7 ms·

The Google Vortex

106 points by soundsop 16y ago

CoolGuySteve 16y ago
"A universe where on average, each employee produced $425,450 in profit in 2010, after deducting their salary and all other expenses. (Or alternatively: $1.2 million in revenue.)" Wait a minute, you generate that much profit and then you don't get paid even half that much? Sounds like why I left Apple.
- klbarry 16y ago
  Considering Google takes all of the risk, and creates an environment where it's much easier to create value than on your own, I think it's more than fair.
  - Zaak 16y ago
    Agreed. Some people choose to leave Google to start their own companies. Some people choose to stay in the situation they have at Google. Choice is generally a good thing.
  - CoolGuySteve 16y ago
    Yeah but out of the $1.2 million of value that his labour is creating, he's only getting around 10% (based on average salaries at Google). Are the reduced risk and added infrastructure really worth Google's 90% cut?
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      You need to deduct employment expenses from that, which is why the article uses the $400k number.
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Would you be able to make that $120K (which seems low to me, actually) elsewhere? That's the important comparison - it's quite possible for you to keep 100% of the value you create, but only create $60-70K/year of value. Several of my college friends (not in the valley) are in that position.
- illumin8 16y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but people start companies to (shudder) make a profit... If you're not comfortable with someone making $1 million in revenue from your $100K salary, you probably shouldn't get a job anywhere.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - CoolGuySteve 16y ago
    *Except Wall St.
- apenwarr 16y ago
  Remember that's an average. Some people produce less and get paid less, some people produce more and get paid more. The two are not always correlated of course. In fact, at Google in particular, I'm sure it's crazily skewed: most people there are probably net money losers, and AdWords floats them all. If you took a vote, I bet the majority of people at Google would be terrified to get paid according to the corporate earnings they account for. Also note that the quoted earnings have of course deducted anything that got paid directly to the owners; the listed earnings are the money that is getting re-invested straight back into the company, not paid to the founders, so it's not quite valid to compare it directly to what you would earn if you owned the company.
  - sophacles 16y ago
    Just saying, adwords is 100% useless without the other google stuff to run it on. This is important, and certainly makes the "actual per employee" profit much, much more difficult to calculate.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    It's hard to do an accounting, because virtually everything at Google is a team effort. There've been projects I've worked on that have generated hundreds of millions in additional revenue. However, there was a group downstream of us in Ads doing the actual sales. And we had groups upstream that we rely upon for data. And those groups had groups upstream of them that managed the infrastructure. Who earned the money? If you take out any one component of the pipeline, it never happened.
- cageface 16y ago
  I'm sure Google (and Apple) is a great place to work but after finally cutting the cord and working only for myself last year I can't imagine working for anybody else unless it's absolutely necessary.
  - apenwarr 16y ago
    Oddly enough, I'm in the opposite situation: I've never held a serious job that wasn't, in some way or another, working for myself. (Other than 4-month co-op placements as a student.) The opposite experience will be interesting to try out.
    - cageface 16y ago
      If you've never been an employee before you should certainly try it. Even if it doesn't suit you you'll understand the tradeoffs of self-employment vs a regular job a lot better. Personally, the only thing I miss is the social environment of the office.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I'm really the opposite. After starting and being a member of several startups, I'm on my last. While I've had profitable exits, nothing that I could retire on (and still feel really comfortable). And I've had friends in industry move up the ranks and get high six figure salaries and multi-million dollar bonuses. And I sometimes look at the hecticness of startup life and think that I'm finally getting too old for it. And while the idea of working for myself is a good one, I've always felt like I was working for someone -- just this person never told me who they were, what they wanted, or when I'd be paid. :-)
      - captainbenis 16y ago
        I'm in the same situation. I also don't want to peghole myself as a small company start-up guy. I'd like the experience of working in a large corporate, and also to surround myself in smarter people and learn and teach a tonne.
shadowsun7 16y ago
I think it's worth noting that while Google has a vortex (cool employees go in, harder for them to come out), Facebook has seen so many people leaving and doing innovative things that it's got it's very own mafia now. Perhaps because it's possible to do something new and crazy (and unrelated) in Google, and not so possible to do so in Facebook.
- PakG1 16y ago
  That's not a fair comparison. Facebook's mafia guys are mostly early-stage employees. Early-stage employees tend to be more entrepreneurial and are also more tight-knit, which is how the mafia sentiment is able to sustain itself. Plenty of Googlers are entrepreneurial enough to leave and do startups, but they aren't considered mafia because they were never part of an early core group that bonded. And those that are entrepreneurial enough to leave aren't as high-profile entrepreneurial as early-stage employees would be.
- Apocryphon 16y ago
  What about Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.?
cal5k 16y ago
It's sort of annoying, actually, that Google is hiring so voraciously in Waterloo. It's making it extremely difficult for us to hire awesome Waterloo grads partly for this reason. So, while we continue to hire from Waterloo where it works, we're also looking further afield for talent... Iqaluit here we come!
- apenwarr 16y ago
  I agree with you, and about Waterloo specifically. I'm probably going to be banned from HN for saying this, but the giant Google talent vacuum cleaner is one potential reason that starting a startup right now is especially difficult and maybe not the right choice. When I've started startups before, it's been in economic down times (eg. right after the .com boom). I actually preferred it that way.
  - cal5k 16y ago
    To be honest, one can always find a reason NOT to start a company. Successful companies have been founded in good times and in bad, in war and in peace, with easy access to talent or with one helluva difficult grind.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jacobian 16y ago
I was nodding along so strongly to the first half of this that I was genuinely surprised when the other shoe dropped. I see another friend get sucked into the vortex nearly every week, and it's gotten to the point where I have trouble being happy for them. I mean, I'm thrilled to see friends do well, but I know that suddenly a great mind has been removed from the larger community. Conversations with pre-Google-employment friends go along the lines of: "What are you working on?" "Well I was working on an inventory tracking system using Flask and Redis so I needed to kludge together something to store session in ..." After getting hired by Google, these conversations are more like: "What are you working on?" "App Engine." "Oh. Um. What parts?" "Oh, you know. Python and stuff." It's sad. So congrats to Avery and everyone else who's getting sucked in. I'm sure things are awesome over there, and I hope some day you'll be able to come back out and tell the rest of us about it. But I sure as hell am never going to give up my freedom to talk to my friends.
- apenwarr 16y ago
  Your last line is an interesting one. The point when more than 50% of my friends worked at Google was a really serious one for me: it became the point at which joining Google meant gaining the freedom to talk to my friends. Not that this is a good thing. But it's very interesting, in terms of incentives.
  - jacobian 16y ago
    > The point when more than 50% of my friends worked at Google was a really serious one for me: it became the point at which joining Google meant gaining the freedom to talk to my friends. Man, I just find that tremendously depressing. But now I feel like a jerk for raining on your parade so I'll butt out. Enjoy the tech and the food and the awesomeness, and I hope some day you'll be able to tell the rest of us what you've learned.
    - khafra 16y ago
      It could be worse. If you go military/industrial complex instead, even if all your friends also have TS/SCI clearances you can't talk about what you do unless they need to know; and even then only in a SCIF and over an encrypted line.
mycroftiv 16y ago
One of the main realities of our current world that I strongly disagree with is the existence of the NDA. I don't believe that individual human beings should ever be required to waive their right to say whatever they want to about anything. Of course, the entire corporate universe is based on NDAs and secrecy and competition - I wonder what an alternate universe based on free sharing of information and cooperation would be like. I'm pretty sure its a universe that I would prefer to live in.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  You never have to join a company with an NDA. It is about as clear of a choice in life as you'll ever have.
  - guelo 16y ago
    I've had quite a few tech jobs and I've had to sign that piece of paper at everyone of them, including at my own startup.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I've worked at plenty of jobs that don't require NDAs -- if NDAs are offensive enough, find an industry where they're not prevalent. And if you bootstrap your own startup you shouldn't need one.
  - svlla 16y ago
    i know, right? NDAs have such clear, big fonts and it says "YOUR CHOICE" at the top. awesome comment dude.
- lukifer 16y ago
  Information asymmetry is one of the most powerful forces in existence, be it political, economic or interpersonal. As long as it can exist, it will exist.
- CrLf 16y ago
  I agree. Any decent professional should know when to keep his mouth shut. And it should know that leaking privileged information would potentially get him fired and marked as unreliable. No NDA required. An NDA not only keeps an employee quiet, but it makes him liable long after the employment relationship has ended. I, for one, would not work for any company that would force me to sign an NDA. Besides being insulting, it's just not worth it.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
I really hope it works out fabulously for you. Say "Hi!" to the Andele guys and their delicious burritos. My experience was that working at Google was unlike any other place I've ever worked before (or since).
- rachelbythebay 16y ago
  Andale is gone, sorry to say. It's different, that's for sure. Different isn't necessarily equal to better, though.
YuriNiyazov 16y ago
"Many of them emerge talking about bureaucracy, politics, 'big company attitude', projects that got killed, and how things 'aren't like they used to be.'". There's a great book called "Watership Down". In it, a band of ragtag rabbits whose home was destroyed come across a warren where all rabbits are well-fed and seemingly happy, and yet, something is wrong, every so often one of them disappears. Except no one talks about it, because that would mean admitting that they live on a rabbit farm. Draw your own conclusion.
- tytso 16y ago
  A lot of this is relative. If you are used to a 30 person company, yes, there's more politics. Compared to where I came from (a 300,000 person company), Google is much, much better. (And if you think the politics are bad in companies, its nothing compared to the politics in a university's I/T department. Why? Perhaps because there's less at stake...) I've worked for a university (MIT), a startup (VA Linux), a big company (IBM), and compared to my past employers, I've easily found Google to be the best for me. Others may find the environment at a 30 person, 300 person, or 300,000 person company more congenial. A lot of it is personal preference...
stcredzero 16y ago
Help solve...the annoying way that surprise popularity usually means losing more money (hosting fees) by surprise. Google is going to create an updated version of Geocities?

106 points by soundsop 16y ago

"A universe where on average, each employee produced $425,450 in profit in 2010, after deducting their salary and all other expenses. (Or alternatively: $1.2 million in revenue.)" Wait a minute, you generate that much profit and then you don't get paid even half that much? Sounds like why I left Apple.

klbarry 16y ago
Considering Google takes all of the risk, and creates an environment where it's much easier to create value than on your own, I think it's more than fair.
- Zaak 16y ago
  Agreed. Some people choose to leave Google to start their own companies. Some people choose to stay in the situation they have at Google. Choice is generally a good thing.
- CoolGuySteve 16y ago
  Yeah but out of the $1.2 million of value that his labour is creating, he's only getting around 10% (based on average salaries at Google). Are the reduced risk and added infrastructure really worth Google's 90% cut?
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    You need to deduct employment expenses from that, which is why the article uses the $400k number.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Would you be able to make that $120K (which seems low to me, actually) elsewhere? That's the important comparison - it's quite possible for you to keep 100% of the value you create, but only create $60-70K/year of value. Several of my college friends (not in the valley) are in that position.
illumin8 16y ago
I hate to break it to you, but people start companies to (shudder) make a profit... If you're not comfortable with someone making $1 million in revenue from your $100K salary, you probably shouldn't get a job anywhere.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- CoolGuySteve 16y ago
  *Except Wall St.
apenwarr 16y ago
Remember that's an average. Some people produce less and get paid less, some people produce more and get paid more. The two are not always correlated of course. In fact, at Google in particular, I'm sure it's crazily skewed: most people there are probably net money losers, and AdWords floats them all. If you took a vote, I bet the majority of people at Google would be terrified to get paid according to the corporate earnings they account for. Also note that the quoted earnings have of course deducted anything that got paid directly to the owners; the listed earnings are the money that is getting re-invested straight back into the company, not paid to the founders, so it's not quite valid to compare it directly to what you would earn if you owned the company.
- sophacles 16y ago
  Just saying, adwords is 100% useless without the other google stuff to run it on. This is important, and certainly makes the "actual per employee" profit much, much more difficult to calculate.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  It's hard to do an accounting, because virtually everything at Google is a team effort. There've been projects I've worked on that have generated hundreds of millions in additional revenue. However, there was a group downstream of us in Ads doing the actual sales. And we had groups upstream that we rely upon for data. And those groups had groups upstream of them that managed the infrastructure. Who earned the money? If you take out any one component of the pipeline, it never happened.
cageface 16y ago
I'm sure Google (and Apple) is a great place to work but after finally cutting the cord and working only for myself last year I can't imagine working for anybody else unless it's absolutely necessary.
- apenwarr 16y ago
  Oddly enough, I'm in the opposite situation: I've never held a serious job that wasn't, in some way or another, working for myself. (Other than 4-month co-op placements as a student.) The opposite experience will be interesting to try out.
  - cageface 16y ago
    If you've never been an employee before you should certainly try it. Even if it doesn't suit you you'll understand the tradeoffs of self-employment vs a regular job a lot better. Personally, the only thing I miss is the social environment of the office.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I'm really the opposite. After starting and being a member of several startups, I'm on my last. While I've had profitable exits, nothing that I could retire on (and still feel really comfortable). And I've had friends in industry move up the ranks and get high six figure salaries and multi-million dollar bonuses. And I sometimes look at the hecticness of startup life and think that I'm finally getting too old for it. And while the idea of working for myself is a good one, I've always felt like I was working for someone -- just this person never told me who they were, what they wanted, or when I'd be paid. :-)
    - captainbenis 16y ago
      I'm in the same situation. I also don't want to peghole myself as a small company start-up guy. I'd like the experience of working in a large corporate, and also to surround myself in smarter people and learn and teach a tonne.

shadowsun7 16y ago

I think it's worth noting that while Google has a vortex (cool employees go in, harder for them to come out), Facebook has seen so many people leaving and doing innovative things that it's got it's very own mafia now. Perhaps because it's possible to do something new and crazy (and unrelated) in Google, and not so possible to do so in Facebook.

PakG1 16y ago
That's not a fair comparison. Facebook's mafia guys are mostly early-stage employees. Early-stage employees tend to be more entrepreneurial and are also more tight-knit, which is how the mafia sentiment is able to sustain itself. Plenty of Googlers are entrepreneurial enough to leave and do startups, but they aren't considered mafia because they were never part of an early core group that bonded. And those that are entrepreneurial enough to leave aren't as high-profile entrepreneurial as early-stage employees would be.
Apocryphon 16y ago
What about Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.?

cal5k 16y ago

It's sort of annoying, actually, that Google is hiring so voraciously in Waterloo. It's making it extremely difficult for us to hire awesome Waterloo grads partly for this reason. So, while we continue to hire from Waterloo where it works, we're also looking further afield for talent... Iqaluit here we come!

apenwarr 16y ago
I agree with you, and about Waterloo specifically. I'm probably going to be banned from HN for saying this, but the giant Google talent vacuum cleaner is one potential reason that starting a startup right now is especially difficult and maybe not the right choice. When I've started startups before, it's been in economic down times (eg. right after the .com boom). I actually preferred it that way.
- cal5k 16y ago
  To be honest, one can always find a reason NOT to start a company. Successful companies have been founded in good times and in bad, in war and in peace, with easy access to talent or with one helluva difficult grind.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jacobian 16y ago

I was nodding along so strongly to the first half of this that I was genuinely surprised when the other shoe dropped. I see another friend get sucked into the vortex nearly every week, and it's gotten to the point where I have trouble being happy for them. I mean, I'm thrilled to see friends do well, but I know that suddenly a great mind has been removed from the larger community. Conversations with pre-Google-employment friends go along the lines of: "What are you working on?" "Well I was working on an inventory tracking system using Flask and Redis so I needed to kludge together something to store session in ..." After getting hired by Google, these conversations are more like: "What are you working on?" "App Engine." "Oh. Um. What parts?" "Oh, you know. Python and stuff." It's sad. So congrats to Avery and everyone else who's getting sucked in. I'm sure things are awesome over there, and I hope some day you'll be able to come back out and tell the rest of us about it. But I sure as hell am never going to give up my freedom to talk to my friends.

apenwarr 16y ago
Your last line is an interesting one. The point when more than 50% of my friends worked at Google was a really serious one for me: it became the point at which joining Google meant gaining the freedom to talk to my friends. Not that this is a good thing. But it's very interesting, in terms of incentives.
- jacobian 16y ago
  > The point when more than 50% of my friends worked at Google was a really serious one for me: it became the point at which joining Google meant gaining the freedom to talk to my friends. Man, I just find that tremendously depressing. But now I feel like a jerk for raining on your parade so I'll butt out. Enjoy the tech and the food and the awesomeness, and I hope some day you'll be able to tell the rest of us what you've learned.
  - khafra 16y ago
    It could be worse. If you go military/industrial complex instead, even if all your friends also have TS/SCI clearances you can't talk about what you do unless they need to know; and even then only in a SCIF and over an encrypted line.

mycroftiv 16y ago

One of the main realities of our current world that I strongly disagree with is the existence of the NDA. I don't believe that individual human beings should ever be required to waive their right to say whatever they want to about anything. Of course, the entire corporate universe is based on NDAs and secrecy and competition - I wonder what an alternate universe based on free sharing of information and cooperation would be like. I'm pretty sure its a universe that I would prefer to live in.

kenjackson 16y ago
You never have to join a company with an NDA. It is about as clear of a choice in life as you'll ever have.
- guelo 16y ago
  I've had quite a few tech jobs and I've had to sign that piece of paper at everyone of them, including at my own startup.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I've worked at plenty of jobs that don't require NDAs -- if NDAs are offensive enough, find an industry where they're not prevalent. And if you bootstrap your own startup you shouldn't need one.
- svlla 16y ago
  i know, right? NDAs have such clear, big fonts and it says "YOUR CHOICE" at the top. awesome comment dude.
lukifer 16y ago
Information asymmetry is one of the most powerful forces in existence, be it political, economic or interpersonal. As long as it can exist, it will exist.
CrLf 16y ago
I agree. Any decent professional should know when to keep his mouth shut. And it should know that leaking privileged information would potentially get him fired and marked as unreliable. No NDA required. An NDA not only keeps an employee quiet, but it makes him liable long after the employment relationship has ended. I, for one, would not work for any company that would force me to sign an NDA. Besides being insulting, it's just not worth it.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

I really hope it works out fabulously for you. Say "Hi!" to the Andele guys and their delicious burritos. My experience was that working at Google was unlike any other place I've ever worked before (or since).

rachelbythebay 16y ago
Andale is gone, sorry to say. It's different, that's for sure. Different isn't necessarily equal to better, though.

YuriNiyazov 16y ago

"Many of them emerge talking about bureaucracy, politics, 'big company attitude', projects that got killed, and how things 'aren't like they used to be.'". There's a great book called "Watership Down". In it, a band of ragtag rabbits whose home was destroyed come across a warren where all rabbits are well-fed and seemingly happy, and yet, something is wrong, every so often one of them disappears. Except no one talks about it, because that would mean admitting that they live on a rabbit farm. Draw your own conclusion.

tytso 16y ago
A lot of this is relative. If you are used to a 30 person company, yes, there's more politics. Compared to where I came from (a 300,000 person company), Google is much, much better. (And if you think the politics are bad in companies, its nothing compared to the politics in a university's I/T department. Why? Perhaps because there's less at stake...) I've worked for a university (MIT), a startup (VA Linux), a big company (IBM), and compared to my past employers, I've easily found Google to be the best for me. Others may find the environment at a 30 person, 300 person, or 300,000 person company more congenial. A lot of it is personal preference...

stcredzero 16y ago

Help solve...the annoying way that surprise popularity usually means losing more money (hosting fees) by surprise. Google is going to create an updated version of Geocities?