Effectively they're rewarding employees for interviewing with other companies. What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview?<p>I've spent quite a bit of time as a manager at some larger tech companies. We'd monitor turnover and adjust our compensation policies, and other policies that affected satisfaction, across the board if there was an increasing trend in turnover. Sure, we'd make a diving catch every once in a while when we didn't keep a close enough eye on one of our top developer's satisfaction. In those cases we'd still look at our overall package.<p>When we made adjustments, the really good, happy engineers were even happier when they got nice raises without even asking for one. Now, by across the board, I don't mean that every engineer gets a good raise. That's because as a company gets larger, they get more and more mediocre engineers. The article doesn't say that Google gives big counter offers to every engineer. I assume Google is smart enough not to do that. It's not possible that all of their engineers are really good. Sometimes good-bye is good riddance.
> And worse – he’s confirmed that many Google employees are interviewing with Facebook and Twitter, among others, simply to get a hefty raise. “Many people at Google use Facebook offers in order to get a big raise,” says Buchheit.<p>I don't understand why this is "worse", i.e. why interviewing purely to get a raise should be thought of as a bad thing. To me, having many (hopefully low cost) interviews simply allows software developers to be efficiently priced as market conditions change.<p>Now, the natural response, if employee value can move <i>upward</i> more easily, is that employers will be less willing to offer job/salary security. But, on average, this is good, right? Fighting this is like fighting to go back to the old pensions system, which drastically reduced employment flexibility and was a major source of economic friction.
By making these counter-offers Google is using real money to back up their assertion to (at least some of) their employees that their growth prospects are better than Facebook's. Think of this as a dividend-like unforgeable statement of corporate fiscal self-confidence.<p>If enough Googlers go fishing for counter-offers at Facebook, Facebook will be wasting a lot of management energy reviewing and making offers to Googlers that were never going jump in the first place.
As a programmer, I'm very happy with this story. Google has always said that the people are their most important asset (actually, most companies say it). But now, they're backing up their words with action, and the programmers end up winning.<p>I wonder if this is just a one-off thing that only Google is doing, or whether this kind of thinking will start to be more prevalent.
A lot of these counteroffers must be to stop the perception of brain drain. Perception is often more important than reality.<p>I dont think there are that many "must not lose him/her, at any cost" engineers, even at google.
Relevant old Dilbert comic: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&ots=bw_e7v4MM2&dq=dilbert%20rewarding%20disloyalty&pg=PA117#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&...</a><p>"The secret company policy is to reward disloyalty!"
This looks like a new bubble. Why would a Twitter IPO raise so much money? What are its growth prospects? Facebook may be different, but still, it all sounds very crazy.
I think it is a poor idea to put stock options in a startup at a high priority when job hunting because startup success is a long shot. It is a different situation for Facebook and other well established pre-IPO companies or older companies that have an established value to their stock (I stayed at SAIC for a long time because of stock bonuses, options, and the expectation that the value would continue to increase).<p>For small startups, it seems like you have founders who have taken a real risk vs. employees/consultants who are getting a salary and perhaps some equity. If you are working for hire, better really enjoy the work and/or the immediate compensation.<p>I have a childhood friend (actually, I also used to baby sit him when he was really young) who started 3 companies over a 20 year period, finally getting $300+ million when selling a large interest in his last company. My friend (and people like him) who take risks get most of the rewards - a fair system.
Maybe I'm not used to the Silicon Valley processes but I think it is pretty uncool to tell your company you received another offer... even without explicitly mentioning you want a raise.<p>You should either be happy with your company, or talk with your boss in order to get better conditions. And if there is no agreement you can look around and go in some other place. But playing the game of the higher offer is something that always disturbed me.
By repeatedly covering this topic, and websites like this linking to the source, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Essentially, TC is partly to blame and it reminds me of when they went after last.fm.
That summarizes it :
"Only a sucker would sit and hope for recognition".<p>Google tries to avoid the unavoidable, at least in astrophysics :<p>"After the type II supernova, only the collapsed core is left behind. If it's less than 2 or 3 solar masses, it is what's known as a neutron star, named thus because it's made almost entirely of degenerate neutrons."
The problem with the article is that it misses the big point.. Google is attempting to save some costs in hiring at the high levels of coding engineers..with a comparison of that costs per employee against the cost to offer a 20% raise is somewhat a miss-leading and pointless article..or what we call link-bait.<p>And some of the Hr hiring costs per employee can be determine from the Google SEC filings..by making some assumptions and completing some calculations..<p>And on top of that most high end Google engineer hires and this has been in fact talked about only become fully productive at 12 to 18 months after joining Google..<p>So lets do the calculations that MA of Tc should have been somewhat curious to do..<p>$120,000 salary per year times 80% non-productive first 12 months..learning the Google engineering system etc..<p>$96,000 in loss productivity costs<p>now ad Hr department costs of interviewing and etc..<p>$20,000..my guess..only guess.<p>so now we are up to a subtotal of $116,000.. and $120,000 times 20% is..$24,000<p>Change the salary to say $400,000 still similar differences in costs of the two decisions..with Google wining out on their own cost decision..