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Google engineer earns $150K works 1 hr/day, spends rest of time on his startup
- Simulacra 3y agoStories like these seem fanciful, but given the benefit of the doubt, I think they are contributing to management's drive to return to office. They read articles like this and lose their marbles.
- bombolo 3y agoI think it's made up but can be used to justify return to office.
- belval 3y ago> When he interned at Google prior to his current role, he said he worked "probably under two hours a day," which freed up time to take a weeklong hush trip to Hawaii while on-the-job. This is more messed up than the rest of the article. You need to have a serious failure of processes and/or extremely low expectations from your interns if they can work 10hrs/week and get a FTE offer afterwards.
- Ancalagon 3y agoIts not that messed up. Every internship I ever saw had low expectations.
- dmux 3y agoIt's kind of crazy that Google of all places doesn't have any sort of system to alert when one of their devices signs on from a location not associated with that employee.
- amf12 3y agoOf course they do.. they don't care as long as you do your job.
- akmarinov 3y agoGet a personal laptop, remote desktop to your work laptop at home… easy
- quickthrower2 3y agoPost Covid I think that horse has bolted.
- evantbyrne 3y agoGoogle does monitor network usage and activity for at least some of their non-developer contractors. I briefly dated a Ukrainian woman who had a mouse jiggler plugged into her Chromebook to game the activity monitoring.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fbdab103 3y agoI have zero expectations from an intern. The scope of the programs vary wildly, but I have seen platforms that are as little as two months. It takes a month just to get someone a new laptop, access to systems, any kind of onboarding to processes, etc. Then you can give them a project, but unless they are exceptionally gifted, the mentor is going to have to spoon feed the requests. My experience dealing with people fresh out of school is that they need discrete assignments, there is less ownership and global thinking. The scope of the work has to be so limited that it requires minimal expertise. Which is to say nothing of the value proposition of having experienced person taking hours out of their day to mentor someone with a limited shelf-life.
- belval 3y agoI expect nothing from interns either, but in this case he got a full-time offer after his internship which is the part that I find baffling. He's either very gifted or got a manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer", which is the part that is a failing in processes in my opinion.
- adamckay 3y ago> manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer" When you've got plenty of money in the budget it's not beyond poor managers to hire more for no other reason than to grow their "kingdom", as a bigger headcount equals bigger importance.
- cvhashim04 3y agoTo me it seems like this employee delivered on his intern project, got good reviews and was extended an offer.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoWow this was the complete opposite from my personal experience. I'm almost over with my summer internship at google. I was given a project complete opposite of "discrete assignments, less ownership and global thinking". I am really happy with the project I was given and the outcome of it. The objective was purposely vague which allowed me to take control: Designing the implementation, consideration of alternatives, setting up experiments, creating feature review documentation. I had to reach out and interact with people from multiple teams. I feel like I really got to experience the FTE life in my short 14 weeks.
- m_kos 3y agoI worked at least 50 hours a week during my research internship at Google. Towards the end, I worked seven days a week. It was mostly because I was the only person on my team with the expertise required to complete the project, and I cared about being eligible for future internships. There were a few non-research interns who I vaguely remember not spending a lot of time in the office, but I would say they were there at least 20 hours a week.
- KMnO4 3y agoGood for him. It's been years since I worked for a place that pays per hour. That's pretty much the point of exempt work: whether it takes you 10 hours per week or 60 hours per week, you're getting paid to get the work done. Sorry Business Insider. If you're trying to get me riled up that a 900 billion dollar company can afford to pay to the equivalent of $375-750/hr for an engineer, sorry. Even at the bottom of the bell curve, he's bringing in more value to Google than that.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI have no sympathy for Google, but I don't think you can apply that value heuristic. The bottom of the bell curve at most large companies is actually negative. People that not only don't contribute enough to revenue to cover their salary, but actively waste other people's time. Average revenue per employee is just that, an average. It also includes work that was done in the past and keeps paying dividends even though the employee might not even be there anymore.
- charsii 3y agoFree market working as intended. If he's keeping up with his tasks and Google is satisfied, why work more?
- alaskamiller 3y agoDid Google culture in 2011/2012 then again in 2022/2023. 2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food! 2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies. Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates. This new silicon valley era is weird.
- civilitty 3y agoAt least now the path to unseating Google seems not only possible but inevitable! Anti-trust investigations and lawsuits, the product graveyard, search seemingly degrading, and now getting trounced on AI. I remember back when I felt Google was invincible but it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Can’t wait to see what succeeds them in search.
- izzydata 3y agoDoes the TV series Silicon Valley no longer make sense in today's culture?
- flashgordon 3y agoEven though it was edgy for its time - it is much more "tamer" compared to what orgs (atleast in tech) are these days. For example I used to think - there is no way that "bear is sticky with honey" can be real. Oh boy! What surprises me is the straight face during the regular utterances (I am saddened and surprised that I am still surprised about it!)
- 3y ago
- jacknews 3y agoBlatant stock-owner propaganda. How many engineers work 12 hour days and come in on weekends, all unpaid.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoI know if I was making $150K working one hour per day and spent the rest of my time working on a startup, I would not want an article written about me and published on the internet...
- rsynnott 3y agoI realise that it is considered most improper on this website to actually read the article, but the person being talked to was not compelled to talk to Fortune (the original source) and Fortune is protecting their identity, as is normal for this sort of story.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoYes, I did read the article. Devon, in his 20's, makes $150k per year, was an intern at Google. You don't think the people at Google could narrow it down a bit and figure out who it is?
- amf12 3y agoEspecially if that person doesn't do anything during the day. Should be pretty easy to track using network logs for any decent tech company.
- rsynnott 3y agoI mean, maybe? I’d imagine they’ve messed with the numbers a bit as well for obfuscation. However, the important point is that the subject did this voluntarily.
- runako 3y ago> Devon, in his 20's, makes $150k per year, was an intern at Google. They have changed the name to protect his identity. The rest of that likely describes hundreds or thousands of people.
- araes 3y agoIts probably still not challenging. Their major shtick is search, with a minor in neural net AI. Gen Z age range. Worked here on an internship. Bought a plane ticket to Hawaii during internship. Makes ~$150,000, +/- obfuscation error. Mostly only tends to make commits in the morning. May have been dumb and used GMail. If its not obfuscated, and almost exactly $150k, then its really easy.
- moron4hire 3y agoI mean, is there any proof this is real, or is this a setup for "the kids just don't want to work these days"?
- bllguo 3y agothis person is working on their startup in the meantime. it's not about not wanting to work, it's about the profligate spending and bloat in big tech it's so obvious to me that I can't believe people need proof, I don't even live in SF and I know plenty of engineers with cushy lifestyles working < half the day at FAAMG. are yall just closing your eyes and justifying this amongst yourselves or something?
- cvhashim04 3y agoJust skimming the article, seems like the author wants us to shake our fists at these zillenials/zoomers
- fidotron 3y agoThis will be interesting given how hiring was driven by a preference to, as one Google exec directly described it to me, have people inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. If you're not denying the staff to your potential competitors by keeping them on payroll then are all of them actually worth keeping?
- VectorLock 3y ago>as one Google exec directly described it to me, have people inside the tent pissing out rather that outside the tent pissing in I'm having trouble trying to parse the meaning of this metaphor.
- bumby 3y agoI’m equally confused, but my guess is it’s a metaphor for ensuring talent is in your company rather than outside of it working for a competitor.
- dangus 3y agoEvery developer for Google who has on payroll is a developer that competitors can’t hire. Google is large enough to impact local labor markets for specific roles. If you tell the world that you can make $200k at Google to dick around all day, you’ve now caused your competitors to need to pay developers more money to attract talent and make them perform at a high level.
- runako 3y agoA lot of the early FAANG hiring was to prevent staff from going to (or founding) a competitor. So build a pipeline to identify the people who are likely to build a competitive threat to e.g. Search and hire them before they get a chance to do that. Pay them enough over the years that they get lazy and start thinking about retirement by 35. It's a bonus if they ship anything useful, and you have in theory increased the odds of that happening by hiring so many of the talented young programmers that graduate every year.
- HWR_14 3y agoIf someone is going to urinate, you'd rather have them stand inside the tent and piss towards the outside (which is unpleasant) rather than stand outside the tent and piss towards the inside (urine landing in you). Similarly, better to have a disrupter on payroll causing issues within your organization than disrupting it.
- somat 3y agoHow do you know you have a good sys-admin? It looks like they are doing nothing.
- synergy20 3y agoIf he can get his work done in 1 hour for his salary, either pay him more so he can contribute more, or let it be. in the end it seems a failed management to me.
- VectorLock 3y agoIts all fun and games until Google decides they own your startup since you were working on it during "their time."
- quickthrower2 3y agoYeah naming your work laptop “girlfriend” wont get you out of this one
- znpy 3y agoMeh, it has to be proven in court. Those agreement are often scarecrows. They aren’t valid in california afaik, and surely they aren’t valid in most of european nations.
- jedberg 3y agoNon-competes aren't enforceable, but IP agreements absolutely are.
- VectorLock 3y agoBeing proven in court is all well and good until Google jams you up in the case for so long and costs you so much for lawyers they effectively torpedo your startup. He's effectively banking that Google will be so big they won't notice - just like only working 1 hour per day.
- gretch 3y agosource: I work at G There's a process where you declare this work. And if it gets approved, you have ammunition to back you in a court case if it ends up going to such lengths. I have had projects approved - questions that get asked are about e.g. conflict of interest or actual competition. Google actually doesn't want to own your fruit-stand-in-the-park business. This is intended to prevent situations like the zuck/winklevoss case (just to name 1 publicly well known example).
- VectorLock 3y agoNo, they don't care to own most people's weekend projects. They wouldn't have any claim on that anyways. But when someone is spending the time Google pays for to work on a startup, I would THINK they would care about that. Or maybe Google's internal processes is okay with them doing 1 hr/day of work "as long as they're getting done whats expected of them."
- xirdstl 3y agoThis is the kind of thing that will be pointed to as a reason to bring employees back into the office. So much so, that it's hard to believe it's real. If you are applauding these guys while maintaining that being forced into the office is a crime against humanity, you may want to do some introspection.
- commandlinefan 3y agoWhat makes you think he couldn't and wouldn't do the same in the office? I had a government job in the early 90's and there was a guy who had a desk and a job there, but also had a real estate business. He took realtor-related calls in the office (loud enough for everybody to hear him doing it) pretty much all day long.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- siliconc0w 3y agoYou used to be able to substantially increase your comp at G with good performance.. The problem is that as the company tries to fit everyone in the same performance bucket and cracks down on spend it becomes pretty opaque about when and whether you'll get anything for the additional effort vs slotted into the same performance bucket as everyone else. This simplifies performance management, basically making it very difficult to get anything extra but it is also pretty demotivating.
- jedberg 3y agoI'm almost certain this article isn't real and was planted by Google PR to use as an excuse to force return to office. It's important to note that Fortune is a blogging platform now and anyone can write an article there.
- TeaBrain 3y agoI think you are thinking of Forbes opinion articles, which anyone can submit for. Forbes, like Business Insider, has no paywall and seems to have a low quality threshold. Fortune is still paywalled at over $200 per year after the trial year, while at Forbes an annual subscription is $50 for less ads. If you want to submit an article to Fortune you have to send a pitch to an editor.
- cvhashim04 3y agoYou might be on to something. Although it’s not too far fetched for someone to get their work done in a few hours and have the rest of the day to themselves. Especially a very competent jr who gets assigned easy work at a slow moving company. I had this experience when I was Jr engineer years ago. I wasn’t given enough work and half the time was just told to spend time learning by manager or Sr Engineer. Heck just browse cscareerquestions and you’ll see several posts about Jr engineers complaining about lack of work and fear of their skills stagnating and not learning enough or fears of being made redundant.
- rjbwork 3y agoThis is probably propaganda, but it's also a management self-own. Either most of your people are so shitty they're indistinguishable from someone working 1hr/day and thus you suck at hiring, or you're so incompetent that you can't tell the difference. Either way, not a good reflection on management.
- cvhashim04 3y agoThe problem with these big companies is how slow things move. Smart, talented engineers often join them and get the enthusiasm beat out of them by corporate politics and lack of impact, all that’s left is watching their bank account grow and apathy.
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/kaG50 https://archive.is/kaG50
- Gud 3y agoGood for him! The way I see it, the more value extracted from Google by its employees, the less resources will be available for Googles adtech business.
- hackeraccount 3y agoI didn't find this credible. It pretends that writing code is what they do when the reality is that most of it is figuring out what people really want - and the way to do that is spending most of your time communicating with the customer; certainly more then one hour a day.