6 ms·

I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingl

I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who are singing his praises justify their pandering. I wonder if Eric would have survived now as a Google CEO. Half the company would walk out today, if they came to know Sundar is in bed with his other CEO buddies and has agreements not to poach employees from each other's companies.

Lucadg 7y ago
Sounds like the "let's do evil" guy
- crististm 7y ago
  He actually mocked an early engineer who voiced the "this is evil" mantra in a meeting after he joined Google. If not right then, definitely in a TV interview a few years later.
rapsey 7y ago
Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive and one sided. Sillicon valley is more then google and apple, and if the competition is only between them with regards to salary then those engineers have nothing to complain about.
- Haga 7y ago
  Yes, those quary workers should stop all that ranting. What have the Roman's not ever done for us.
- lsc 7y ago
  >Sillicon valley is more then google and apple It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp. (it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.) The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.
  - jcadam 7y ago
    Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense). Though, salary for software engineers has been ticking up lately. I suppose I can thank the demand for engineers created by these tech companies for that.
    - lsc 7y ago
      >Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense). Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"
      - jcadam 7y ago
        I'm much too old to work at a FAANG :), I do make a pretty good salary for the area of the county I live in, though. In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.
        lsc 7y ago
        https://www.paysa.com/salaries/netflix--senior-software-engineer https://www.paysa.com/salaries/netflix--senior-software-engi... so, uh, if you think software engineers are engineers, half a megabuck is a lot more attainable than you think. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not 'no more than a dozen worldwide" - a megabuck just isn't what it used to be. (I mean, to be clear, if you limit the field to people I'm personally close enough to share this sort of data with, you are looking at a quarter megabuck if you really are pretty good, but from what I see? paysa isn't lying; I punch in my title and job and location, and it's not far off.) My own personal impression is that it's easier to be 60-somthing man at a faang company than it is to be a woman. mean, I'm not saying age discrimination doesn't exist, but I do work with a fair number of folks in their 60s.(Of course, not being a woman and not being 60 something, my impression here is somewhat suspect.) I'm pushing 40 myself, and on my current team there are more people who are obviously older than I am than there are people who are obviously younger than I am. (Systems administration drifts older (I assume 'cause kids don't have to learn command line stuff to use computers anymore, and if you are gonna learn it, you might as well go for SRE or SWE and get a pretty good pay bump) and the last half-decade or so, I've been supporting server farms for folks doing electrical engineering, system verilog and the like or kernel-type/embedded work, which also tends attract older people.) (Of course, your locational preferences and housing space requirements are yours, I'm just saying)
ok-repl 7y ago
Those poor underpaid Googlers
- Teever 7y ago
  Collusion like that puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers. It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.
  - flipflopsrawr 7y ago
    It’s happens a lot more than it’s talked about. When a few people left the company I worked at for Rackspace who was paying a lot more the CEO of my company talked with Rackspace into agreeing to stop interviewing people from my company. I moved on from that company after the CEO admitted to the agreement. It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  You don't have to feel sorry for them, while still disagree about the non-poaching agreements that these CEOs made.
- nnq 7y ago
  ...higher salaries in one place tend to pull up salaries elsewhere too. And conversely, if you push down the top, you also push down the middle (under the optimistic assumption that the bottom can't go any further down...). Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?". That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|
  - kevstev 7y ago
    Indeed- I thank the FANGs everyday for pulling up my salary. In 2013 I was making about 1/3 what I am now in the financial industry in NYC doing algo trading/HFT. I was reluctant, but after years of seeming to miss out on the big money that everyone talked about finance people making, I finally just decided to look outside the industry. I got a remote job with a company in the valley, and got a 60% increase in comp, that after 3 years grew to just a hair shy of 100%. I was pretty much the first defector to leave finance for tech in my circles, but more followed. I jumped around one more time, with a financial company who truly pays top tier salaries (to match tech companies), and am now making a full 3x what I was just a bit over 5.5 years ago, with a much better work life balance and general work environment. I can't imagine this would have happened without Goog/FB/Apple/Netfix, etc. Every day I reap the benefits of their competition for talent without having worked at any of them.
simonh 7y ago
You know how far you are over the ethical line when Zuck tells you to take your shady scheme elsewhere.
- patrec 7y ago
  More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as open source long before Google ever got around to releasing the real thing (buck, thrift, ...). These days of course, Facebook itself is a powerhouse of original tech.
  - throwaway_9168 7y ago
    Apparently FB hyper-targeted Google employees with ads based on the profile these employees had happily volunteered when creating their FB profile. (Wish I had a reference link). Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke. And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned with their morals, as explained in this rhyme - Move fast and break laws, Lets show these dumb fricks who's boss, When shit hits the fan The CIA will cover our arse
    - ataturk 7y ago
      I think you nailed it on your last line. What we are seeing is the intel apparatus deeply ingrained in tech. I hate the phrase "intel community" as if this is a nice bunch of people who get together afternoons to play chess. No, these many of the world's worst sociopaths doing awful things because they enjoy it.
    - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
      Well, that just doesn't rhyme at all.
loblollyboy 7y ago
Pure evil lmao
mises 7y ago
If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.
codemac 7y ago
He's still going to serve on the "compensation committee"..

Lucadg 7y ago

Sounds like the "let's do evil" guy

crististm 7y ago
He actually mocked an early engineer who voiced the "this is evil" mantra in a meeting after he joined Google. If not right then, definitely in a TV interview a few years later.

rapsey 7y ago

Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive and one sided. Sillicon valley is more then google and apple, and if the competition is only between them with regards to salary then those engineers have nothing to complain about.

Haga 7y ago
Yes, those quary workers should stop all that ranting. What have the Roman's not ever done for us.
lsc 7y ago
>Sillicon valley is more then google and apple It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp. (it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.) The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.
- jcadam 7y ago
  Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense). Though, salary for software engineers has been ticking up lately. I suppose I can thank the demand for engineers created by these tech companies for that.
  - lsc 7y ago
    >Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense). Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"
    - jcadam 7y ago
      I'm much too old to work at a FAANG :), I do make a pretty good salary for the area of the county I live in, though. In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.
      - lsc 7y ago
        https://www.paysa.com/salaries/netflix--senior-software-engineer https://www.paysa.com/salaries/netflix--senior-software-engi... so, uh, if you think software engineers are engineers, half a megabuck is a lot more attainable than you think. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not 'no more than a dozen worldwide" - a megabuck just isn't what it used to be. (I mean, to be clear, if you limit the field to people I'm personally close enough to share this sort of data with, you are looking at a quarter megabuck if you really are pretty good, but from what I see? paysa isn't lying; I punch in my title and job and location, and it's not far off.) My own personal impression is that it's easier to be 60-somthing man at a faang company than it is to be a woman. mean, I'm not saying age discrimination doesn't exist, but I do work with a fair number of folks in their 60s.(Of course, not being a woman and not being 60 something, my impression here is somewhat suspect.) I'm pushing 40 myself, and on my current team there are more people who are obviously older than I am than there are people who are obviously younger than I am. (Systems administration drifts older (I assume 'cause kids don't have to learn command line stuff to use computers anymore, and if you are gonna learn it, you might as well go for SRE or SWE and get a pretty good pay bump) and the last half-decade or so, I've been supporting server farms for folks doing electrical engineering, system verilog and the like or kernel-type/embedded work, which also tends attract older people.) (Of course, your locational preferences and housing space requirements are yours, I'm just saying)

ok-repl 7y ago

Those poor underpaid Googlers

Teever 7y ago
Collusion like that puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers. It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.
- flipflopsrawr 7y ago
  It’s happens a lot more than it’s talked about. When a few people left the company I worked at for Rackspace who was paying a lot more the CEO of my company talked with Rackspace into agreeing to stop interviewing people from my company. I moved on from that company after the CEO admitted to the agreement. It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.
cerberusss 7y ago
You don't have to feel sorry for them, while still disagree about the non-poaching agreements that these CEOs made.
nnq 7y ago
...higher salaries in one place tend to pull up salaries elsewhere too. And conversely, if you push down the top, you also push down the middle (under the optimistic assumption that the bottom can't go any further down...). Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?". That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|
- kevstev 7y ago
  Indeed- I thank the FANGs everyday for pulling up my salary. In 2013 I was making about 1/3 what I am now in the financial industry in NYC doing algo trading/HFT. I was reluctant, but after years of seeming to miss out on the big money that everyone talked about finance people making, I finally just decided to look outside the industry. I got a remote job with a company in the valley, and got a 60% increase in comp, that after 3 years grew to just a hair shy of 100%. I was pretty much the first defector to leave finance for tech in my circles, but more followed. I jumped around one more time, with a financial company who truly pays top tier salaries (to match tech companies), and am now making a full 3x what I was just a bit over 5.5 years ago, with a much better work life balance and general work environment. I can't imagine this would have happened without Goog/FB/Apple/Netfix, etc. Every day I reap the benefits of their competition for talent without having worked at any of them.

simonh 7y ago

You know how far you are over the ethical line when Zuck tells you to take your shady scheme elsewhere.

patrec 7y ago
More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as open source long before Google ever got around to releasing the real thing (buck, thrift, ...). These days of course, Facebook itself is a powerhouse of original tech.
- throwaway_9168 7y ago
  Apparently FB hyper-targeted Google employees with ads based on the profile these employees had happily volunteered when creating their FB profile. (Wish I had a reference link). Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke. And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned with their morals, as explained in this rhyme - Move fast and break laws, Lets show these dumb fricks who's boss, When shit hits the fan The CIA will cover our arse
  - ataturk 7y ago
    I think you nailed it on your last line. What we are seeing is the intel apparatus deeply ingrained in tech. I hate the phrase "intel community" as if this is a nice bunch of people who get together afternoons to play chess. No, these many of the world's worst sociopaths doing awful things because they enjoy it.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    Well, that just doesn't rhyme at all.

loblollyboy 7y ago

Pure evil lmao

mises 7y ago

If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.

codemac 7y ago

He's still going to serve on the "compensation committee"..