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My total comp for creating GitHub Copilot
- asd88 3y ago20K bonus and promo on top of existing TC and perf incentives is not bad at all. Also, depending on their level, “creating GitHub Copilot” might actually be part of their baseline role expectations.
- kumarm 3y agoI think you missed this part: "The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo. That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot." If you are a Dev with skills you will see this all the time in big corp.
- predictabl3 3y agoI had a high up at Microsoft try to get me in trouble with my boss because I tried (appropriately) raising concerns that Azure was an near-impossible to target platform for OSS cloud software due to basic missing features. I had another thread with a higher up, with Russinovich on it, in which the principal manager lied repeatedly over, and over, and over about the entire shape of the VMSS API. They shipped anyway and have spent years adapting that API in the exact way I pointed out, and of course now have to support both. I had a team ask me not to ship a feature for (open source software you've all undoubtedly heard of) because they wanted me to use their Azure-proprietary flavor instead. I'm pretty sure that feature never even shipped because that team had designed it so poorly that it wasn't even suitable for tiny deployments. Microsoft is excellent as using young, passionate folks, especially ones that don't have experience in advocating for themselves, and pretty terrible at promoting or rewarding individual contributors doing their best to push things forward. Oh and my total comp was garbage. I joined a startup and got a 40% bump without even asking.
- whateveracct 3y agoVP is a hypocritical asshole - news at 11!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mjr00 3y agoYeah. I don't know what "created" means. Was this person strongly advocating for the creation of Copilot, putting together business cases for why Copilot should be created, and fighting with corporate to get dedicated resources onto a Copilot team? Or did this person join as a software engineer and happened to be assigned to the Copilot team? There's a much stronger case for "deserving" (whatever that means in capitalism terms) greater compensation for the former than the latter. This person is also trying to hire startup roles, so not exactly an unbiased viewpoint, either.
- ergocoder 3y ago> Also, depending on their level, “creating GitHub Copilot” might actually be part of their baseline role expectations. I can confidently say no it is not a part of the baseline expectation of any role.
- zdragnar 3y agoLast large company I worked for had something along the lines of "improving state of the art at the company" as a performance metric for principal / staff engineers. Basically, if you weren't doing something novel or carving out some personal impact on the development process, tooling, or product itself, they always had something they could hold against you if they wanted. The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
- thinkingkong 3y agoInnovating at a big company without the control over the rewards (and a contract to back it up) is sort of a lame bargain. You end up with a low downside risk (cash) but your upside opportunity is whatever you've pre-negotiated. Even within sales, if you bring home a huge contract you're more likely to get fired and forced to arbitrate your 'bonus'. The entire system is a joke. If you really want to do innovation and you don't need the resources of a huge company to do so, and you're risk adverse then... gosh I don't know what to say.
- jshen 3y agoThis hasn't been my experience. I spent over a decade at startups, a handful of years at a big research lab, and over a decade at a big company. I've made far far more money from working at the big company than I did at the startups, and one of them had an exit. Unless you are a founder, you will get less in most exits than you do getting bonuses and stock options at a big company once you've climbed the ladder a little bit.
- Barrin92 3y ago>If you really want to do innovation and you don't need the resources of a huge company to do so Practically anything at the cutting edge of research is incredibly capital intensive. So you're either loaded to start with or you have to spend most of your time collecting money rather than doing research. If you're a researcher who cares primarily about their work, the freedom you have by working for a large company or a government institution is immense. Personally I will take a generous paycheck and resources provided for me so I can do actual work over trying to add zeroes to my own bank account. Many scientists make this trade consciously.
- DC-3 3y agoMan does his job, gets bonus, complains about it. Ok.
- francisofascii 3y agoFrom the Twitter thread: > I’m not upset! Making copilot was an absolute joy. Just putting corpo internals in perspective for others.
- DC-3 3y agoWhen I'm definitely not upset about things I usually whine about them on twitter too.
- tester457 3y agoI would complain too if "The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo."
- dewey 3y agoWhy should this part be taken at face value when the other bits of information are already contested?
- lostmsu 3y agoWhich bits of information are contested? The op listed what he did up there in the thread, and yeah, that's pretty much all the Copilot is.
- rib3ye 3y agoI wouldn't post that publicly. But then again, I didn't create Copilot.
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoWay the pay less than agreed? That's always my question.
- scottiebarnes 3y agoUnfortunately I'm not sure there's much of an alternative here. If you want to capture more value you could have gone and done your own startup, but of course you would have needed access to data/code for your machine learning to learn off of, which may not have been possible outside of GitHub. Can anyone think of some other pathway, other than trying to negotiate for more compensation, after proof of concept is delivered?
- paxys 3y agoThere is no other pathway. You are either an entrepreneur or you aren't. You either take risks or you don't. If you opt for the safe paycheck then that paycheck is exactly what you are going to get.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- weeblewobble 3y agoJoin an early stage startup with a founder that can raise money and build partnerships
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pleonasticity 3y agoI work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself. Just because he contributed to the first prototype does not entitle him to claim creation. He wasn’t even the first person inside Microsoft to use LLMs in an IDE completion experience. The work from prototype to product is an order of magnitude more than prototype alone.
- SaintSeiya84 3y ago[flagged]
- mjr00 3y agoTheir profile does say "creator of GitHub Copilot, Dropbox Paper, MobileCoin, and Hackpad" which indicates a bit of an ego problem. Professional software is a team effort, and pretending to be the only person who worked on a project is a red flag. Most people would say lead developer rather than creator...
- treyfitty 3y agoWell, most interviews I’ve been a part of always emphasize “I wanna hear what YOU did, don’t talk about the team.” It kinda optimizes for embellishing ones contributions, and has almost become expected.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.
- fizwhiz 3y agoWhat's min-maxing?
- yazaddaruvala 3y agoIts a synonym for "optimizing" or "playing the game perfectly".
- Abroszka 3y ago20k sounds good. Also a good reminder to just work in an idgaf mode. Their success is not your success. Work the least you can to avoid being fired, and try to improve yourself whether it aligns with the company goals or not.
- mistrial9 3y ago20k is "chump change"
- subsection1h 3y agoYeah, many of these comments are bizarre. And the fact that you were downvoted is bonkers. I got a $5k bonus in 2004 at a non-FAANG for simply installing a single software program from source (I forget what it was) that wasn't in Debian's package repos at the time. I realize that HN in 2023 is a far different place than it was in the beginning, but has the percentage of users in rural states and developing nations skyrocketed recently or something?
- mistrial9 3y agothere might be some psychology about a) low-effort postulation b) mentioning money amount directly, which is directly different for different economies and life circumstances. It is my opinion but it might not be constructive.. for example I am easily offended by "all money all the time" type talkers, and there are many variaties of those.. its not inclusive but its not an inclusive topic either. last, harsh times call out harsh talk.. the economic stories here are so across the board. It does raise the blood pressure simply reading some days $0.02
- RajT88 3y ago20k is not a good bonus for this company. That's the bonus plan for a run of the mill engineer just starting out there. You'll find college grads hired right out of school with a higher bonus plan.
- 3y ago
- happytoexplain 3y agoI'm sure there's something bad about this, but wow he really needed to read that Tweet out loud before posting it. To anybody without specialized knowledge about what his accomplishment normally would result in (including me), this Tweet looks incredibly out of touch - like a CEO complaining that their bonus was five digits instead of six. Again, I am not saying that this is what's happening - I'm saying it looks like that to probably 99% of people. As an aside, his wording is very confusing to me. He says "total comp", so he is either saying that he worked for free, or the phrase "total comp" doesn't include your salary, which both sound crazy. And wouldn't a "title bump" come with a salary bump? If it didn't, surely he would say that, right?
- zer0tonin 3y agoCEO bonuses are 7 or 8 digits nowadays
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI once was in bed with a top lawyer making multiple hundred k a year, who was whining about his law firms partner taking half of the money he made with his work, without doing any work himself. He did not appreciate me asking why he didn't take up self employment if he could then just keep 100% of what he made if he was salty enough about his partner to complain about it to a stranger (me). I believe those big bad companies and bosses DO bring quite a lot to the table, a stable income, resources, a life free of personal risks, maybe even just credibility and many other things... It's childish to gloss over this.
- atonse 3y agoA lot of employees don’t understand what’s involved in being a business owner, building a Rolodex, the 100 nos for every yes, etc. So they think the owners (or partners) do nothing. But in reality, they’re getting paid for years of building relationships with clients, etc. There’s also what I call bathing in shit: having to work with people you detest, and having to do unethical things (which I still struggle a lot with) Yes someone is going to bring up an edge case where someone lucked out by being born into the right family. But in most cases it’s just the hard work over time, with a mix of risk taking. As something who’s spent years trying to build those relationships, I truly appreciate it.
- SaintSeiya84 3y agoI see a lot of ad-hominen attacks against the guy...there's a lot of professional envy in this world.
- happytoexplain 3y agoI see criticisms that all seem reasonable (as in, you can certainly disagree with them, but they are not baseless petty attacks), but I see very little (if any?) ad-hominem.
- SaintSeiya84 3y agoNah is plain envy, professional envy, none of those "non baseless petty attacks" comes from people that can say they worked in the most disruptive tech of the new century.
- ARandomerDude 3y agoOr he's a jerk. I don't know either way but there do seem to be at least two possibilities. A third is he's a jerk in real life and people are envious of some of his accomplishments. Hard to say, so I try to reserve judgement.
- blibble 3y agoI don't think anyone on this site is going to be professionally envious of a 20k USD bonus
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoSeems like an age-old case of high volatility high rewards vs low volatility low rewards tradeoff, and mismatched expectations. Last time I worked at a FAANG I got a sticker for going above and beyond duty, and that was a great nudge to get out of that system if I wanted a better reward structure for my labor.
- AHOHA 3y agoAt least it was tangible thing, a whole sticker!! A company worked on a while ago, the rewards were a message to the group and some thumbs up!!
- pelagicAustral 3y agoI mean, that's just a bit petty... Nothing to see here gents.
- dmattia 3y agoMy first job out of college was at Google Ads on a team of 7 creating a new Ad format that ended up being pretty successful. That ad type has now made billions of dollars, and I did get a promo and bonuses, but I never expected anything like profit share because it felt so obvious to me that I was standing on the shoulders of thousands of giants. There was the ads policy team that made sure our ads weren't offensive. There was the Cider team that gave us an efficient IDE for doing our work. There were the SREs that made sure we wouldn't break everything when we ran releases. There were internal tooling teams that made our tests reliable, our builds fast, and our development easy. There were the creators of the frameworks we used on the frontends/backends/infra. There was the creator of Memegen that kept me sane. There were dozens of folks telling me what to do as a new grad that made my job easy. There was the experiments/AB testing folks who helped us tune our models. At the end of the day, I was converting protobufs from one format to another, making a UI here or there, parsing some logs, making minor model adjustments, etc. It was work, pretty similar to what I've done at other companies, it was just that the scale was different. I always wonder when I see stories like this if these folks really were as critical as they claim to be or if they were just in the right place at the right time to get a bunch of visibility. Especially when in that Twitter thread there is this conversation: > What do you mean by created? Did you code it from scratch yourself? > Alex: Yes, me and 1-6 others. > Scientist at OpenAI: hey > Alex: correction: + much of OpenAI eng, plus years of their bleeding edge research I wonder if Alex maybe had more help than he's claiming in other places as well.
- jimbokun 3y ago> but I never expected anything like profit share because it felt so obvious to me that I was standing on the shoulders of thousands of giants. Larry and Sergey also stood on the shoulders of those giants, but they made a lot more money off it than you did.
- swyx 3y agoand what upper/lower bound can you put to the share of value that you would assign to the ability to and effort of gathering "thousands of giants" and orienting them towards some useful direction, rather than being hands on?
- TigeriusKirk 3y agoBonuses for above-and-beyond stuff (ie not the "bonuses" that everyone counts on) tend to vary wildly in my experience. I've gotten a very similar bonus to this for putting in a few long nights and accelerating a client delivery by a month. And sometimes much less for much more effort. I think it depends on how much of a slush fund a project has, which might not be at all tied to the impact of the project.
- AHOHA 3y agoI can relate somehow, I once did create a lot of software from scratch and idea to the total production, and didn’t even have a raise! So I learned the hard way that no matter what you do, all your efforts will be gone to someone else, your success is theirs and your failure is yours only, so I started my own business!
- HEmanZ 3y agoMicrosoft is pretty famous among engineers for not paying unless you force their hand, but totally willing to negotiate if you do. Which is pretty much business 101, so I’m not sure why anyone is surprised. Line up another offer and watch them throw huge bonuses to retain you (if you’re really worth what you think you are). I know from my and others experience they are happy to exceed even pretty crazy external offers if you bring them to the table, they just won’t increase your pay a dime if they don’t have to.
- paxys 3y agoMicrosoft also has the advantage of operating in a state with a (relatively) low cost of living when compared to Silicon Valley and no state tax. Engineers there are very happy despite the pay cut.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoNot really, the Seattle area cost of living is very high and nearing SF levels. Average home prices are shooting up near $1m in Seattle. Even renting a studio apartment is almost impossible for less than $2k a month, it's ridiculous.
- paxys 3y agoMultiply all those numbers by 2 and you get the Bay Area.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoNot exactly. Median Bay area homes are selling for 1.2m vs. 840k in Seattle. Average studio apartment rental in SF is 3k a month vs about 2.2k in Seattle. They're both extremely high costs of living. You aren't saving that much moving to Seattle. There is a noticeable salary difference/adjustment down if moving from SF to Seattle too.
- paxys 3y ago
- blairbeckwith 3y agoFor some reason I expect everyone around this guy view his contributions differently than he does.
- paxys 3y agoSo he "only" got a six figure salary, five figure bonus, stock grant, promotion, retirement fund, healthcare and FAANG-level benefits with unlimited company resources to do his work and a large failure cushion. Dude is going to get a massive reality check when he joins a startup and sees the reality of how the other 99% works. And this ignores the fact that his engineering team had at least a dozen other people and Microsoft paid billions to OpenAI for any of his work to even be possible. What did he expect exactly, founder equity?
- lostmsu 3y agoThere's a huge gap between 25k and founder equity.
- NtochkaNzvanova 3y agoCorrect, since the median value of a chunk of founder equity in the long term is probably 0.
- w0m 3y agoHe lists 'principal' on LinkedIn. According to levels.fyi, that's roughly a ~100k/year TCO increase on-top of the 20k spot bonus assuming that's his new title not old. That's not a tiny bump.
- dot5xdev 3y ago> So he "only" got a six figure salary, five figure bonus, stock grant, promotion, retirement fund, healthcare and FAANG-level benefits My guy. Are you being held hostage by your employer? Blink twice for yes. I had most of those things with a bachelors straight out of college, working for a dinky startup. A six figure salary is basically minimum wage for software engineers in the Bay. If you're making less than six figures, your employer is exploiting you. I hope you find a better job.
- antisthenes 3y agoSix figures doesn't mean $100,000, my guy.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago+20k bonus, in addition to the years of steady above average salary for your area and great benefits (like full high quality healthcare for your entire family), etc. Corporate jobs aren't a slot machine, they're a place to pay the bills without stressing about it every month.
- lisasays 3y agoExcept -- for the people you work for (and their investors) they absolutely are a slot machine. That just so happens to be rigged in their favor.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoIt's a public company though, you can be an investor too. In fact you are probably given stock awards that over time would make you a ton of money in the long run. When my friends started working at MS 15 years ago they were getting stock awards at a 20-40 dollar per share price... now those shares have gone up substantially in value (~10x in that time). It's not quit your job and never work again money, but it's definitely enough to afford a big down payment on a home.
- sgerenser 3y agoAnyone who was Senior or higher at Microsoft 15 years ago, did’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest, and are still there almost certainly made enough cumulatively to buy a house in cash, even in Seattle.
- akomtu 3y ago"As a dev lead of the github copilot team, I was responsible for creating the first prototype, designing the plan to productionize it, onboarded a team of engineers, blah blah..." Now pocket your 250k sign on bonus + 650k annual comp. Whining on public about a small bonus only trashes your reputation.
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- rgifford 3y agoLack of corporate regulation and labor organization have led to a real asymmetrical arrangement for workers. It's a classic power imbalance. CEO-to-worker pay is at its highest level in 100 years [1]. Seems to me senior corporate leadership and founders are basically full of it. If scientific discovery is subject to multiple discovery, leadership just can't be a unique skill and founding a company just can't be a unique occurrence [2]. I'm confident there are 1000s of qualified folks capable of outperforming senior leadership in any position at any fortune 500. I'm confident if it wasn't Tesla, it would've been another American electric car company 6 months later. Buuut do we pay CEOs or founders as though they're replaceable? They play golf with board members and send their kids to summer camp together. They're dilettantes, hucksters, shmucks, dorks. For example, I'm always amazed when this type holds an all hands to discuss company culture un-ironically. As though leadership principles or company values or whatever pseudo-religious structure they divined might actually take us in? How can you even respect yourself? I suppose the pragmatic, sociopathic voice in my head might justify it: "If they can see this as more than work, I can extract more from them. If they can see me as more than another person fumbling around in the dark, I can elevate myself above them." I just couldn't live with the constant lying to myself. Always makes me chuckle when folks blather on about risk-reward premiums while relying on public infrastructure -- postal service, education, military, internet, rail system, roads, power grids, democracy, freeways, bridges, etc. Start or run your business in war torn Afghanistan and I'm happy to talk about 400:1 pay ratios between leadership and lowest paid employees. No? Alright then. Sit down, shut up, and just be happy folks aren't pulling out the pitchforks... yet. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-compensation-ratio-of-top-firms-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
- dubcee349 3y agoHis complaint doesn't include what level he was at MSFT. Depending on level he may have only been meeting expectations. It also doesn't include what his compensation was, just his additional compensation for working on co pilot. He could be 1 million TC + but we won't know. A few other factors to consider: The people doing the low level coding are usually not the top compensated people for a project. Its the higher level architects that determine the overall plan for the product and set the direction for mid and low level engineers.
- tky 3y ago$20k bonus seems nice. Most folks acknowledge their salary and bonus opportunity from day one - what was the bonus potential here? Context helps. I’d ask Alex: for your new startup, how will you quantify bonuses for salaried employees who do outstanding work or create services that are exceptionally valuable to avoid disappointment like your own?
- archarios 3y agoMarx was right.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phillipcarter 3y agoThis bit is far more funny: > The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo. That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot. It's a tale as old as time at Microsoft where a VP (who usually has a fake job if we're being real) tries to actively block things they have no actual understanding of, it goes out and is a massive success, and then they take credit and build an empire around it. Copilot will end up a worse product as a result of this dynamic. All you have to do is look at the anemic release of Copilot Chat, a preview of a product that people working on it should feel embarrassed about, to see how the shift has already happened. It's a shame, but it's how things work there. There are some high-level execs at Microsoft who are great, and it's a true joy when you work with them. But in my experience, many are completely lost on what their product area is even about anymore, or so actively steeped in org-level politics that they've lost their sense of how to actually Get Shit Done.
- shashashasha___ 3y agoonly 20k? and vp that was against it now manages it.... ok, pretty sure we are missing the 'other' perspective of what was going on there. lets face it, companies will pay a lot to keep those magicians. so something doesn't add up. why lose such a professional for a little sum of money? so, there is another side to the story.
- maltalex 3y ago> +20k bonus and a title bump. As opposed to what? What would the author consider to be sufficient compensation? 50K? 100k? 200k? More? How much should I be compensated on top of my regular package for doing my job extra well this year? > Join a startup. Want to have a better connection between the value of your work and your compensation - build a startup, don't join one as an employee.
- antisthenes 3y agoThat was my takeaway as well. Author's ego is too big to be a cog (extremely well compensated and risk-free cog) within a corporation, so we should all wish him the best of luck in creating his own AI startup and destroying the moat that Google itself admitted they don't have. Good luck, author.
- gitlol 3y agoIf I were somebody with a past including a multitude of public assault allegations along with formal charges, even if I were innocent, I would simply not start Twitter drama about my former employer who didn't fire me during an absolute PR nightmare and risk that coming up again. Just me, though.
- RhysU 3y agoWas Copilot a largely riskless copycat effort because TabNine had previously proven the technology was feasible, TabNine had previously proven the business fit, and Copilot was backed by a gorilla of a company? Technology-wise, I have a Deep TabNine beta invitation email dated August 2019 and Wikipedia tells me that Copilot announced June 2021. Business-wise, Codata bought TabNine in December 2019. Gorilla-wise, TabNine was initially one lone undergraduate at Waterloo.
- OrangeMusic 3y agoAt this point are we still taking "blue checkmark" Twitter accounts seriously?