Increasing employee pay is a bandaid on the real problem. Googlers think there are more interesting places to work. Not even a pay-raise, or a free massage can change that.
The real question - how many Googlers leave each week? What is the employee turnover?<p>We know about the high-profile exits, but I'd be interested to see how many middle and lower level employees are leaving.
I don't think I've seen the same degree of this with Microsoft before. Is the difference that FB and Google are both in Silicon Valley and so there's very low friction moving from one to the other?
It all seems like chump change when compared to the holdings of the CEO and founders (according to the article they hold over half the stock). Google is in amazing entity when you think about that. The smartest people in the world work their asses off, and over half of that value goes to 3 people. The ultimate pyramid scheme ;)
On the one hand, this isn't so crazy since employee pay makes up a much larger portion of expenditures than executive pay, so there's a lot more headroom for raises to the latter. On the other hand, executives make a lot more money to start with so the same percentage of raise translates to a much larger increase in pay so this is hardly "fair".