I'm not trying to be a shill for Google here, but I think it is a little misleading to say Google is hoarding all of this money and making their engineers live on pennies. The engineers are paid well,
It seems to me you're sneaking in a little argument about what people 'deserve' here, and appealing to a predatory modesty. OH, sure, google is making an insane amount of money, and they're not passing it down to the people doing the work, but do workers NEED that money? Couldn't they, in fact, get by with less than they're paid now?
No, not at all. I quit Google to work at a startup not because I didn't like Google, but because I felt a startup was a way for my compensation to more directly align with the value I could help create. And obviously my belief at that time was my "real value" was far higher than I was being paid at the time.
I really just wanted to dispute the numbers here, because I disagree that big tech companies are somehow more unfair to the employees than finance companies. Assuming there aren't illegal anti-poaching agreements, market forces operate in SV the same way they operate in the finance sector to drive up salaries of talented employees.
And it seems to me that if you want to strike off on your own (which is a risky but good was of generating "true value" for yourself), it is easier to do that in SV with a tech startup than it is in the finance industry.
Assuming there aren't illegal anti-poaching agreements, market forces operate in SV the same way they operate in the finance sector to drive up salaries of talented employees.
Isn't the entire point of this debacle that there are anti poaching agreements, however?
I would argue that there are yet some cultural impediments to labor market efficiency in SV:
- People don't want to look like, think of themselves as, or hire those that just in it for the money. It would be incredibly crass and uncool to change jobs just for salary, it should only be about caring more about something.
- Time-consuming and unpredictable hiring processes inhibit switching. There is probably a better company for most people somewhere, you know you might switch if you could predict whether you were going to get an offer. But if takes 3 days of vacation time for all-day interviews, and you have absolutely no idea whether you would be accepted or if you will happen to know the CS trivia they'll happen to ask, and you probably won't because of the supposed false negative bias, maybe not.
Finance sector, on the other hand, has to hire super geniuses willing to work 120 hours a week because to do otherwise would be to admit that most of what they do is dumb luck, defeating the whole façade.
Assuming there aren't illegal anti-poaching agreements, market forces operate in SV the same way they operate in the finance sector to drive up salaries of talented employees.
Comments
It seems to me you're sneaking in a little argument about what people 'deserve' here, and appealing to a predatory modesty. OH, sure, google is making an insane amount of money, and they're not passing it down to the people doing the work, but do workers NEED that money? Couldn't they, in fact, get by with less than they're paid now?
No, not at all. I quit Google to work at a startup not because I didn't like Google, but because I felt a startup was a way for my compensation to more directly align with the value I could help create. And obviously my belief at that time was my "real value" was far higher than I was being paid at the time.
I really just wanted to dispute the numbers here, because I disagree that big tech companies are somehow more unfair to the employees than finance companies. Assuming there aren't illegal anti-poaching agreements, market forces operate in SV the same way they operate in the finance sector to drive up salaries of talented employees.
And it seems to me that if you want to strike off on your own (which is a risky but good was of generating "true value" for yourself), it is easier to do that in SV with a tech startup than it is in the finance industry.
Isn't the entire point of this debacle that there are anti poaching agreements, however?
I would argue that there are yet some cultural impediments to labor market efficiency in SV:
- People don't want to look like, think of themselves as, or hire those that just in it for the money. It would be incredibly crass and uncool to change jobs just for salary, it should only be about caring more about something.
- Time-consuming and unpredictable hiring processes inhibit switching. There is probably a better company for most people somewhere, you know you might switch if you could predict whether you were going to get an offer. But if takes 3 days of vacation time for all-day interviews, and you have absolutely no idea whether you would be accepted or if you will happen to know the CS trivia they'll happen to ask, and you probably won't because of the supposed false negative bias, maybe not.
Finance sector, on the other hand, has to hire super geniuses willing to work 120 hours a week because to do otherwise would be to admit that most of what they do is dumb luck, defeating the whole façade.
Um... did you even RTFA?