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Per the article, Google has over 100 engineers working on Fuchsia. If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping th

Per the article, Google has over 100 engineers working on Fuchsia. If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposedly will never benefit their employer. A rich employer may retain an unproductive employee for a limited amount of time if they expect it to ultimately pay off. It just doesn't make any sense to retain someone indefinitely if they're not going to produce anything of value, and (implicitly) will quit the moment you try to put them on any sort of real-world valuable work. Google is a public company with fiduciary responsibilities to its shareholders and a legally accountable board, it can't just throw tens of millions of dollars away without good reason or explanation. > You see all these different projects competing against each other (multiple messaging apps are a good example) and you think: why is Google so unfocused? There are many good reasons to have multiple teams competing against each other, building the same product. Often it will bring a strong drive and pace to all competing projects, as well as cross-pollination, and eventually they often merge to a single deliverable that is better than any of the projects could produce individually. > what Google basically wants to do is hoard engineers I'm not sure why all these improbable theories make more sense to you than the plain fact that Android was designed quite a few years ago, has many natural deficiencies, and - like all technologies - will eventually be replaced by a superior successor. That's exactly what Fuchsia is about. Its existence does not require any elaborate conspiracy theory. On the contrary: given how strategically important the Android market niche is for Google, it would be very surprising if Google was not working on a viable successor. It's as if Sony didn't have a successor for the PS4 in the pipeline, and just expected it to sell forever, with minor patches here and there.

nnq 8y ago
> It just doesn't make any sense to retain someone indefinitely if they're not going to produce anything of value They likely will. Whenever a new projects starts, engineers can be recruited for it from the pre-vetted internal pool. Hiring and the ramp-up time for new hires would cost more. Yeah, if you're an ossified compnay rarely starting new projects it doesn't make sense. But if your Google this is not the case...
- dunpeal 8y ago
  This sounds good in theory, but in practice what you're describing will not be stable, sustainable, or at all practical. You can't really run this sort of revolving-door "talent pool" project for long, certainly not a massive project of 100+ engineers. If every time a new project opens up, its hiring managers get to unreservedly raid the "talent pool" project for star performers, then pretty soon this project will be known internally as a joke, that is at priority zero, and any but its most dysfunctional engineers will be rushing to other projects, either internally within Google or (more likely) outside it. You'll end up with all the best people quickly leaving for real projects where they can do real work on real products for real pay (bonuses for revenue-yielding projects are much, much higher than for anything else). The project itself will be a dysfunctional joke since you can't run it with the best talent routinely recruited away. The only people who will work on it will be dead weight who don't care to work on real products or even make any progress on a bogus one, which is the definition of the sort of people you should immediately fire. In fact, the whole initial "pool" of candidates sounds toxic, if the only reason they were given this project is that any other _real_ work would cause them to leave. As a hiring manager, I'd be very skeptical of anyone who seemed to be this sort of indifferent diva, and would not be looking to hire them. To sum up, it's a fun little theory, but extremely unlikely to work in practice, and I've never seen anything like it. The simple explanation that Fuchsia is an Android successor is much more likely, and there's zero evidence for the far-fetched "talent pool" explanation other than an unsupported comment by some anonymous "one person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff". It's ridiculous.
nostrademons 8y ago
$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose. Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > $50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. See my comment to nnq. You can't just take "100 of your best engineers", and stick them on some bogus project that regularly gets raided for its best talent by hiring managers. If they'd rather work on a bogus project than on a real product, they're not very useful engineers. The project will quickly be seen as a joke, and not just by one unnamed "person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff", but by everyone in the company. No serious engineer would stay on it. There's literally no evidence for this far-fetched theory, and no verified examples of this happening in the industry at all. If an engineer isn't producing something worthwhile, he's not a good engineer, certainly not "one of my best engineers". The whole theory is pretty crazy and it's funny it ended up so high in the comment thread that we're discussing it seriously. > Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." [...] This is a lot of unsubstantiated hand-waving with no real data to back it up. The data I've seen is that involuntary turnover (aka termination) in FAANG is 5-8% annually, which is very reasonable for healthy companies. Have you worked for a FAANG? People are regularly put on notice and fired for poor performance. Even a very successful company can't afford to keep poor performers indefinitely. If they do, they would not remain successful for long. You're describing a public company with fiduciary accountability to its shareholders as if it can be run like some corrupt retirement home for aging diva former-engineers. You realize that if Google was throwing away $50-100m of investor money per year, an exec would eventually have to publicly explain to the shareholders why their money is wasted this way, and if Google was trying to hide that it is a bogus project, then they would be lying to investors, which is a criminal offense? This theory is frankly nonsense.
ashelmire 8y ago
> If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. Wait uh... are you saying seniors at Google make an average of $500k?
- ummonk 8y ago
  That seems like a low estimate of the cost of a senior SWE at Google. They probably earn at least 400k in cash + bonus + stock, and there are employer costs beyond that (office space, benefits, payroll taxes).
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    Glassdoor has avg total comp for senior swes at google at 193k...
    - fyi_see_fyi 8y ago
      I am very surprised if that's the case. For what it's worth, I just started at Google as a Senior SWE this summer. My base is in the 180s. With an average annual bonus, my moving/starting bonus, and stock grant (ignoring stock price movements), my first four years should be 400ish...very high 300s really. BTW, https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is another source of data which might prove useful 190 total comp is more in line with what I expect for an early career person. Welcome to 2018 tech company salaries.
      - ashelmire 8y ago
        That's a pretty great package... brb applying to work at Google.
    - dlor 8y ago
      That is definitely not correct.
- mchahn 8y ago
  Salary is usually only 2/3 of the cost of an employee. Benefits and overhead are a big part.
nevir 8y ago
> the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. There's a high likelihood that at least some of their work will be of value to the company—or, if everything pans out, they get a fancy new platform. The real motivation is probably somewhere in the middle (retention, product development). This is a solid bet to make, especially when you are effectively not worried about the cost (thanks, ads!). A lot of Google is heavily research focused like this: let engineers (mostly) freely explore complicated problem spaces. If it's a product—awesome!—see if there's market fit, and then grow it. If not, no problem; see where it, or parts thereof, can be applied elsewhere within Google. Source: I worked there.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  Sure, that's more reasonable. You're describing a match between business needs (the potential Android successor - quite an important business target) and a critical mass of senior engineers eager to work on the product. I'm sure Google is aware that more interesting and ambitious projects do tend to capture and hold the interest of the most talented engineers, and that figures into their business decisions. What I strongly dispute is this notion that such a project would be subsidized solely for retention. Everyone knows about big Google projects that were shut down when their business case lost its appeal. I've also seen much smaller projects shut down when their value proposition was no longer deemed sufficient, even when their members were talented, passionate, and at real risk of leaving once their project shut down.
oscargrouch 8y ago
> That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposedly will never benefit their employer. I think Google figure it out its real bussiness like MacDonalds did: Not burgers, but real state bussiness. I think Google understood they are not in the make "valuable useful tech" bussiness as one is inclined to think, they are in the "tech talent retention bussiness". Even if they dont use the talent, if they are able to lock the talent inside Google as a kid in a Circus, their competitors wont have access to the talent pool they need, and this will make a big monopoly on Google. Of course, this is only possible if you have the ammount of cash and credentials Google have to attract tech people like Disney do to kids. I think this is their real primary mission; attract human talent, retain and ultimately lock it from the competition. Do you ever wonder why the startup scene is so dry lately, even with so many enginners and tech focused people no short of ideas? The titans are just sucking all the oxigene in the room making everyone else choke.
dplgk 8y ago
> they often merge to a single deliverable that is better than any of the projects could produce individually. Do you have an example of this?

nnq 8y ago

> It just doesn't make any sense to retain someone indefinitely if they're not going to produce anything of value They likely will. Whenever a new projects starts, engineers can be recruited for it from the pre-vetted internal pool. Hiring and the ramp-up time for new hires would cost more. Yeah, if you're an ossified compnay rarely starting new projects it doesn't make sense. But if your Google this is not the case...

dunpeal 8y ago
This sounds good in theory, but in practice what you're describing will not be stable, sustainable, or at all practical. You can't really run this sort of revolving-door "talent pool" project for long, certainly not a massive project of 100+ engineers. If every time a new project opens up, its hiring managers get to unreservedly raid the "talent pool" project for star performers, then pretty soon this project will be known internally as a joke, that is at priority zero, and any but its most dysfunctional engineers will be rushing to other projects, either internally within Google or (more likely) outside it. You'll end up with all the best people quickly leaving for real projects where they can do real work on real products for real pay (bonuses for revenue-yielding projects are much, much higher than for anything else). The project itself will be a dysfunctional joke since you can't run it with the best talent routinely recruited away. The only people who will work on it will be dead weight who don't care to work on real products or even make any progress on a bogus one, which is the definition of the sort of people you should immediately fire. In fact, the whole initial "pool" of candidates sounds toxic, if the only reason they were given this project is that any other _real_ work would cause them to leave. As a hiring manager, I'd be very skeptical of anyone who seemed to be this sort of indifferent diva, and would not be looking to hire them. To sum up, it's a fun little theory, but extremely unlikely to work in practice, and I've never seen anything like it. The simple explanation that Fuchsia is an Android successor is much more likely, and there's zero evidence for the far-fetched "talent pool" explanation other than an unsupported comment by some anonymous "one person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff". It's ridiculous.

nostrademons 8y ago

$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose. Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.

dunpeal 8y ago
> $50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. See my comment to nnq. You can't just take "100 of your best engineers", and stick them on some bogus project that regularly gets raided for its best talent by hiring managers. If they'd rather work on a bogus project than on a real product, they're not very useful engineers. The project will quickly be seen as a joke, and not just by one unnamed "person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff", but by everyone in the company. No serious engineer would stay on it. There's literally no evidence for this far-fetched theory, and no verified examples of this happening in the industry at all. If an engineer isn't producing something worthwhile, he's not a good engineer, certainly not "one of my best engineers". The whole theory is pretty crazy and it's funny it ended up so high in the comment thread that we're discussing it seriously. > Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." [...] This is a lot of unsubstantiated hand-waving with no real data to back it up. The data I've seen is that involuntary turnover (aka termination) in FAANG is 5-8% annually, which is very reasonable for healthy companies. Have you worked for a FAANG? People are regularly put on notice and fired for poor performance. Even a very successful company can't afford to keep poor performers indefinitely. If they do, they would not remain successful for long. You're describing a public company with fiduciary accountability to its shareholders as if it can be run like some corrupt retirement home for aging diva former-engineers. You realize that if Google was throwing away $50-100m of investor money per year, an exec would eventually have to publicly explain to the shareholders why their money is wasted this way, and if Google was trying to hide that it is a bogus project, then they would be lying to investors, which is a criminal offense? This theory is frankly nonsense.

ashelmire 8y ago

> If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. Wait uh... are you saying seniors at Google make an average of $500k?

ummonk 8y ago
That seems like a low estimate of the cost of a senior SWE at Google. They probably earn at least 400k in cash + bonus + stock, and there are employer costs beyond that (office space, benefits, payroll taxes).
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Glassdoor has avg total comp for senior swes at google at 193k...
  - fyi_see_fyi 8y ago
    I am very surprised if that's the case. For what it's worth, I just started at Google as a Senior SWE this summer. My base is in the 180s. With an average annual bonus, my moving/starting bonus, and stock grant (ignoring stock price movements), my first four years should be 400ish...very high 300s really. BTW, https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is another source of data which might prove useful 190 total comp is more in line with what I expect for an early career person. Welcome to 2018 tech company salaries.
    - ashelmire 8y ago
      That's a pretty great package... brb applying to work at Google.
  - dlor 8y ago
    That is definitely not correct.
mchahn 8y ago
Salary is usually only 2/3 of the cost of an employee. Benefits and overhead are a big part.

nevir 8y ago

> the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. There's a high likelihood that at least some of their work will be of value to the company—or, if everything pans out, they get a fancy new platform. The real motivation is probably somewhere in the middle (retention, product development). This is a solid bet to make, especially when you are effectively not worried about the cost (thanks, ads!). A lot of Google is heavily research focused like this: let engineers (mostly) freely explore complicated problem spaces. If it's a product—awesome!—see if there's market fit, and then grow it. If not, no problem; see where it, or parts thereof, can be applied elsewhere within Google. Source: I worked there.

dunpeal 8y ago
Sure, that's more reasonable. You're describing a match between business needs (the potential Android successor - quite an important business target) and a critical mass of senior engineers eager to work on the product. I'm sure Google is aware that more interesting and ambitious projects do tend to capture and hold the interest of the most talented engineers, and that figures into their business decisions. What I strongly dispute is this notion that such a project would be subsidized solely for retention. Everyone knows about big Google projects that were shut down when their business case lost its appeal. I've also seen much smaller projects shut down when their value proposition was no longer deemed sufficient, even when their members were talented, passionate, and at real risk of leaving once their project shut down.

oscargrouch 8y ago

> That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposedly will never benefit their employer. I think Google figure it out its real bussiness like MacDonalds did: Not burgers, but real state bussiness. I think Google understood they are not in the make "valuable useful tech" bussiness as one is inclined to think, they are in the "tech talent retention bussiness". Even if they dont use the talent, if they are able to lock the talent inside Google as a kid in a Circus, their competitors wont have access to the talent pool they need, and this will make a big monopoly on Google. Of course, this is only possible if you have the ammount of cash and credentials Google have to attract tech people like Disney do to kids. I think this is their real primary mission; attract human talent, retain and ultimately lock it from the competition. Do you ever wonder why the startup scene is so dry lately, even with so many enginners and tech focused people no short of ideas? The titans are just sucking all the oxigene in the room making everyone else choke.

dplgk 8y ago

> they often merge to a single deliverable that is better than any of the projects could produce individually. Do you have an example of this?