7 ms·

Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO

54 points by ehershey 4y ago

kyl3B3nzl3 4y ago
Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."
- dividefuel 4y ago
  And even for that I can't find a source either. This article mentions making the company 20% more efficient, and it says that Pichai hinted at cuts, but doesn't give a direct quote there either. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-make-company-20percent-more-efficient-hints-at-potential-cuts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-...
- de6u99er 4y ago
  They just increased their staff by 20% within the past year. To me it looks more like Pichai wants to be perceived by stock holdets like he's doing something.
KerrAvon 4y ago
Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.
- jfim 4y ago
  There's a value to having slack. Most novel ideas come from having one's mind wander, not by being constantly busy with coding. Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.
- qdog 4y ago
  Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers. Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).
- googlryas 4y ago
  It doesn't, in my experience. In the previous incarnation of the perf review system(which just slightly changed recently), there were effectively 3 buckets: Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations. The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve". The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role. The third one is "okay good, maybe i can go for promo if I string together 4 of these performance reviews as exceeds expectations"
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    That sounds fucking horrifically stressful.
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Why do people at Google seemingly care so much about promotions?
    - googlryas 4y ago
      +25% total comp I imagine. Also a lot of them are in the sf/sv housing market and think they'll never be able to buy a house even making 250k/yr
      - klipklop 4y ago
        This is exactly it. After they hit whatever promo level that let’s them buy a home they usually stop trying to climb so hard unless they are really ambitious. If you want your partner to stay home and help raise the kids you probably have to make L6 at a minimum. You can make $250k and have zero chance of buying a single family home in the South Bay now. Prob need a household income around $300-350k before it starts to become reasonable. The recent interest rate hikes really jumped up the monthly payments. Dumpy houses can go for $2m, USD but that is slowly trending down.
    - dmitrygr 4y ago
      Pay bands are relatively narrow. The only way to a serious raise is promotion.
dividefuel 4y ago
Did the CEO say that? The article didn't contain a single direct quote.
- kyrra 4y ago
  googler, opinions are my own. See: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pichai_productivity/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pic... Basically search for any articles about "Google CEO" and "productivity".
kyrra 4y ago
Googler, opinions are my own. The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings). But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst. At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here. [0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7 https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...
- longtimegoogler 4y ago
  Same. I have never met this proverbial rest and vest guy making 7 figures. Most everyone I know is scrambling to survive the performance reviews and get to the next level. And if your productivity is very low you will get put on an improve or out plan.
- melony 4y ago
  Are you an employee who worked his/her way up or are you one of those who were acquihired?
  - kyrra 4y ago
    I was previously at Cisco (which aquired Sourcefire, where I was at). That acquisition went poor, so I applied to Google. I did the interview process as a normal SWE at Google. Been there around 7 years now, all in payments.
    - melony 4y ago
      Ask around some of your colleagues who joined as acquihires, especially the early ones.
pyrolistical 4y ago
Also the term "rest and vest" isn't use correctly here. "Rest and vest" refers to people who were acquired during an acquisition. They were too important to fire as they had vital information how the acquired company worked, but also they couldn't leave due to the golden handcuffs they were given in the form of options. So they "rest and vest".
- lordswork 4y ago
  Maybe this is how the term originated, but I have never heard it used in this context personally.
eduction 4y ago
I’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds. Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus. While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm. Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in. What a company.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  > What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    Depends; these would seem like the kind of decisions that affect the long term a lot more than the short term. In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent. They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a few bad decisions. It’s precisely because they’re still making boatloads of money that this makes even less sense.
walrus01 4y ago
The floating advertising and popups on that inc.com url are absolute cancer.
davewbrwn 4y ago
Google has over invested in AI research projects and, while they are pumping out good research, they aren’t exactly pumping out great products. If I were Pichai I’d trim the fat there first. As for rest and vesters, it sounds like it refers to senior people who have climbed the ladder high enough to coast at “meeting expectations” which obviously is not good enough grounds for firing someone.
- de6u99er 4y ago
  And there's also quantum computing.
LarsDu88 4y ago
Google is a de-facto ad search monopoly that can (and continues to be able to) afford dead weight. The real threat to Google is NOT a bunch of unproductive employees. They could probably run the ad search groups, android, g-mail, docs, and more with 10% of their current headcount if employees were worked to the bone. As a conglomerate, Alphabet can and does burn money in attempts to be innovative in a true sense with Google X, Calico, Verily, DeepMind, and more. What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason. Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.
de6u99er 4y ago
This will backfire very hard. Pichai just wants to deflect from his incompetence, by blaming those who made Google into what it once was. It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives. He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.

54 points by ehershey 4y ago

Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."

dividefuel 4y ago
And even for that I can't find a source either. This article mentions making the company 20% more efficient, and it says that Pichai hinted at cuts, but doesn't give a direct quote there either. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-make-company-20percent-more-efficient-hints-at-potential-cuts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-...
de6u99er 4y ago
They just increased their staff by 20% within the past year. To me it looks more like Pichai wants to be perceived by stock holdets like he's doing something.

KerrAvon 4y ago

Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.

jfim 4y ago
There's a value to having slack. Most novel ideas come from having one's mind wander, not by being constantly busy with coding. Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.
qdog 4y ago
Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers. Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).
googlryas 4y ago
It doesn't, in my experience. In the previous incarnation of the perf review system(which just slightly changed recently), there were effectively 3 buckets: Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations. The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve". The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role. The third one is "okay good, maybe i can go for promo if I string together 4 of these performance reviews as exceeds expectations"
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  That sounds fucking horrifically stressful.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Why do people at Google seemingly care so much about promotions?
  - googlryas 4y ago
    +25% total comp I imagine. Also a lot of them are in the sf/sv housing market and think they'll never be able to buy a house even making 250k/yr
    - klipklop 4y ago
      This is exactly it. After they hit whatever promo level that let’s them buy a home they usually stop trying to climb so hard unless they are really ambitious. If you want your partner to stay home and help raise the kids you probably have to make L6 at a minimum. You can make $250k and have zero chance of buying a single family home in the South Bay now. Prob need a household income around $300-350k before it starts to become reasonable. The recent interest rate hikes really jumped up the monthly payments. Dumpy houses can go for $2m, USD but that is slowly trending down.
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    Pay bands are relatively narrow. The only way to a serious raise is promotion.

dividefuel 4y ago

Did the CEO say that? The article didn't contain a single direct quote.

kyrra 4y ago
googler, opinions are my own. See: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pichai_productivity/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pic... Basically search for any articles about "Google CEO" and "productivity".

kyrra 4y ago

Googler, opinions are my own. The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings). But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst. At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here. [0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7 https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...

longtimegoogler 4y ago
Same. I have never met this proverbial rest and vest guy making 7 figures. Most everyone I know is scrambling to survive the performance reviews and get to the next level. And if your productivity is very low you will get put on an improve or out plan.
melony 4y ago
Are you an employee who worked his/her way up or are you one of those who were acquihired?
- kyrra 4y ago
  I was previously at Cisco (which aquired Sourcefire, where I was at). That acquisition went poor, so I applied to Google. I did the interview process as a normal SWE at Google. Been there around 7 years now, all in payments.
  - melony 4y ago
    Ask around some of your colleagues who joined as acquihires, especially the early ones.

pyrolistical 4y ago

Also the term "rest and vest" isn't use correctly here. "Rest and vest" refers to people who were acquired during an acquisition. They were too important to fire as they had vital information how the acquired company worked, but also they couldn't leave due to the golden handcuffs they were given in the form of options. So they "rest and vest".

lordswork 4y ago
Maybe this is how the term originated, but I have never heard it used in this context personally.

eduction 4y ago

I’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds. Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus. While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm. Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in. What a company.

riku_iki 4y ago
> What a company. I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Depends; these would seem like the kind of decisions that affect the long term a lot more than the short term. In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent. They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a few bad decisions. It’s precisely because they’re still making boatloads of money that this makes even less sense.

walrus01 4y ago

The floating advertising and popups on that inc.com url are absolute cancer.

davewbrwn 4y ago

Google has over invested in AI research projects and, while they are pumping out good research, they aren’t exactly pumping out great products. If I were Pichai I’d trim the fat there first. As for rest and vesters, it sounds like it refers to senior people who have climbed the ladder high enough to coast at “meeting expectations” which obviously is not good enough grounds for firing someone.

de6u99er 4y ago
And there's also quantum computing.

LarsDu88 4y ago

Google is a de-facto ad search monopoly that can (and continues to be able to) afford dead weight. The real threat to Google is NOT a bunch of unproductive employees. They could probably run the ad search groups, android, g-mail, docs, and more with 10% of their current headcount if employees were worked to the bone. As a conglomerate, Alphabet can and does burn money in attempts to be innovative in a true sense with Google X, Calico, Verily, DeepMind, and more. What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason. Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.

de6u99er 4y ago

This will backfire very hard. Pichai just wants to deflect from his incompetence, by blaming those who made Google into what it once was. It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives. He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.