[HN Gopher] Sergey Brin: The Facebook phenomenon is a problem (2...
___________________________________________________________________
Sergey Brin: The Facebook phenomenon is a problem (2007)
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 103 points
Date : 2022-03-29 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Finally, we (or basically I) have not done a good enough job of
| high rewards for high performance.
|
| 15 years later, this is still a widespread problem everywhere.
| People don't capture the full value of their labor (which makes a
| sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is
| allocated), which leads to people not being incentivized to
| increase the value of their labor.
|
| We've all heard stories about people being extra efficient and
| getting rewarded with raised expectations and maybe a paltry
| raise. If people were really incentivized to do their best work,
| I imagine we'd get a better world.
| buzzdenver wrote:
| > People don't capture the full value of their labor (which
| makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk
| is allocated),
|
| I think it is primarily due to de-risking. You agree with your
| employer that the biggest percentage of your income will be
| fixed and independent of how much value the company produced
| (be it profits or share appreciation or whatever). This makes
| sense because your life has high fixed costs, and your cash-
| flow cannot allow for years when you make zero (or even a
| negative amount), even if in the next one you would make 5
| times your current salary.
|
| > which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the
| value of their labor.
|
| Don't think this is necessarily true. I would love to walk into
| an apple orchard now and spend an hour picking if I could keep
| 25% of the apples.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > People don't capture the full value of their labor
|
| Why would you expect people to capture the full value of their
| labor?
|
| Imagine you operate a business. You do the math and determine
| that hiring a new employee will cost you $100K/year, but it
| will bring in $100K/year of revenue. In other words, the
| employee would capture the full value that they create
| (assuming nothing goes wrong).
|
| Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any
| business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the
| company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value to
| the company. It's an easy no.
|
| Now if you can hire someone for $100K and their addition will
| bring in $150K, that's a different story.
|
| You can't expect to capture the full value of your labor as an
| employee. However, you're also free from capturing the full
| value of the _losses_ you might create. If you fail to ship
| your objectives or you accidentally drop the main DB and cost
| the company $100K, you don 't receive a bill for the negative
| value you created. You get to keep your paychecks.
|
| > which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the
| value of their labor.
|
| This doesn't make sense at all. People increase the value of
| their labor all the time because it leads to more and better
| opportunities and gives more leverage in future negotiations.
|
| You don't have to capture the "full value" of your labor to
| have an incentive to improve.
| [deleted]
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make
| any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the
| company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value
| to the company. It's an easy no.
|
| That's what the model predicts, but it's unfortunately not
| how companies beyond a certain size work in practice. Hiring
| decisions are not made by the business owner to increase
| profit, but middle-ranking members of the hierarchy who have
| their own parallel goals.
|
| Businesses can, and do, regularly hire employees that bring
| in zero or negative value. Often, these people will make up
| more than 50% of the company by headcount, and the only
| reason the company still turns a profit is because their
| existence is subsidised by a small minority of hyper-
| productive people.
| brokencode wrote:
| There is usually no way to quantify how much value each
| developer is contributing. I mean, if your job for 6 months
| is to go through your company's software and update to a
| new API since an old one is getting deprecated, how much
| business value did you produce? Yet you did something that
| needed to be done.
|
| There are people who take on big, flashy projects that
| generate a lot of measurable value, and there are people
| who do the boring stuff that needs to be done too. Without
| one, you don't get the other.
| whack wrote:
| There's a theoretical response and a practical response.
|
| In theory, if you had a competitive and fungible marketplace
| where a specific employee would boost profits by $100k, and
| you offered her a salary of $80k, someone else would outbid
| you with $90k, and someone else would outbid them at $95k
| etc. Even if the "margins" are low, no one is going to pass
| up on free money.
|
| In practice, the labor marketplace isn't nearly competitive
| or fungible enough to expect the above. However, there is
| still a very different problem. Even if the average salary is
| "fair", people get rewarded a tiny fraction of the value they
| generate. Imagine if I'm working at Google and I find a way
| to save Google $10M/year via improved hardware efficiency.
| Despite the fact that this isn't part of my job description.
| How much of that $10M would I get in the form of a salary
| increase or bonus? A pretty darn tiny amount. 1% if I'm
| lucky. Is it worth it? Probably not. I might as well just do
| what my manager asks me to do, and spend my extra time
| learning Haskell and going to happy hours. This is pretty
| much what GP was alluding to. If companies started giving
| people a significant fraction of the value they generate,
| corporate life would change dramatically.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| > which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and
| how risk is allocated
|
| This doesn't just make a sort of sense to me, it makes perfect
| sense.
|
| People trade their labor at a lower rate for higher stability
| (less risk). The people who start companies, find capital, and
| distribute that capital in ways that increase the value of the
| company have taken on more risk (how significant varies case-
| by-case and usually is a natural market cap ceiling to the
| total value the owners can extract ahead of employees).
|
| If the company I work at gives me shares in that company, I
| want the company to pay less for my labor (and everyone's) if
| my belief is that collectively all employees output will
| accelerate my own wealth creation when I sell my shares in the
| company. The share becomes a transitive store of value I
| believe my own labor alone will never be able to keep up with,
| and I want to make sure the value it's accumulating is not
| diminished because the company is paying out the full capital
| value of everyone's labor. Then there would be very little
| incentive for me to take the shares in the first place, and,
| honestly, very little incentive for anyone to start a company
| (why take on that risk if there's no payout in excess of just
| joining another company?).
| myroon5 wrote:
| Feels like many are stuck in this dichotomy between choosing
| stable rates or venturing out on your own where more middle
| ground should probably exist. Employee incentives should
| probably align more
| [deleted]
| bushbaba wrote:
| > If people were really incentivized to do their best work, I
| imagine we'd get a better world.
|
| Assuming wages are a function of the free market. And the less
| mobile people are, the less job-applicants exist, and the
| higher wages need to be to poach. Incentivizing for good work
| might have diminishing returns after a certain point.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I love it, we need everyone to have poverty wages and be
| insecure in case the poor multinational corporations might
| have difficulty underpaying people
| sytelus wrote:
| This is the entire foundation of capitalism. The idea is that
| people who own capital only reward other people for their
| _time_ who help add to their capital. If companies distributed
| all of the gains in terms of stock awards to employees, you
| will see very different asset distribution in our society.
| mrh0057 wrote:
| It's suppose to be the value you added. The investors get
| payment for the risk they take by investing in or loaning
| money to the company. If a company has monopoly power and/or
| gets bailed out by the government consistently there is no
| risk to investors. What ends up happening is rent seeking a
| behavior by theses companies and they will also take
| unnecessary risks since they are incentivized to.
| tw600040 wrote:
| That would be fair if companies can also distribute losses if
| any and are able to get money back from employees
| steveylang wrote:
| Maybe so, but stockholders aren't responsible for company
| losses either.
| tw600040 wrote:
| They are. They lose their money / investment if companies
| go bankrupt or don't do well.
| gojomo wrote:
| 'Capitalism' is neither theoretically, nor in practice,
| limited to "only reward people for their time". Some
| industries where the labor is low-skilled trend that way.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The basic concept of capitalism is that there are capital
| owners, and they hire workers who use that capital to
| generate value. The capital owners receive all of that
| value and then pay the workers for their time.
|
| This is not a comprehensive description of capitalism but
| it is the low level idea. Obviously there is a distribution
| of real world behaviors.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by
| private owners, instead of by the state. It's a
| decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's
| inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect
| information.
|
| It's not anchored in labor exploitation.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > Capitalism is about trade and industry being done by
| private owners, instead of by the state. It's a
| decentralized economic system that acknowledges a state's
| inability to fully plan the economy due to imperfect
| information.
|
| > The basic concept of capitalism is that there are
| capital owners, and they hire workers who use that
| capital to generate value. The capital owners receive all
| of that value and then pay the workers for their time.
|
| These are both true.
| [deleted]
| davmar wrote:
| capitalism cannot differentiate between efficiency and
| exploitation
| [deleted]
| qsort wrote:
| You would also see much fewer companies to begin with. Maybe
| there's a better way to reward highly skilled people than
| beating this extremely dead horse?
| [deleted]
| sytelus wrote:
| Capitalism has nothing to do with fewer or more companies.
| A founder can currently be rewarded as much as 1000000X
| than an average employee simply because the arrangement is
| that employee gets paid for _time_ (a highly limited
| quantity) while founder gets paid for _capital_ (virtually
| unlimited quantity). Assume that you forced founders not to
| capture all of the capital gains generated by employees
| such that the founder was rewarded "only" 1000X more than
| average employee. I don't think this is so badly under-
| rewaeded that founders will just stop being founders.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A founder that's rewarded 1000000X is cashing in on a
| lottery ticket. That's all there is to it. Just as in
| most lotteries, even most founders are losers.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >If companies distributed all of the gains in terms of stock
| awards to employees
|
| Then there would be no incentive for investment.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Exactly. And investment includes buying the tools that lets
| the worker be productive enough to create a surplus.
|
| There's three people (or entities) in this: the one who
| makes the tool, the one who buys the tool, and the one who
| uses the tool. All of them need some of the rewards from
| the increased productivity that the tool empowers,
| otherwise we stop getting tools that let us be more
| productive, and we're all worse off. So you have to pay
| both the capitalists and the workers.
|
| Now, you can argue that the pendulum has swung too far in
| the direction of the capitalists. That's a defensible
| position. But the answer is not to move to "the workers get
| 100% of the gains". That's going to leave everyone worse
| off, including the workers.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Problem is the employees aren't willing to bear the risk that
| early investors were willing to.
|
| If the entire society had a similar level of appetite for
| risk, we'd see a different asset distribution in society.
|
| Since most people are terribly averse to losing anything,
| they also shut down the perspective of winning big.
| noncoml wrote:
| It's not about being willing, it's about being able too.
|
| Imagine there is a lottery where for every 10 million
| tickets you buy you get one that is giving you 20 millions
| back.
|
| No brainer, right? Except if you don't have the 10 million
| to spare, buying lottery tickets instead of food doesn't
| make sense.
|
| Labor/job is your single lottery ticket.
|
| Investors can afford to buy all tickets to make sure they
| win.
| robrenaud wrote:
| Make a lot of friends, buy up the tickets together, and
| split the winnings.
|
| Applied another way, everyone in a given class of YC
| should share a bit of ownership with everyone else in
| their YC class, and then everyone of them is likely to
| end up a millionare.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| This is where the analogy fails, I think, because it
| assumes a static market price, or a lack of competition
| for the tickets. Where the price changes or competition
| changes availability, we run into the same issues where
| those who already have power/money are more able to
| exploit the system than those who have to collude just to
| have a shot.
| paxys wrote:
| What this email doesn't say is that Google's solution for fixing
| retention problems was to reach out to Apple and many other large
| tech employers and sign illegal agreements to not hire each
| other's employees.
|
| The subject of this email (Facebook) famously declined to
| participate however.
| gnachman wrote:
| If you got an offer from Facebook they would beat it. I did
| this in 2012 and instantly had 10x the RSUs. Some Googlers
| thought it was immoral to do this. It was at this time that
| comp for engineers radically changed.
| paxys wrote:
| I signed a job offer in late 2011 and was due to start a
| couple months later. Two weeks before the start date, the
| hiring manager emailed out of the blue to say that they were
| bumping up my starting salary by 10%. It was a wild time to
| be in tech (although the situation today isn't all that
| different).
| pavlov wrote:
| Zuckerberg is widely despised on HN, but he should get some
| credit for standing up to the Silicon Valley wage cartel. As
| your example shows, it put potentially life-changing
| compensation within the reach of a much larger group of
| software engineers.
|
| Previously you pretty much had to get lucky as an early
| engineer through IPO, but in the past decade it's been
| possible to save millions by working at FAANGs. And those
| millions trickle down into the ecosystem: people can afford
| to start their own companies, do angel investments, etc.
| Teever wrote:
| You don't give despicable people credit for doing the right
| thing because they happened to the right thing only because
| it benefited them.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Zuckerberg doesn't seem that despicable to me. Certainly
| not in the company of companies like Google. What's the
| worst thing you can say about him or Facebook?
|
| I think most of the bad press just comes from media
| clickbait. Mainstream news identifies Facebook as a
| competitor and threat on ideological model, see people
| complaining about conservative news sources topping most
| shared on Facebook lists, and on a business model basis
| (Facebook controls a large stream of traffic).
| LunaSea wrote:
| I mean a good argument against Facebook (and by proxy
| Zuckerberg) is that Facebook designs the product in a way
| that benefits them rather than the psychological well
| being of their users.
| jonas21 wrote:
| You've got both the direction and timeline backwards. It was
| Apple who reached out to Google (if "reaching out" is a
| euphemism for Steve Jobs yelling on the phone), and it happened
| in 2005, two years before this. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.engadget.com/2014-03-24-emails-reveal-that-
| steve...
| ditonal wrote:
| Then for years Google denied wrongdoing but said they couldn't
| address it because it was in active litigation.
|
| Finally, the whole thing got settled (slap on the wrist but
| something at least), so Google employees could finally get an
| answer in the weekly all-hands (TGIF).
|
| Laszlo Bock was their head of people at the time, and claimed
| that Google still did nothing wrong, and that they only settled
| because they were caught up in the whole thing with other
| companies like Adobe who did do something wrong. He said they
| did nothing wrong because they only stopped outbound recruiting
| towards employees at those companies, which had no effect, and
| still accepted inbound applications.
|
| This raises the obvious question - if outbound recruiting had
| no effect, why was Google so eager to put at end to it? And how
| could Google act like they were caught up it the crossfire when
| it was specifically emails by Sergey Brin that provided the
| strongest evidence of illegal collusions?
|
| It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's
| smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin
| narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart
| people to believe it rather than have their intelligence
| insulted.
|
| But sadly, most Google employees did seem to buy it. There's a
| strong cult of indoctrination, starting with calling yourself a
| Googler and wearing the stupid hat, that Google execs just had
| a halo effect. I think between 2010 and now that halo effect
| has massively worn off, especially with all the dirty details
| about misbehavior from Sergey Brin, Vic Gundtora, and Andy
| Rubin.
|
| Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even really
| smart people can get caught up in cult-like communities. The
| "founder worship", the indoctrination into company culture, all
| of that is super common in Silicon Valley tech companies and
| for an obvious reason - it works.
| MegaButts wrote:
| > Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even
| really smart people can get caught up in cult-like
| communities.
|
| I see it differently. It seems like strong evidence as to how
| smart the average googler really is. If you start with the
| assumption these people are smart then you can reach your
| conclusion, but if you discard that assumption you just have
| a group of gullible employees.
| solveit wrote:
| Lol, every HN commenter knows Google was in the wrong but
| the Googlers themselves didn't because they're gullible.
| No, the Googlers didn't buy it but continued working
| because when it comes to it, thinking your company does
| shady things is very rarely sufficient to get you to up and
| leave. Is your company bigger than, say, a thousand people?
| Then they have definitely done _something_ as bad as Google
| 's collusion and you know it even if you don't know what.
| Are you going to leave?
| MegaButts wrote:
| I agree with you, and I'm very much of the opinion that
| most techies are entitled assholes who only care about
| enriching themselves. I was just pointing out what I
| considered to be a flaw in GP's reasoning.
|
| > Are you going to leave?
|
| I did, actually (more than once). And it's what made me
| realize how few engineers care about anything other than
| their paychecks and ultimately themselves. When push
| comes to shove, the vast majority of people I've met and
| worked with have no qualms looking the other way for more
| compensation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > When push comes to shove, the vast majority of people
| I've met and worked with have no qualms looking the other
| way for more compensation.
|
| When push comes to shove, those people would have no
| power to change things anyway in the vast majority of
| cases. You can either live in a terrible world rich, or
| poor - in both cases the world wouldn't change but at
| least your life will be better.
|
| A lot of problems are big enough that only governments
| can deal with them by the use of laws and appropriate
| enforcement (eventually escalating to violence if
| needed). But if the governments themselves benefit from
| the problem, or are owned by the corporations
| (corruption, or "lobbying" as it's called in the US),
| there's no chance for a few individuals to make a
| difference.
| MegaButts wrote:
| I disagree that employees have no power to make a
| difference. It's learned helplessness. By that logic,
| unions are also ineffective at bargaining. The point is
| you have to actually work together instead of for
| yourself.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| If we all left every company as soon as they commit some
| immoral things, there'd be no company surviving beyond a
| few months. If we ditched all our friends as soon as they
| commit some immoral thing, we'd have no friends. If we
| ditched our countries as soon as they commit some immoral
| thing, we'd have no countries.
|
| All entities, one day or another, commit some immoral
| thing according to some relative morality. We can't
| expect that they never will. Of course, a consistent and
| repeat offender should not be rewarded with our support.
| But it's unreasonable to hold people and groups of people
| to unreasonable standards, such as "sustained perfect
| moral behavior".
|
| The average Googler most likely than not thinks that what
| Google did is bad, but not bad enough overall to warrant
| their quitting.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's
| smartest people" but the can have executives on stage spin
| narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart
| people to believe it rather than have their intelligence
| insulted."
|
| If there are a limited number of "world's smartest people"
| (truly, people willing to fiddle with computers for hours on
| end), then an obvious strategy would be to hire as many of
| them as possible if for no other reason than to prevent any
| other company from having them.
|
| Most people I know would not want to fiddle with computers
| for extended periods of time. That has no bearing on whether
| they are "smart" or "intelligent". AFAICT, the notion of
| Google employees as "really smart people" is one perpetuated
| by a relatively small group of people wordlwide who are
| content to fiddle with computers 24/7. The cult analogy makes
| sense. The group cannot properly interact with "outsiders",
| all of whom are, according to the group, not "the world's
| smartest people", presumably because they have no interest in
| playing with computers. Myopia.
|
| Make no mistake, I am not suggesting the Google group does
| not contain some intelligent people however it is a narrow
| band of intelligence associated with a circumspect view of
| the world, seen only through the use of computers. The
| "world's smartest people" idea sounds absolutely cult-like to
| me every time it gets repeated on HN, as it ignores too many
| intelligent people, far more than work for Google, who are
| not computer nerds. These folks outside the Google cult are
| easily intelligent enough to understand how computers and
| programmatic advertising work, but they are not interested in
| spending their time fiddling with such things, preferring
| instead to work on other subjects that they find more
| interesting and rewarding. Their work often has a tangible
| societal benefit unlike mass surveillance and censorship for
| the purpose of collecting advertising revenue.
| qiskit wrote:
| > It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's
| smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin
| narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart
| people to believe it rather than have their intelligence
| insulted.
|
| They don't hire the smartest people, they hire the greediest
| people. The only thing people worship in silicon valley and
| tech in general is money. That's it. An if your salary, stock
| options, etc are dependent on believing and selling lies,
| that's what you do. When an industry or group gets "saint
| status" or proclaims to be the agents of good, your spidey
| senses should start tingling.
| holografix wrote:
| No one believes it. It's called plausible deniability
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Not everyone who works at a company loves the company. A lot
| of people might think things their company does is pretty
| despicable.
|
| If it's the best place to extract maximum benefits (money,
| experience, recognition, etc) - then you take the good with
| the bad.
| ditonal wrote:
| This is certainly true for some Googlers, but there are
| many true believers (at least when I was there). Many
| people there sincerely think Google is a special company -
| the company was even arrogant enough in their IPO to say
| they "not a conventional company, and not intending to
| become one".
|
| Even outside Google, the halo effect is insane. Look at how
| much hate companies like Facebook and Uber get on HN. But
| if you break down the scandals side by side, you'll realize
| Google has by far the worst ethics in the industry.
|
| For example, Uber is accused of being sexist because a
| woman wrote an open letter that she was excluded in various
| ways as an employee there, such as not receiving swag in
| her size as the only woman on the team. That sounds like a
| shitty culture. Meanwhile, Vic Gundotra was credibly
| accused of inviting 22 year old junior SWEs to exec
| offsites to sexually harass them. Andy Rubin was found to
| have sexually assaulted a subordinate, according to
| Google's own investigation, and recieved a 90M payout.
|
| What's a worse workplace for women? Not getting swag in
| your size, or being raped?
|
| Yet when I worked at Google when all these scandals took
| place, ordering an Uber was a huge faux paus. You had to
| order a Lyft because "Uber=sexist."
|
| Even now on a recent thread I mentioned how all these tech
| companies are more evil than your typical crypto startup,
| people said "only Uber and Facebook" look bad on a resume.
| I would argue that's purely a function of PR because I
| challenge anyone to debate me that Facebook or Uber had
| worse ethics scandals than Google.
|
| Google has one of the strongest PR machines of all time and
| its effect on sentiment inside and outside the company is
| indisputable.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why are you convinced that ethics is all people care
| about?
|
| Some people think Google is a good product. Nearly
| everyone on HN hates Facebook and I think most people
| hate Instagram, too, now?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| See also 'mercenary'.
| solveit wrote:
| See 'anyone working at a large company ever'. Any large
| group of people with any kind of goal and any amount of
| power(doesn't even have to be a company) will do
| despicable things, it's almost a law of nature. Google's
| collusion is barely a blip on the bad stuff people do.
| caboteria wrote:
| Someone who works at a company that does things that they
| find despicable because they're optimizing their benefits
| sounds like a textbook psychopath.
| AnonymousC1421 wrote:
| Google isn't nearly as nice of a place to work at as people
| make it out to be.
|
| As an example they will finally increase vacation from 15days
| to 20days on April 1st this year.
|
| The media reports this as "on top of already lavish perks
| Googlers are now getting 20 days of PTO a year!".
|
| Gee whiz amazing. An increase from 15 days of PTO. If only we
| didn't much more than that in my much lower quality of life
| home country as a standard for tech workers.
|
| And sorry if this sounds a bit spoilt. I should be grateful to
| work at a large megacorp in this economy right? It's just that
| Google isn't any better in terms of working conditions than any
| other big tech company. In fact in general it's a little bit
| worse yet there's propaganda movies (The Internship) about how
| great it is to work at Google.
|
| It's a job. No one else seems to want to acknowledge it.
| paxys wrote:
| It isn't about being objectively good or bad but how it
| compares to everyone else.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > As an example they will finally increase vacation from
| 15days to 20days on April 1st this year.
|
| That change is for junior employees. It's still overdue, but
| vacation bumps up to 25 days per year after you have some
| tenure, and has done for more than a decade. I'm not saying
| that 25 days is anything to write home about -- I've heard of
| places that give 30, or unlimited -- but 25 is not bad.
| AnonymousC1421 wrote:
| Lets put the numbers out there objectively for others
| reading this.
|
| Previously after 4 years you got 20 days per year. Then you
| got 25 at year 6+.
| [deleted]
| colonelxc wrote:
| This might just be an impreciseness of language, but it's
| actually 20 days after you've been there 3 years, and 25
| after you've been there for 5.
|
| So if you're saying 'year six' starts the day after
| you've been there for 5 full years, then yes, we are
| saying the same thing.
|
| (Source: have been at Google almost 8 years, and went
| through both of those bumps)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| It's been a long time since I went through these bumps,
| but I had thought that _in_ your third year you got 20
| days? Is that not right? So odd to make you wait for
| three years for your first increase and then only two for
| your next one.
| [deleted]
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| unlimited vacation is typically advertised as this amazing
| perk but in reality _cheaper_ than many alternatives:
|
| * you carry no vacation liability on the books year-to-year
|
| * if you don't encourage people to take it, or provide
| slack when they can take time off they use less vacation
| jasode wrote:
| _> and many other large tech employers and sign illegal
| agreements to not hire each other's employees._
|
| I don't remember reading about any _formally signed
| agreements_. Executives aren 't going to create an
| incriminating paper trail like that. Instead, it was some
| complaints in emails and an implied understanding. E.g. Steve
| Jobs and Eric Schmidt emails:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
| karaterobot wrote:
| What does "rainy weather and a few GPS misalignments" mean?
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| I would understand that some employees are not following the
| exact path that they wish.
| dekhn wrote:
| After this Google started giving $1K in cash every christmas and
| one year gave everybody at the company a 10% bonus. Those times
| are gone.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Wasn't the year of the surprise 10% only because the unlawful
| collusion between Google, Apple, and others was on the brink of
| becoming public?
| emtel wrote:
| The $1K christmas bonus started no later than 2002.
|
| You say those times are gone, but have you seen what FAANG pays
| people now?
| paxys wrote:
| Yeah, back in the 2000s or even early 2010s a $1K+ employee
| holiday bonus would be a "holy shit!" event that would make
| the news. Doing so today, even after adjusting for inflation,
| would be met with "yeah, whatever" by everyone, including new
| grads.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't get the phenomenon of piddling bonuses. I worked
| for Amazon in the 2000s. And we got an employee discount.
|
| 10% off anything on the site.
|
| Capped at a maximum of $100 / year.
|
| This is a discount that feels like they're going out of
| their way to spit in your face. What if you raised my
| annual pay by... $100? Who would notice or care?
| dastbe wrote:
| for good or for bad, one of the things amazon does is
| focus on providing benefits that can apply to ALL
| employees, i.e. the six figure devs all the way down to
| the fc employees.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Amazon would notice because paying their whole workforce
| $100 extra per year would cost them significant money
| whereas that sum of all those discounts would work out to
| a small fraction of that amount.
| Barrera wrote:
| That part about "a social networking bubble of imitations and tag
| alongs" is ironic, given Google's numerous failed attempts to tag
| along on the social networking bubble.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-29 23:00 UTC)