3 ms·
Google does indeed deserve kudos for being an early adopter of great benefits, WLB, cool offices, etc. But I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for "sky hi
by whack 3y ago
Google does indeed deserve kudos for being an early adopter of great benefits, WLB, cool offices, etc. But I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for "sky high" compensation. I had a classmate with competing offers from both MS and Google back in 2007 - the Google offer was pretty close to MS's offer, both at the time and over the prior decade.
A big reason why silicon valley comp rose so much in the last decade was because major companies were previously colluding to suppress worker wages. And yes, this includes Google. It ended in 2009, and that's when tech compensation really exploded. See link at bottom.
If anything I would give Facebook far more credit. They were willing to pay more than any other major tech company. And more importantly, they also refused to participate in the aforementioned cartel, which resulted in a ton of poaching atcivity which drove up market wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- paulpauper 3y agoit also exploded due to the growling size of such companies and dominance relative to overall US economy, especially post-2008 in which there was a void filled by the collapse of the housing, auto, brick and mortar retail, and financial sectors (except for Walmart, biotech, payment processing, and information tech, everything else weas hurt badly). such companies play a much bigger absolute and relative role, whether it's shopping, cloud and data infrastructure, advertising, AI, etc.. Companies need to pay top dollar for top talent to get products to market before an equally-sized trillion-dollar competitor does. Due to network effects, speed is of upmost importance.