7 ms·

Google Fights Back In Battle For Talent

65 points by razin 16y ago

rfreytag 16y ago
By making these counter-offers Google is using real money to back up their assertion to (at least some of) their employees that their growth prospects are better than Facebook's. Think of this as a dividend-like unforgeable statement of corporate fiscal self-confidence. If enough Googlers go fishing for counter-offers at Facebook, Facebook will be wasting a lot of management energy reviewing and making offers to Googlers that were never going jump in the first place.
dschobel 16y ago
Crazy stuff, I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent.
- jrockway 16y ago
  10-20% is probably not all that much money for Google.
  - dschobel 16y ago
    Just because they have cash doesn't mean they want to dig into it, lest we forget that Google already once initiated a hiring freeze during leaner times in the advertising market.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Additionally, I hear they are already underpaying programmers. (I hesitate to mention this because I don't actually have any data.) If shareholders cared this much about micro- financial issues, Google's headquarters would be based in Kansas and not Silicon Valley. And they wouldn't have solar panels or ball pits, or ... Sparing gross negligence, it seems like shareholders are willing to accept that you need to spend money to make money. (Incidentally, I work at huge megacorp with annoyed shareholders, but I still get to fly business class when traveling abroad for work. My last flight was something like $11,000 when economy was $1200. Oh hai, order of magnitude! It might seem like a waste of shareholder money, but they accept it as a cost of doing business.)
- bd 16y ago
  Google revenue per employee is $1M+. Their profit per employee is about $300K. And keep in mind this is across all employees (including non-engineering staff).
- tomerico 16y ago
  Google has never paid any dividend and has always gave big bonuses to its employees. So stockholders already tolerate these things. Microsoft on the other hand has been paying generous dividends, its profits has been rising at an impressive rate, yet its stock has remained steady for almost a decade.
  - maigret 16y ago
    Yes, because investors hope Google to pay (high) dividends soon. Without dividends, stocks are just a Ponzy scheme.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- nailer 16y ago
  > I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent. You're begging the question. Google pay less than other companies that require similar high-end engineering talent - eg, low latency trading desks at hedge funds. The talent of a typical SA is far below a Google or Facebook SRE or trading desk ops guy. I imagine the pure dev side to be similar.
edanm 16y ago
As a programmer, I'm very happy with this story. Google has always said that the people are their most important asset (actually, most companies say it). But now, they're backing up their words with action, and the programmers end up winning. I wonder if this is just a one-off thing that only Google is doing, or whether this kind of thinking will start to be more prevalent.
bambax 16y ago
This looks like a new bubble. Why would a Twitter IPO raise so much money? What are its growth prospects? Facebook may be different, but still, it all sounds very crazy.
- pclark 16y ago
  Why does this look like a new bubble? Why wouldn't Twitter raise billions in a public offering? Their growth prospects are every web or mobile phone user - in any country - to use their service. The amount of attention Twitter has from its users is really noteworthy.
  - bambax 16y ago
    There was a story not long ago on HN (can't seem to find it though) about a blogger who had a special Twitter pipeline to send tweets whenever he blogged, or something. The thing failed silently and stayed broken for two months, and NOBODY NOTICED: neither he nor any of his "followers" (he had more than a thousand). So, having found out about the situation, he decided to stop using Twitter altogether. On LinkedIn I now have to see all the tweets of my "contacts" whenever I log in; this is so annoying that it may push me to quit LinkedIn for this reason alone. People on Twitter are just copying and pasting news found elsewhere; there is an infinitely small proportion of original content: for one "Shit My Dad Says", there are millions of users who only mulch old content from the likes of Digg (RIP) or Reddit or HN. Twitter users are not paying attention to one another; they shout in the desert and nobody cares. This cannot go on forever.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - mark_l_watson 16y ago
      I up voted you because I agree that "People on Twitter are just copying and pasting news found elsewhere; there is an infinitely small proportion of original content..." I find Twitter to be very useful because interesting people who I follow post links to interesting stuff. But, not too many fully formed ideas in 140 characters: just links or short funny things, etc.
baddspellar 16y ago
Effectively they're rewarding employees for interviewing with other companies. What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview? I've spent quite a bit of time as a manager at some larger tech companies. We'd monitor turnover and adjust our compensation policies, and other policies that affected satisfaction, across the board if there was an increasing trend in turnover. Sure, we'd make a diving catch every once in a while when we didn't keep a close enough eye on one of our top developer's satisfaction. In those cases we'd still look at our overall package. When we made adjustments, the really good, happy engineers were even happier when they got nice raises without even asking for one. Now, by across the board, I don't mean that every engineer gets a good raise. That's because as a company gets larger, they get more and more mediocre engineers. The article doesn't say that Google gives big counter offers to every engineer. I assume Google is smart enough not to do that. It's not possible that all of their engineers are really good. Sometimes good-bye is good riddance.
- shpxnvz 16y ago
  What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview? It's always been the case that those who negotiate effectively tend to end up with better compensation than those who don't. I wouldn't expect re-negotiation to turn out any different. I'd guess that those who are unhappy that their co-workers successfully re-negotiate their compensation would tend to be just as unhappy when a new employee negotiates a compensation package better than theirs. I doubt there's much you can do to make those people happy, short of helping them to be better negotiators themselves. I've had experience with a company who responded to this sort of employee dismay by putting salary caps on new hires. The end result was, predictably, that the really talented people we found walked away when the company refused to negotiate, and pressure to increase head count forced the company to hire a lot of less-than-ideal candidates. Regarding the use of offer letters to negotiate - it seems like a risky tactic. The appeasement is certainly not sustainable, and when they start refusing to counter-offer, those employees better be ready to make good on their threat of leaving.
vidar 16y ago
A lot of these counteroffers must be to stop the perception of brain drain. Perception is often more important than reality. I dont think there are that many "must not lose him/her, at any cost" engineers, even at google.
- qq66 16y ago
  There may not be any "must not lose him/her, at any cost" engineers, but there are certainly "must not lose him/her, at a cost of $x million" engineers.
antirez 16y ago
Maybe I'm not used to the Silicon Valley processes but I think it is pretty uncool to tell your company you received another offer... even without explicitly mentioning you want a raise. You should either be happy with your company, or talk with your boss in order to get better conditions. And if there is no agreement you can look around and go in some other place. But playing the game of the higher offer is something that always disturbed me.
- MC27 16y ago
  Employers often ask questions like that when people hand in their notice - in order to persuade them to stay. And in any case, it is silly to keep your salary secret - that is how employers exert their control over employees.
- edw519 16y ago
  But playing the game of the higher offer is something that always disturbed me. Not me. Here's my experience (many times): Phase I Me: I deserve more $ because <27 good reasons>. Boss: I can't because <14 stupid reasons>. Phase II Me: I quit (not bluffing). Boss: You can't. Here's more $.
  - siculars 16y ago
    I second your experience, edw519. Unfortunately, often the only way to get management to loosen the purse strings is to come back with another offer from another firm. This exact situation has happened to me. Sad, really.
    - antirez 16y ago
      The problem is understanding if the inability of a given company to recognize the value of an employer is a good enough reason to move away...
      - siculars 16y ago
        Agreed. It may well be. I took the counter offer from the original company for various reasons. But it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not sure if I would have made the same decision had I had it to do over. When a company does not value your contribution until there is a competing offer you feel a bit taken for granted and unappreciated. Any academic work in the HR/recruiting field will tell you that money is not the sole motivator or even the main motivator. Under-appreciation is a great way to lose employees.
MC27 16y ago
By repeatedly covering this topic, and websites like this linking to the source, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Essentially, TC is partly to blame and it reminds me of when they went after last.fm.
shareme 16y ago
The problem with the article is that it misses the big point.. Google is attempting to save some costs in hiring at the high levels of coding engineers..with a comparison of that costs per employee against the cost to offer a 20% raise is somewhat a miss-leading and pointless article..or what we call link-bait. And some of the Hr hiring costs per employee can be determine from the Google SEC filings..by making some assumptions and completing some calculations.. And on top of that most high end Google engineer hires and this has been in fact talked about only become fully productive at 12 to 18 months after joining Google.. So lets do the calculations that MA of Tc should have been somewhat curious to do.. $120,000 salary per year times 80% non-productive first 12 months..learning the Google engineering system etc.. $96,000 in loss productivity costs now ad Hr department costs of interviewing and etc.. $20,000..my guess..only guess. so now we are up to a subtotal of $116,000.. and $120,000 times 20% is..$24,000 Change the salary to say $400,000 still similar differences in costs of the two decisions..with Google wining out on their own cost decision..
- jasonkester 16y ago
  Where do you get your 80% non-productive number? Every job I've had in the last 10 years, I've delivered production code on day one. I expect that anybody good enough to get hired at Google would be capable of the same. I mean sure, we've all hired our share of useless junior devs, but then we've all done that at places that were a notch or two below Google on the minimum-standards front. For talented developers with experience, I could see losing a few percentage points of your max speed during the first week while you get used to process, but do you really think you can stumble along at 20% of your capability for an entire year and not be noticed? At a top-tier software company???
  - ovi256 16y ago
    >Every job I've had in the last 10 years, I've delivered production code on day one. We all did, but it's not enough. You probably took time away from other engineers to coach you and explain the system. If you took more time than it would have took them to accomplish what you did, you're not productive. And his point is that's what you did.
jessriedel 16y ago
> And worse – he’s confirmed that many Google employees are interviewing with Facebook and Twitter, among others, simply to get a hefty raise. “Many people at Google use Facebook offers in order to get a big raise,” says Buchheit. I don't understand why this is "worse", i.e. why interviewing purely to get a raise should be thought of as a bad thing. To me, having many (hopefully low cost) interviews simply allows software developers to be efficiently priced as market conditions change. Now, the natural response, if employee value can move upward more easily, is that employers will be less willing to offer job/salary security. But, on average, this is good, right? Fighting this is like fighting to go back to the old pensions system, which drastically reduced employment flexibility and was a major source of economic friction.
- F_J_H 16y ago
  So, would you say it is no different than when companies offshore development to reduce costs? After all, when companies explore cheaper offshore options, it “simply allows software developers to be efficiently priced as market conditions change.” I’m sure I will get my share of down votes for this, but as a cofounder that has hired several developers, I’ve had people come to me with better offers and give me an ultimatum. I rarely counter as there is no guarantee they won’t come back sometime later with an even higher offer, and so on and so on. What if your employer did the same sort of thing and came to you and said – “hey, someone with equal credentials and experience told me they would do your job for less, so you either need do it for the same or I will replace you.” Yes I know there is no guarantee that the new person could perform as well, and that there would also be inefficiencies due to having to come up the learning curve, but there is also no guarantee that the other job will be better for the person entertaining the “better” offer. I have had people leave for a “better” job, ended up completely hating it, and then asking if they can come back. Um….no. This isn’t mom’s basement where if it doesn’t work out, you can always move back. I’ve found to keep people, you need to pay them enough to take the “money” question off the table, and the ensure they have something meaningful and rewarding to do. *edit - typo
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    > So, would you say it is no different than when companies offshore development to reduce costs? Yes. >I rarely counter as there is no guarantee they won’t come back sometime later with an even higher offer, and so on and so on. If I'm a builder and the price of wood goes up--but it's still the cheapest material for my needs--I keep using it. If it keeps going up, I keep paying more and more until there is a cheaper alternative. Yes, it can be argued that there are key differences between people and wood, but you haven't identified them and why they are important here. >What if your employer did the same sort of thing and came to you and said – “hey, someone with equal credentials and experience told me they would do your job for less, so you either need do it for the same or I will replace you.” I would be bummed I was no longer as valuable of a commodity, but I wouldn't fault the employer.
sp332 16y ago
Relevant old Dilbert comic: http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&ots=bw_e7v4MM2&dq=dilbert%20rewarding%20disloyalty&pg=PA117#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&... "The secret company policy is to reward disloyalty!"
VladRussian 16y ago
That summarizes it : "Only a sucker would sit and hope for recognition". Google tries to avoid the unavoidable, at least in astrophysics : "After the type II supernova, only the collapsed core is left behind. If it's less than 2 or 3 solar masses, it is what's known as a neutron star, named thus because it's made almost entirely of degenerate neutrons."
- VladRussian 16y ago
  got angry? At astrophysics? Some people still surprise me. This was the post where i least expected to lose karma.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
I think it is a poor idea to put stock options in a startup at a high priority when job hunting because startup success is a long shot. It is a different situation for Facebook and other well established pre-IPO companies or older companies that have an established value to their stock (I stayed at SAIC for a long time because of stock bonuses, options, and the expectation that the value would continue to increase). For small startups, it seems like you have founders who have taken a real risk vs. employees/consultants who are getting a salary and perhaps some equity. If you are working for hire, better really enjoy the work and/or the immediate compensation. I have a childhood friend (actually, I also used to baby sit him when he was really young) who started 3 companies over a 20 year period, finally getting $300+ million when selling a large interest in his last company. My friend (and people like him) who take risks get most of the rewards - a fair system.

65 points by razin 16y ago

By making these counter-offers Google is using real money to back up their assertion to (at least some of) their employees that their growth prospects are better than Facebook's. Think of this as a dividend-like unforgeable statement of corporate fiscal self-confidence. If enough Googlers go fishing for counter-offers at Facebook, Facebook will be wasting a lot of management energy reviewing and making offers to Googlers that were never going jump in the first place.

dschobel 16y ago

Crazy stuff, I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent.

jrockway 16y ago
10-20% is probably not all that much money for Google.
- dschobel 16y ago
  Just because they have cash doesn't mean they want to dig into it, lest we forget that Google already once initiated a hiring freeze during leaner times in the advertising market.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Additionally, I hear they are already underpaying programmers. (I hesitate to mention this because I don't actually have any data.) If shareholders cared this much about micro- financial issues, Google's headquarters would be based in Kansas and not Silicon Valley. And they wouldn't have solar panels or ball pits, or ... Sparing gross negligence, it seems like shareholders are willing to accept that you need to spend money to make money. (Incidentally, I work at huge megacorp with annoyed shareholders, but I still get to fly business class when traveling abroad for work. My last flight was something like $11,000 when economy was $1200. Oh hai, order of magnitude! It might seem like a waste of shareholder money, but they accept it as a cost of doing business.)
bd 16y ago
Google revenue per employee is $1M+. Their profit per employee is about $300K. And keep in mind this is across all employees (including non-engineering staff).
tomerico 16y ago
Google has never paid any dividend and has always gave big bonuses to its employees. So stockholders already tolerate these things. Microsoft on the other hand has been paying generous dividends, its profits has been rising at an impressive rate, yet its stock has remained steady for almost a decade.
- maigret 16y ago
  Yes, because investors hope Google to pay (high) dividends soon. Without dividends, stocks are just a Ponzy scheme.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
nailer 16y ago
> I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent. You're begging the question. Google pay less than other companies that require similar high-end engineering talent - eg, low latency trading desks at hedge funds. The talent of a typical SA is far below a Google or Facebook SRE or trading desk ops guy. I imagine the pure dev side to be similar.

edanm 16y ago

As a programmer, I'm very happy with this story. Google has always said that the people are their most important asset (actually, most companies say it). But now, they're backing up their words with action, and the programmers end up winning. I wonder if this is just a one-off thing that only Google is doing, or whether this kind of thinking will start to be more prevalent.

bambax 16y ago

This looks like a new bubble. Why would a Twitter IPO raise so much money? What are its growth prospects? Facebook may be different, but still, it all sounds very crazy.

pclark 16y ago
Why does this look like a new bubble? Why wouldn't Twitter raise billions in a public offering? Their growth prospects are every web or mobile phone user - in any country - to use their service. The amount of attention Twitter has from its users is really noteworthy.
- bambax 16y ago
  There was a story not long ago on HN (can't seem to find it though) about a blogger who had a special Twitter pipeline to send tweets whenever he blogged, or something. The thing failed silently and stayed broken for two months, and NOBODY NOTICED: neither he nor any of his "followers" (he had more than a thousand). So, having found out about the situation, he decided to stop using Twitter altogether. On LinkedIn I now have to see all the tweets of my "contacts" whenever I log in; this is so annoying that it may push me to quit LinkedIn for this reason alone. People on Twitter are just copying and pasting news found elsewhere; there is an infinitely small proportion of original content: for one "Shit My Dad Says", there are millions of users who only mulch old content from the likes of Digg (RIP) or Reddit or HN. Twitter users are not paying attention to one another; they shout in the desert and nobody cares. This cannot go on forever.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - mark_l_watson 16y ago
    I up voted you because I agree that "People on Twitter are just copying and pasting news found elsewhere; there is an infinitely small proportion of original content..." I find Twitter to be very useful because interesting people who I follow post links to interesting stuff. But, not too many fully formed ideas in 140 characters: just links or short funny things, etc.

baddspellar 16y ago

Effectively they're rewarding employees for interviewing with other companies. What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview? I've spent quite a bit of time as a manager at some larger tech companies. We'd monitor turnover and adjust our compensation policies, and other policies that affected satisfaction, across the board if there was an increasing trend in turnover. Sure, we'd make a diving catch every once in a while when we didn't keep a close enough eye on one of our top developer's satisfaction. In those cases we'd still look at our overall package. When we made adjustments, the really good, happy engineers were even happier when they got nice raises without even asking for one. Now, by across the board, I don't mean that every engineer gets a good raise. That's because as a company gets larger, they get more and more mediocre engineers. The article doesn't say that Google gives big counter offers to every engineer. I assume Google is smart enough not to do that. It's not possible that all of their engineers are really good. Sometimes good-bye is good riddance.

shpxnvz 16y ago
What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview? It's always been the case that those who negotiate effectively tend to end up with better compensation than those who don't. I wouldn't expect re-negotiation to turn out any different. I'd guess that those who are unhappy that their co-workers successfully re-negotiate their compensation would tend to be just as unhappy when a new employee negotiates a compensation package better than theirs. I doubt there's much you can do to make those people happy, short of helping them to be better negotiators themselves. I've had experience with a company who responded to this sort of employee dismay by putting salary caps on new hires. The end result was, predictably, that the really talented people we found walked away when the company refused to negotiate, and pressure to increase head count forced the company to hire a lot of less-than-ideal candidates. Regarding the use of offer letters to negotiate - it seems like a risky tactic. The appeasement is certainly not sustainable, and when they start refusing to counter-offer, those employees better be ready to make good on their threat of leaving.

vidar 16y ago

A lot of these counteroffers must be to stop the perception of brain drain. Perception is often more important than reality. I dont think there are that many "must not lose him/her, at any cost" engineers, even at google.

qq66 16y ago
There may not be any "must not lose him/her, at any cost" engineers, but there are certainly "must not lose him/her, at a cost of $x million" engineers.

antirez 16y ago

Maybe I'm not used to the Silicon Valley processes but I think it is pretty uncool to tell your company you received another offer... even without explicitly mentioning you want a raise. You should either be happy with your company, or talk with your boss in order to get better conditions. And if there is no agreement you can look around and go in some other place. But playing the game of the higher offer is something that always disturbed me.

MC27 16y ago
Employers often ask questions like that when people hand in their notice - in order to persuade them to stay. And in any case, it is silly to keep your salary secret - that is how employers exert their control over employees.
edw519 16y ago
But playing the game of the higher offer is something that always disturbed me. Not me. Here's my experience (many times): Phase I Me: I deserve more $ because <27 good reasons>. Boss: I can't because <14 stupid reasons>. Phase II Me: I quit (not bluffing). Boss: You can't. Here's more $.
- siculars 16y ago
  I second your experience, edw519. Unfortunately, often the only way to get management to loosen the purse strings is to come back with another offer from another firm. This exact situation has happened to me. Sad, really.
  - antirez 16y ago
    The problem is understanding if the inability of a given company to recognize the value of an employer is a good enough reason to move away...
    - siculars 16y ago
      Agreed. It may well be. I took the counter offer from the original company for various reasons. But it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not sure if I would have made the same decision had I had it to do over. When a company does not value your contribution until there is a competing offer you feel a bit taken for granted and unappreciated. Any academic work in the HR/recruiting field will tell you that money is not the sole motivator or even the main motivator. Under-appreciation is a great way to lose employees.

MC27 16y ago

By repeatedly covering this topic, and websites like this linking to the source, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Essentially, TC is partly to blame and it reminds me of when they went after last.fm.

shareme 16y ago

The problem with the article is that it misses the big point.. Google is attempting to save some costs in hiring at the high levels of coding engineers..with a comparison of that costs per employee against the cost to offer a 20% raise is somewhat a miss-leading and pointless article..or what we call link-bait. And some of the Hr hiring costs per employee can be determine from the Google SEC filings..by making some assumptions and completing some calculations.. And on top of that most high end Google engineer hires and this has been in fact talked about only become fully productive at 12 to 18 months after joining Google.. So lets do the calculations that MA of Tc should have been somewhat curious to do.. $120,000 salary per year times 80% non-productive first 12 months..learning the Google engineering system etc.. $96,000 in loss productivity costs now ad Hr department costs of interviewing and etc.. $20,000..my guess..only guess. so now we are up to a subtotal of $116,000.. and $120,000 times 20% is..$24,000 Change the salary to say $400,000 still similar differences in costs of the two decisions..with Google wining out on their own cost decision..

jasonkester 16y ago
Where do you get your 80% non-productive number? Every job I've had in the last 10 years, I've delivered production code on day one. I expect that anybody good enough to get hired at Google would be capable of the same. I mean sure, we've all hired our share of useless junior devs, but then we've all done that at places that were a notch or two below Google on the minimum-standards front. For talented developers with experience, I could see losing a few percentage points of your max speed during the first week while you get used to process, but do you really think you can stumble along at 20% of your capability for an entire year and not be noticed? At a top-tier software company???
- ovi256 16y ago
  >Every job I've had in the last 10 years, I've delivered production code on day one. We all did, but it's not enough. You probably took time away from other engineers to coach you and explain the system. If you took more time than it would have took them to accomplish what you did, you're not productive. And his point is that's what you did.

jessriedel 16y ago

> And worse – he’s confirmed that many Google employees are interviewing with Facebook and Twitter, among others, simply to get a hefty raise. “Many people at Google use Facebook offers in order to get a big raise,” says Buchheit. I don't understand why this is "worse", i.e. why interviewing purely to get a raise should be thought of as a bad thing. To me, having many (hopefully low cost) interviews simply allows software developers to be efficiently priced as market conditions change. Now, the natural response, if employee value can move upward more easily, is that employers will be less willing to offer job/salary security. But, on average, this is good, right? Fighting this is like fighting to go back to the old pensions system, which drastically reduced employment flexibility and was a major source of economic friction.

F_J_H 16y ago
So, would you say it is no different than when companies offshore development to reduce costs? After all, when companies explore cheaper offshore options, it “simply allows software developers to be efficiently priced as market conditions change.” I’m sure I will get my share of down votes for this, but as a cofounder that has hired several developers, I’ve had people come to me with better offers and give me an ultimatum. I rarely counter as there is no guarantee they won’t come back sometime later with an even higher offer, and so on and so on. What if your employer did the same sort of thing and came to you and said – “hey, someone with equal credentials and experience told me they would do your job for less, so you either need do it for the same or I will replace you.” Yes I know there is no guarantee that the new person could perform as well, and that there would also be inefficiencies due to having to come up the learning curve, but there is also no guarantee that the other job will be better for the person entertaining the “better” offer. I have had people leave for a “better” job, ended up completely hating it, and then asking if they can come back. Um….no. This isn’t mom’s basement where if it doesn’t work out, you can always move back. I’ve found to keep people, you need to pay them enough to take the “money” question off the table, and the ensure they have something meaningful and rewarding to do. *edit - typo
- jessriedel 16y ago
  > So, would you say it is no different than when companies offshore development to reduce costs? Yes. >I rarely counter as there is no guarantee they won’t come back sometime later with an even higher offer, and so on and so on. If I'm a builder and the price of wood goes up--but it's still the cheapest material for my needs--I keep using it. If it keeps going up, I keep paying more and more until there is a cheaper alternative. Yes, it can be argued that there are key differences between people and wood, but you haven't identified them and why they are important here. >What if your employer did the same sort of thing and came to you and said – “hey, someone with equal credentials and experience told me they would do your job for less, so you either need do it for the same or I will replace you.” I would be bummed I was no longer as valuable of a commodity, but I wouldn't fault the employer.

sp332 16y ago

Relevant old Dilbert comic: http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&ots=bw_e7v4MM2&dq=dilbert%20rewarding%20disloyalty&pg=PA117#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&... "The secret company policy is to reward disloyalty!"

VladRussian 16y ago

That summarizes it : "Only a sucker would sit and hope for recognition". Google tries to avoid the unavoidable, at least in astrophysics : "After the type II supernova, only the collapsed core is left behind. If it's less than 2 or 3 solar masses, it is what's known as a neutron star, named thus because it's made almost entirely of degenerate neutrons."

VladRussian 16y ago
got angry? At astrophysics? Some people still surprise me. This was the post where i least expected to lose karma.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

I think it is a poor idea to put stock options in a startup at a high priority when job hunting because startup success is a long shot. It is a different situation for Facebook and other well established pre-IPO companies or older companies that have an established value to their stock (I stayed at SAIC for a long time because of stock bonuses, options, and the expectation that the value would continue to increase). For small startups, it seems like you have founders who have taken a real risk vs. employees/consultants who are getting a salary and perhaps some equity. If you are working for hire, better really enjoy the work and/or the immediate compensation. I have a childhood friend (actually, I also used to baby sit him when he was really young) who started 3 companies over a 20 year period, finally getting $300+ million when selling a large interest in his last company. My friend (and people like him) who take risks get most of the rewards - a fair system.