4 ms·
This is just a life insurance policy being rebranded and puffed up by Google PR & Google HR. Life insurance is a standard benefit among many top employers. Wha
by rhplus 14y ago
This is just a life insurance policy being rebranded and puffed up by Google PR & Google HR.
Life insurance is a standard benefit among many top employers. What makes Google a bit different is that they're paying out 10 x salary, which is probably at the higher end of the spectrum of policies like this. I think my previous employer paid something like 4 x salary for death through illness and 10x for accidental death. Perhaps Google is happier to pay higher premiums or they've negotiated down thanks to a younger and healthier corpus of employees?
- philsnow 14y agoWhere do you get the 10x salary number ? The linked article says 50% of salary for 10 years -> 5x yearly salary total. I wouldn't say that on average my co-workers are "younger" (than whom?). Healthier, maybe.
- Evbn 14y agoIf it's salary and doesn't include equity or benefits, its value is reduced another 30%-50% as a multiple of compensation.
- cgs1019 14y agoLife insurance is provided as a separate benefit.
- patio11 14y agoHe's pointing out (correctly) that this is an entirely cosmetic abstraction layer on top of life insurance. It's like saying "And in addition to your salary, we're also giving you a roll of quarters every month in case you need to pay tolls, do laundry at one of those barbaric laundromats not in the Googleplex, or play arcade games." "So what you're saying is you're giving me $10 a month extra in salary?" "No no, what we're saying is we're giving a roll of quarters..." Pro-tip for HNers here, by the way: Notice how you responded much, much more viscerally to this emotional, novel perk than you would have if Google had described it as an industry-standard perk with a knob slightly adjusted? Please remember this the next time you're e.g. writing a pricing plan or feature grid.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago> He's pointing out (correctly) that this is an entirely cosmetic abstraction layer on top of life insurance. Life insurance is provided by extremely conservative, highly diversified investment companies. > Notice how you responded much, much more viscerally to this emotional, novel perk ... Yeah, with nausea that employees are expected to gamble something so important on ... AdSense.
- tedunangst 14y agoLife insurance is provided by anyone willing to pay your survivors a death benefit.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoYeah, like Enron or Lehman Brothers or General Motors. The point is that betting on your employer is a bad idea when it comes to insurance products and especially annuities. If you want your kids to have financial support if you die, you owe it to them to buy policies from more than one conservative insurance company. The whole point of insurance is to defray risk, not get a handsome payout.
- jemfinch 14y agoWhen it boils down to it, every perk is an entirely cosmetic abstraction layer over money. The company spends money, and employees save money. The interesting perks are the ones that save the employee more than money. Free food does more than save employees from spending money on brown bag lunches or fast food joints: it saves employees from having to even think about how they'll eat lunch. Shuttle service? It doesn't just save employees the money they'd spend commuting, it saves them time and the frustration of dealing with traffic or public transportation. In that sense, a survival benefit like this isn't just the company throwing a few extra dollars for life insurance at employees. It's not just saving employees money, it's saving employees from the pain of having to concern themselves with how their surviving dependents will get along. They don't need to see a doctor for a physical to get this benefit. They don't need to calculate their number of expected children, multiply by their expected college expenses in a decade, figure in the remaining cost of their mortgage, the time it will take their spouse to find employment, etc. in order to put a number of how large a life insurance policy they need to take out; they can simply rest easy knowing that their dependents will be taken care of for a decade or longer and not give it a second thought. The survival benefit Google offers in addition to industry-standard life insurance is only "an entirely cosmetic abstraction layer" in the most uninteresting of ways. (Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer for Google, but these opinions are entirely my own.)
- grandalf 14y agoIt's actually 5x salary, which for the typical highly paid google engineer is probably a life insurance policy which costs < $100 per month.
- inopinatus 14y agoMoney loses value, so it's less than 5x if you use the discounted present value of the future cashflows. Finger in the air, it's around 4.5x if you assume a discount rate of 3% and 4x with a discount rate of 6%.
- shasta 14y agoHalf salary for 10 years would be 5x salary, nominally. Present value is probably around 4x salary.
- mjwalshe 14y agoYep this is standard for big UK companies 4X death in service benefit is common
- hessenwolf 14y agoThe interest rate is really so fucking low at the moment that the present value is about the same as the nominal. I would expect a survivor benefit to be inflation indexed too.
- vidarh 14y agoIt is fantastic PR, though. It sounded fantastic to me until I remembered that I have a private policy that is about 7x salary plus a separate policy that repays my mortgage, and the combined cost is low enough that I don't notice when it goes out each month. If I wasn't paying for my own separate insurance, I probably would've been easier to wow with this.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pikewood 14y agoI love the framing of the statement. "This might sound ridiculous, but we've announced death benefits at Google." From that point on, you're led to believe that Google is such a great company that it's willing to hurt itself to be good to its employees. Much better than "We automatically contribute $10 a month into a life insurance policy for everyone." To me, it's a great example of showing the benefits instead of just the features, mixed with an elegant form of Crazy Mike's Discount TV Warehouse, with prices so low, we must be crazy.