
  These also exist at Google.
brendangregg 9y ago
I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers. It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.
master_yoda_1 9y ago
I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work. I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave. 4 month after that the startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding. So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is no free lunch".
banku_brougham 9y ago
I notice ther was no mention of amazon, but that is a large tech company with 10s of thousands of engineers. Anyone have an amzn rest and vest story?
- Applejinx 9y ago
  I think that's culturally impossible. Amazon's a bit of a snake-pit and there's no way such behavior could exist in that environment: it'd be painting a giant target on your back.
spraak 9y ago
Well, at my current position I am certainly resting, but not vesting, so I'm torn about what to do. On one hand, I have lots of time to do my own projects, but instead I've been very lazy and mostly read HN :/ and on the other hand, I am at the low end of the pay spectrum for my experience. I'd rather be paid more, but I don't want to have to work harder for it than I am now. Wow, I am silly. Edit: I mean that the company has not IPO'd and I don't own any stock/equity as a remote contractor.
rebootthesystem 9y ago
I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And, yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way. I think it's soul-sucking depressing.
needlessly 9y ago
Cuck.
- sctb 9y ago
  We've banned this account for violating the guidelines and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945731. We can unban the account if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll not post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: removed irrelevant item link intended to reference the guidelines.
  - Bromskloss 9y ago
    What does this link have to do with things?
    - sctb 9y ago
      Nothing at all, thanks for the heads up!
ComodoHacker 9y ago
Well, this highly connotates with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045
nodnyl 9y ago
What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money on, than actually taking their money.

487 points by SQL2219 9y ago

> "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described. Is this really prevalent at Google? edit:quotes

muzz 9y ago
My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.

natch 9y ago

I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered to care. Not limited to Google of course.

zw123456 9y ago

Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead. I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting. Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.

mavhc 9y ago
Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the company to try and get promoted.
- gorbachev 9y ago
  There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other. I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows. Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.
technofire 9y ago
One reason CEOs are paid so much is to offset the risk involved in accepting the position. If a CEO performs poorly, that's often the end of their career, so the high compensation makes that gamble more acceptable.
- gaius 9y ago
  What risk? What end of career? Maybe that's the theory but a failed CEO who destroys a company will cruise into another CEO job in practice... or even make a run for POTUS.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"It's a defensive measure." "That's Microsoft Research's whole model." ?

IBM 9y ago

This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost half of Google's and Microsoft's). The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement. I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do. >"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year. Called it a year ago [1]: >I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662

aetherson 9y ago
A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around, spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate it was after years of this kind of behavior.
- IBM 9y ago
  I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common. I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2]. [1] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-is-said-to-be-developing-a-curved-glass-smart-watch/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-oversee-car-project-1469458580 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-ove...

mklarmann 9y ago

It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a bit like gender bias.

YANT2017 9y ago

This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance. Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a startup in that regard. There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.

k__ 9y ago

Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient? They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
> They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired. The conventional term for this is "up or out".
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes, but why aren't other companies do this?
  - Applejinx 9y ago
    Because that's also a mistake: the problem there is, you cannot keep a person doing something they're optimal for if you need to continually promote them. One of the holy grails of effectiveness at doing stuff is having some comprehension of your boundaries. To categorically disavow even the concept of boundaries is catastrophically silly.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Up-or-out relies on a constant intake of new staff. You'll have to do a lot more hiring, and you're applying a pretty strong personality filter on the company. And as Applejinx says, the fact that someone isn't suited to the role above them doesn't mean they aren't suited to their current role. Up-or-out means tossing out the guy who knows his job well and is doing it well to replace him with someone who's never done it before and needs a training period; this is significant overhead applied to every job in the company.
sjg007 9y ago
No. The partner model is different. Tech companies are keeping talent on the bench. McKinsey and co turn over hardworking younglins.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

p0nce 9y ago

Sad to see tech giants not recapturing carbon with their unlimited money.

WalterBright 9y ago

I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth that much? An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent. Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
What was the XXX figure? It'd be interesting to know.
- mac01021 9y ago
  I don't know, but "Surely you're joking, MR. Feynmann" contains an anecdote about a bidding war between Caltech and another university, at the end of which he turned down an even bigger offer in order to be at Caltech.
- somecontext 9y ago
  Wikipedia claims that Feynman's first job after Los Alamos was at Cornell for $4,000 per year (~$54k/year inflation-adjusted). This claim is repeated in many sources, including the book "Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman". That book also makes the claim that in the 1960s (perhaps as early as 1960 itself), Feynman's salary crossed $20,000/year and that he was the highest-paid member of the faculty. Inflation-adjusted, that is at most $165k/year.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-( I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road. I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the right thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO. Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly. I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off. That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.

madengr 9y ago
I had $30k in Sun stock at one time; lost it all.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it. I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain! The dot com days taught me the hard way why you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either. All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.

pixelmonkey 9y ago

One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work. It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance. In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines. Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense. Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance. The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly. These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt. It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well. And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade. But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?

IBM 9y ago
I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti-trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti-trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism. [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/antitrust-better-deal https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...

bane 9y ago

I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends. The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around. Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.

RSchaeffer 9y ago
>I'd structure my days very differently What would your restructured day look like?
- bane 9y ago
  I think I would definitely put more effort into establishing clearer space/time boundaries between work and home. I live near a local library and might turn it into an office of sorts so that I have a place to go, people to interact with and so on. I'd definitely put more effort into making sure I'd wake up, shower, and dress for work during work hours and then stop at the end of the work day. Basically, better discipline, more delineation.
  - jdswain 9y ago
    I used to go out in the morning to a local Starbucks and do email and planning tasks plus also get some social interaction. That worked really well for staring the day with a clear boundary. At the end of the day I'd walk up to the train station (through a park) to meet my wife, so I'd have a clear boundary on both ends of my day. It worked really well while I lived there. Now I'm in a small town and it's a bit harder to do something similar.

rb808 9y ago

Google is sounding more like IBM every year.

home_boi 9y ago
Did IBM pay well back in the day?
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden [2] http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/ http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/
- edoceo 9y ago
  Oh yes, glorious 80s
- icelancer 9y ago
  Still does for the right positions. Research-directed ones pay exceptionally well.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  In the 80s and before IBM was THE place to work. Pretty much like Google or Facebook today. In the 90s they slowly started to cut retirement benefits and other perks and now it's not a great place to work at as far as I know.

freyir 9y ago

> "They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days" Worthless slackers.

techsupporter 9y ago
Edit: Never mind all that, I didn't get the joke. My apologies. In my defense, text doesn't convey emotion very well. Leaving up the post for my own shame. What, because they work 40 hours per week? I have a 4x10 schedule (including a weekend day) and I work exactly my assigned hours. The company is paying me for those hours and nothing more--exceptional circumstances excluded, of course--so I feel no qualms about sticking with that. I get to have a life outside of work, too.
- thisone 9y ago
  I believe that was sarcasm
  - Zyst 9y ago
    I also got the same idea. I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all. Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all. Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.
    - tnecniv 9y ago
      It's just Poe's Law coming into play. It can't be avoided really. Hell, people can't decide if The Prince is a satire or not.
      - sverige 9y ago
        The Prince is easy once you've read Discourses on Livy.

y_u_no_rust 9y ago

it's going to be fun watching all of this burn to the ground

cylinder 9y ago

All's good when the stock price is inflated. The reckoning (cost cutting) will come.

tanilama 9y ago
Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.
- contingencies 9y ago
  They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...
  - tanilama 9y ago
    Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the companies do.
rwmj 9y ago
Or maybe they'll entrench their advertising monopoly and perhaps gain a few more in driving cars and so on, and then they'll coast along as rentiers?

geff82 9y ago

Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.

ashark 9y ago
It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.
- kentt 9y ago
  I agree, but there is something I just can't make sense of. I would love to just work my ass off for 4 hours a day but you won't get through any part of an interview if someone finds that out.
- shostack 9y ago
  For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc. The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.
  - 9y ago

Swizec 9y ago

> she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it. > As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes. > after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.

hendzen 9y ago
Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.
- Swizec 9y ago
  It says the stock was from a recent acquisition and the article context is about vesting. One can surmise her stock is tied up in a vesting schedule and thus illiquid for now.
- lisper 9y ago
  It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    How?
    - lisper 9y ago
      Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.
tryingagainbro 9y ago
Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume. It can be worse, like being trapped making $8 an hour at some supermarket.
9y ago

capkutay 9y ago

These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services (mail, ad analytics, etc).

scurvy 9y ago
This was Microsoft's strategy post-dotcom implosion. "We have more money than everyone. Hire all the smart people even if we don't have anything for them to do." It worked until...Google.
hendzen 9y ago
The fact that they have a the market position and capital to buy up human resources and waste them simply to keep competitors from being able to develop products goes to show that they are abusing their monopoly positions. Wouldn't it be better for the economy & society at large if these talented people were working hard at building new & better products?
- ws_jl 9y ago
  Alas, the employee would have to act ultimately.
  - hendzen 9y ago
    People respond to incentives. If you can get paid 250K+ to sit around and hang out on reddit all day, why wouldn't you do that instead of busting your ass?
    - sjg007 9y ago
      Because some people want to work, to be useful? Redditing is like shouting into the void, totally useless (hacker news is kinda similar). At the top of Maslow's hierarchy is where you find the need to do work that contributes to society. I read this NYTimes articles about a New Yorker who was paid $5m to vacate his apartment for new development. He was the last hold out. It turns out when he was young he was in medical school but dropped out after he received a sizable inheritance. He was also quite good in school etc... His regret? I could've been a doctor! Basically he felt his life was unlived and unexamined despite the luxury of money. So if you rest and vest but spend 8hrs a day at work doing nothing... then what's the point? How long would you do it?

icelancer 9y ago

>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. This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.

NTDF9 9y ago

Reminds me of the common saying, "The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."

hendzen 9y ago

I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim the fat?

adamnemecek 9y ago

So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more than 1M a year are at each of these companies?

thrill 9y ago
And can they use one more?
patio11 9y ago
Thousands minimally; soon tens of thousands.

boulos 9y ago

There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different groups. Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant). Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing: > There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors. Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are normal for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?

scurvy 9y ago
At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"
- yulaow 9y ago
  Well that's a profoundly sad and depressing answer, hoping to never end with that kind of thoughts
  - dsacco 9y ago
    It's a lighthearted joke.

jokoon 9y ago

I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.

chillacy 9y ago
That's definitely one way. I'm not sure if that happens intentionally at my company, but the severe lack of documentation lends itself to creating a culture where a select few who have been around for 5+ years tend to know exactly where to find everything, who to talk to, etc. And that's very valuable in that climate, even if they do little coding themselves.
m-j-fox 9y ago
I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between them, they could perform his duties, no?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- samsonradu 9y ago
  Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are quite good also, a very good speaker.
  - m-j-fox 9y ago
    Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.

lisper 9y ago

It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder. Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in 2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-) To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened. The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight (http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.

js2 9y ago
You don't want to know how many of your taxpayer dollars went to pay me for helping to shepherd purchase orders through the JPL bureaucracy. :-(
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Working the bureaucracy is often much more difficult than the engineering part. In my company the tech leads spend more on figuring out what documentation to produce and how to store it than either writing documentation or producing software.
  - js2 9y ago
    It was the OP who wrote he "spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it." I would feel all the worse knowing my pay was taxpayer funded.

loeg 9y ago

Where do I sign up for that job?

asah 9y ago

Can confirm. But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around. Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.

antod 9y ago
And for a rich company, I suppose keeping them around stops their competitors from hiring them a while.
- aisofteng 9y ago
  The article explicitly mentions this.
  - antod 9y ago
    Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that reflects badly on me or modern journalism.
zilchers 9y ago
I'd also add, coming from a startup to a big company can be incredibly frustrating, and a lot of high performers can be quite demoralized by the bureaucracy and pace (even while they're being paid well to be there).
ComodoHacker 9y ago
It's not nefarious, but it's clearly a money spent not optimally.

ChemicalWarfare 9y ago

The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella. None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures. But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to. What struck me as odd is the "Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else’s team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...

joejerryronnie 9y ago

Or, as a recently bought out/retired colleague remarked, "My job now consists of being home all day and trying not to piss off my wife" - a much harder endeavor than any engineering project I can think of.

pdimitar 9y ago
Sounds like love and respect are long gone from that "relationship".
- frenchy 9y ago
  Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children, which makes things harder. They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company enjoyable.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?" People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out there.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      Are you really surprised that people can't get along when they re stuck together 24/7 all days? That's what happens when they retire.
      - pdimitar 9y ago
        Surprised? Absolutely not. Even the greatest love can wither away if there's no diversity in the way a couple spends their life. Stasis is death, movement is life, applies to all areas of human life.

jaequery 9y ago

I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs. It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long that you have no idea what is going on and where.

seattle_spring 9y ago

I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.

trelliscoded 9y ago
I agree. I've worked with people who actually put in 8 hours of work a day on a regular basis, and it had a huge impact on my desire to get things done. Also, working with Germans.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I think it's not only engineers. I know several people who are either corporate lawyers or other long-time managers who pretty much go to meetings the whole day because they have nothing real to do. They all are pulling good money but feeling like they are not doing much seems to take a psychological toll.

user5994461 9y ago

> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract. Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.

whipoodle 9y ago
The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run than the reality.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

liveoneggs 9y ago

to all of the lottery winners out there- Fuck You > sincerely- > the wage slaves

dang 9y ago
Would you please not rant on HN? We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion here.

ghettoimp 9y ago

So working 9-5 is "coasting"...? Fuck you. I've got kids.

avs733 9y ago
I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s. If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.

kelvin0 9y ago

Legendary slacker story: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chin... Don't work hard, work smart :)

WalterBright 9y ago

There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life. I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.

shoefly 9y ago
I feel the same. I will stop coding when they nail shut my coffin.
DonbunEf7 9y ago
It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home-improvement projects that had been planned but never executed. "I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."
jasonkester 9y ago
I agree that having a purpose is important, but I disagree that that purpose should necessarily be work. I think it's important to establish the things that give your life meaning early in life, and that they not be your job. It's sad to see people hitting 65, getting essentially kicked out of the only thing they've ever done to fill their time, then unsuccessfully try to come up with a hobby on the spot. You can't just take up fishing when you retire. But if you take it up when you're 25, spend 40 years working so that you can have weekend fishing trips and a big 3 week expedition each year, looking forward to the day you've finally put enough into the market to ditch the day job and move closer to that one really good trout stream in Wyoming that consumed so much of your vacation time over the years, and where most of your real friends try to get out to at least once a year... Well, that seems like a better plan.
rorykoehler 9y ago
For me retirement means not having to worry about income ever again, not to stop working.

shoefly 9y ago

This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.

peterburkimsher 9y ago
That's what I'm doing now. It's ok, but it's against my contract to get paid for those projects. So I have to give everything away for free, open-source! Sounds great, but that also means my marketing budget is zero. I can't find users. I've put in all this effort, but nobody knows about it, and it feels all like a waste of time. But you know, I still get paid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tanilama 9y ago
Me too. Felt guilty, but I changed my job later. Cannot stand this.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

Why are programmers called engineers these days? An engineer has an engineering degree and does something completely different than computer programming.

jessaustin 9y ago
Having interacted with various P.E.'s and been mostly disappointed with their work (seriously these guys are worse than architects as far as having creativity pointed only toward fuck-ups that the client would never want), I wonder why programmers/coders/whatevers even want to engage in this pretense. Why not call ourselves "code lawyers"?
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
It is the common use of the word engineer and not the legal one. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/engineer http://www.dictionary.com/browse/engineer

peterburkimsher 9y ago

Is it unethical to keep a chair warm when my boss didn't give me new tasks to do? For other areas of life (immigration), I need to get more years of continuous relevant work experience. I come to an office every day, but my boss just doesn't have enough to keep me busy. My job title is "Project Engineer", which is vague enough to cover everything from DLL debugging to Node.JS programming to network monitoring to evaluating Advanced Planning systems. The latest task is to do some online course in machine learning, even though he didn't specify how the company will need it. On bad days, I feel useless. But I reconcile the situation to myself by saying it's basically a "basic income" (the salary is not high; the minimum that people on my visa can have). I could think about changing after I have the years of work experience, but years just come with patience, not with productivity. I feel like my situation isn't "fair" because my friends are so much more stressed, but I need the years, not the results. I also do a lot of side projects and post them online (e.g. learning Chinese - http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io ), but my contract and visa specifically state that I can't have any other paid work. So all my projects must be free and open source. If another rest-and-vest person wants to comfort their conscience, I suggest reading more about Basic Income theories.

jayd16 9y ago

So...the age old concept of "Fuck You" Money? This is more an indictment of the work hours/pressure on average engineer.

0xbear 9y ago

This actually dates back decades. DEC invented "no output division": a team comprised of senior but bored people who would be unfashionable and dangerous to kick out. You give them some bullshit bling project and segregate them well from people who are actually doing meaningful work so that they don't get in the way. It's better if they do something meaningless for you than something meaningful for a competitor.

fh973 9y ago
These also exist at Google.

brendangregg 9y ago

I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers. It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.

master_yoda_1 9y ago

I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work. I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave. 4 month after that the startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding. So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is no free lunch".

banku_brougham 9y ago

I notice ther was no mention of amazon, but that is a large tech company with 10s of thousands of engineers. Anyone have an amzn rest and vest story?

Applejinx 9y ago
I think that's culturally impossible. Amazon's a bit of a snake-pit and there's no way such behavior could exist in that environment: it'd be painting a giant target on your back.

spraak 9y ago

Well, at my current position I am certainly resting, but not vesting, so I'm torn about what to do. On one hand, I have lots of time to do my own projects, but instead I've been very lazy and mostly read HN :/ and on the other hand, I am at the low end of the pay spectrum for my experience. I'd rather be paid more, but I don't want to have to work harder for it than I am now. Wow, I am silly. Edit: I mean that the company has not IPO'd and I don't own any stock/equity as a remote contractor.

rebootthesystem 9y ago

I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And, yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way. I think it's soul-sucking depressing.

needlessly 9y ago

Cuck.

sctb 9y ago
We've banned this account for violating the guidelines and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945731. We can unban the account if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll not post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: removed irrelevant item link intended to reference the guidelines.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  What does this link have to do with things?
  - sctb 9y ago
    Nothing at all, thanks for the heads up!

ComodoHacker 9y ago

Well, this highly connotates with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045

nodnyl 9y ago

What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money on, than actually taking their money.