4 ms·

> Imagine if I'm working at Google and I find a way to save Google $10M/year via improved hardware efficiency. The sole reason while your research generates mi

by IMTDb 5y ago

> Imagine if I'm working at Google and I find a way to save Google $10M/year via improved hardware efficiency. The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year. As stated above, you deserve to be compensated for a part of your work. But pretending that your compensation should also include the "Google scale" factor - which you did not contribute to in any meaningful way - is not right. If you want your compensation to be based on the outcome of your work on the company as a whole, you need to work for equity and not for salary, and accept the associated risks - which might include getting nothing for a lot of efforts. Of course, your compensation will then also include the work made by others, which you might like or dislike. If you want to be able to precisely measure your own contribution, exclude any other factors, and capture almost all of it, you probably are better of creating your own solo-founder type of company and stay solo. When 1+1=3, it's hard to precisely pinpoint which "1" generated the extra value.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> But pretending that your compensation should also include the "Google scale" factor - which you did not contribute to in any meaningful way - is not right. If I can make $1 on my own, and you can make $1 on your own, but together we can make $4, we each deserve $2. I don't deserve $3, even though I turned your lone $1 into $4. But I also don't deserve just $1, because I did contribute to the scale factor. In todays world, it seems like we'd each get $1.
- IMTDb 5y ago
  More accurately: If me and me friends lemonade stands makes $1 million on it's own and your lemonade stands makes $1 on it's own. We bring them together and make $1.1 million because we had an amazing product and you are an amazing sales guy (yay!). How do we divide the extra $100k. Are you pretending that you should get $50k (50 thousands times what you were doing alone) and we should get $50k (1.005 times what we were doing without you) as well ? That does not seem very fair to me at all.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Some of that extra $100k should probably go to the company, but sales is maybe not the best example because salespeople are quite often paid on a base+commission basis and would easily get a fixed percentage of all of their sales for the year. It seems high for sr engineers to make $500k/yr but it should be noted that senior sales people can also make $500k/yr if they're doing well!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bialpio 5y ago
  Not necessarily. If you add a 3rd person, C, that also can make $1 alone, but $5 with person A, then person A's worth is somewhere between $2 and $3 if my intuition is right (i.e. B would need to agree to uneven split to convince A to work with them). This falls under computational social choice field (coalition formation), and is not a straightforward thing to compute.
- cscurmudgeon 5y ago
  The analogy doesn't apply. In this case, there are thousands of other employees and you together making $4. Not just two people.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year. "Google scale" wouldn't exist without the workers that make it possible. Seems to me like they can get more of that value they enable than they currently do.
utopcell 5y ago
What a silly argument, decoupling the company's status from the contributions of its high-performing employees as if they're independent events. Google probably runs at 25% profit margin, so $10M/y savings equate to $40M/y additional revenue. A Google cloud sales rep probably makes at least 5% sales commission, so they'd net at least $2M for equivalent sales (which they would only able to achieve because of Google scale, but if you make that argument with them, good luck keeping them employed). Conversely, a SWE delivering $10M/y savings would probably only see a small bump on their refreshers and bonus.

by IMTDb 5y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> But pretending that your compensation should also include the "Google scale" factor - which you did not contribute to in any meaningful way - is not right. If I can make $1 on my own, and you can make $1 on your own, but together we can make $4, we each deserve $2. I don't deserve $3, even though I turned your lone $1 into $4. But I also don't deserve just $1, because I did contribute to the scale factor. In todays world, it seems like we'd each get $1.

IMTDb 5y ago
More accurately: If me and me friends lemonade stands makes $1 million on it's own and your lemonade stands makes $1 on it's own. We bring them together and make $1.1 million because we had an amazing product and you are an amazing sales guy (yay!). How do we divide the extra $100k. Are you pretending that you should get $50k (50 thousands times what you were doing alone) and we should get $50k (1.005 times what we were doing without you) as well ? That does not seem very fair to me at all.
- fragmede 5y ago
  Some of that extra $100k should probably go to the company, but sales is maybe not the best example because salespeople are quite often paid on a base+commission basis and would easily get a fixed percentage of all of their sales for the year. It seems high for sr engineers to make $500k/yr but it should be noted that senior sales people can also make $500k/yr if they're doing well!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bialpio 5y ago
Not necessarily. If you add a 3rd person, C, that also can make $1 alone, but $5 with person A, then person A's worth is somewhere between $2 and $3 if my intuition is right (i.e. B would need to agree to uneven split to convince A to work with them). This falls under computational social choice field (coalition formation), and is not a straightforward thing to compute.
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
The analogy doesn't apply. In this case, there are thousands of other employees and you together making $4. Not just two people.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year. "Google scale" wouldn't exist without the workers that make it possible. Seems to me like they can get more of that value they enable than they currently do.

utopcell 5y ago

What a silly argument, decoupling the company's status from the contributions of its high-performing employees as if they're independent events. Google probably runs at 25% profit margin, so $10M/y savings equate to $40M/y additional revenue. A Google cloud sales rep probably makes at least 5% sales commission, so they'd net at least $2M for equivalent sales (which they would only able to achieve because of Google scale, but if you make that argument with them, good luck keeping them employed). Conversely, a SWE delivering $10M/y savings would probably only see a small bump on their refreshers and bonus.