4 ms·
Crazy stuff, I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent.
by dschobel 16y ago
Crazy stuff, I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent.
- jrockway 16y ago10-20% is probably not all that much money for Google.
- dschobel 16y agoJust 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 agoAdditionally, 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 agoGoogle 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 agoGoogle 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 agoYes, 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.