Google's 'Rest and Vest' Days for Senior Employees Are Over, Says CEO
inc.comI’ve watched Google through its entire “journey” and I have to say it’s revealing how quickly they jettisoned their rhetoric about having, attracting, and retaining what they claimed were the best engineers in the world at the slightest whiff of economic headwinds.
Google was basically an infant in the dotcom boom/bust cycle and for a company weathering its first real economic challenge, and a mild one at that, it is sure notable how quickly they are throwing their employees under the bus.
While I don’t have much sympathy for someone who makes a ton of money working two hours a day, I have even less sympathy for executives who created, championed, and perpetuated the thinking that encouraged that to happen and now try to shift blame for their own philosophy onto the people they proactively lured into their firm.
Google execs thought they would continue to make tons of money by treating certain engineers like gods. The second they suspected that might not be the case they demoted these gods to lazy slacker deadweight. Don’t fall for it. The real deadweight is running the company. The real blame lies with the decision makers. They have been blowing hot air about what enlightened managers they are for 20 years and suddenly realize they might be revealed as frauds. Step 1, blame the victims of your incompetence, the people you will soon lay off. Smear them, with no honor or decency, hurting their chances of recovering from the very situation you put them in.
What a company.
Completely agree. If they are going to remove deadweight, Google's leaders must be the first to go. My friends have been telling me about these inefficiencies for years and they have done nothing about it. Google has one of the greatest concentrations of talented engineers of any business in history. What did Google's leadership position these engineers to build?
When you look at Sundar Pichai, what exactly has he brought to the table? Which unique insights and strategic decisions from the CEO have made Google richer? It's not enough to point at the profit growth; Google owns a historical money-making machine in its Ads business and any half decent administrator could have increased its profits over the past years.
> What a company.
I didn't get this, Google is very profitable cash cow, so decision makers are doing their job better than competition.
They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide. Unless the management deliberately pilots the company into the ground, their cash cow will outshine the competition out of sheer inertia.
The quality of decision making is seen when the rules of the game change and the companies are forced to adapt. This may or may not happen this cycle, depending on what happens to interest rates.
> They are a de facto monopoly on online advertisement networks worldwide.
that's not true, there are plenty of competition, meta, tiktok, reddit, display exchanges, amazon, apple. If they will deliver better ROI from ads, advertisers will be happy to switch budgets from google.
You can compete with Facebook by creating another social media site, as TikTok and Snapchat have demonstrated.
Google search has 92% market share. It is an ad monopoly in the areas it controls.
> Google search has 92% market share.
its generic search, when you go to vertical searches, say Amazon may beat google for shopping searches. Reddit can build good search one day, and many people including me will switch to searching inside reddit, instead of adding "reddit" to google search query.
You are right, google is currently generic search monopoly, but we were talking about ads, and there are plenty of other ads verticals.
I think the discussion was any monopoly that serves as a cash cow to enable poor management.
For comparison, AT&T had a monopoly only on long distance, so people could choose drastically different behavior if they wanted to defund AT&T. I.e. you didn't need to move out of the region where most of your relations lived but it was a better deal to pay AT&T's tax (and regional monopolies charged more than true long distance on many regional calls). Potentially making a lot more money and having an entirely different life out weighed higher than market phone rates that made AT&T a successful cash cow.
Ok, but rant above was about decision makers, and looks like decision makers did just fine in building monopoly, 10 years ago google had 60% of search share, with Y and B another 15% each.
Also, it is not clear how much money google makes from search specifically, and how much from other verticals where there is stronger competition.
I think that's true. But I think you may be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.
Google has a number of advertising businesses, largely distinct. I think Youtube, adwords and adsense are the names of the three big ones. Adwords is a monopoly (that is, only Google sells advertising on www.google.com) and Youtube is too. But you didn't mean to to say that Google has a monopoly on selling ads on google.com and youtube.com, did you?
I think you had the third business in mind. That's the one that serves ads on third-party web sites. And what does Google's 92% market share for search have to do with its market share for that business? Or, put differently, how does Google's 92% market share help sell that product to more web site owners?
Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.
Can anyone put serve ads on Google SERPs? No, only Google. We don't even have any transparency how it works.
Google is turning into utility and should be regulated as such. At the very least we should regulate how their support is done.
> Can anyone but google scrape the web? No. Tons of websites won't let you unless you are googlebot.
I though cloudfare has some way to onboard other bots too.
Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary, yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).
The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.
Google makes themselves out to be an innovative company that hires the best engineers in the world, but I'm struggling to think of anything notable they've created over the past decade.
> Google employs ~30k software engineers, each making a ridiculously high salary
I think current google salary can even be below market average.
> yet 80% of their revenue comes from ads (a field which they have a monopoly over).
ads is just way of monetization, actual product portfolio is very diverse.
> The products people use every day (Gmail, maps, search, chrome) are nearly 15-20 years old at this point.
My understanding is that they switched from idea of building tons of lower quality products some of which survived to full focus on fewer areas. Current focus is AI and cloud, where there is enough space for innovation.
Depends; these would seem like the kind of decisions that affect the long term a lot more than the short term.
In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.
They spent decades building the image of “one of the best” employers for skilled software engineers, and they could potentially throw that away with just a few bad decisions.
It’s precisely because they’re still making boatloads of money that this makes even less sense.
> In the long term, this could severely impact the perception of Google for prospective employees, which in turn could hinder their ability to hire talent.
it could be opposite, talents usually interested in challenging work with appropriate rewards, while current message is about cutting mediocre employees.
Every comment I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and then watching you squander it.
No engineer worth their salt is going to work for these companies after this. The 'mediocre employees' as you put it are exactly what GP was talking about.
It's victim blaming at its finest. Remember- google only hires the very best.
You are shilling so hard you've now entered complete fallacy territory. You are not just making stuff up to fit your narrative, you are actively ignoring the truth and that's destructive to the conversation.
And I'm saying all this as someone who for years warned people about what was coming. Still, they are not to be blamed as all this started with the C-suite and management all going on hiring sprees for no better reason than to deprive the competition of workers.
They infantilized their workforce and made them as dependent as possible.
They attached golden handcuffs which started the whole rest and vest situation.
They are to blame, not the workers all about to be put on PIPs.
Tell google PR to come up with something better, or at least something that doesn't fly in the face of the facts everyone can see with their own eyes.
The sky is not purple. The emperor is wearing no clothes.
I guess you are the one who received pip.
Sick burn, man you really destroyed my argument with that one sentence.
I'd have to work for a bigco to get put on a pip.
I can see now you are just trolling in bad faith, come back when you have an actual thought to elucidate.
So, what exactly management did wrong in your opinion?
Googler, opinions are my own.
The article links to another piece talking about coasters[0]. Maybe this is from being a grunt senior SWE, I don't think I've ever met a coaster at Google (that gets away with it). People that I knew were slackers that I've worked with have been ushered out the door (or left on their own accord when they couldn't get promo, or were getting low ratings).
But I only interact with a tiny fraction of Google's total employee base, so there is a good chance this happens. We have too much work, and it's pretty obvious when there are coasters in our midst.
At a different company, a friend told me (who was a manager at this company) that he liked keeping coasters/slackers on his team, so that when he was told he had to fire someone (due to a company wide RIF (reduction in force)), he would have someone to sacrifice. But I've never heard of Google doing a RIF, so that doesn't apply here.
[0] https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...
I dunno. I remember seeing quite a contingent of people not doing very much work at Google. You're walking to a meeting, pass by the game room, and it's always the same group of people playing ping pong no matter the time of the day. You try to grab lunch in a 30 minute slot between meetings, and there's a 45 minute long line to get food. Some people appeared to have a lot more free time than others. I certainly didn't have it.
Same. I have never met this proverbial rest and vest guy making 7 figures. Most everyone I know is scrambling to survive the performance reviews and get to the next level.
And if your productivity is very low you will get put on an improve or out plan.
In my experience, these slackers do exists in meaningful numbers (maybe most of PIPed but I know at least a few long timers). That said, an even bigger problem is that the majority of people are incentized to slack in some capacity.
The impact & output of work within Google follows something like a perato distribution and yet the payscale is pretty flat. It creates this weird incentive system that almost encourages some base level of slacking unless you really want that promotion. And the difference in output makes it pretty hard to staff project and superstars often end up overworked which is hardly fair to the people doing the work.
This wasn't always the case, but is probably the norm at larger companies. It does seem to me like the way comp is modeled isn't ideal, but I'm definitely not a comp expert. My guess is that more discretion in pay would open companies up to all kinds of legal liabilities not to mention actual unfairness.
All that is to say that there is likely some extra slack that can be let go with little effect.
(Ex-Googler)
These people aren't on teams you interact with. They have a low enough employee ID and/or a sufficient level that they just mill about on a passion project.
I do not work at Google but that is what I have heard from every friend of mine who does. In fact they have all said that it was almost a shock working there at first just how competitive it was. Then again I am sure there could be whole departments with completely different mentalities.
There are. Some are very collegial, others are...not quite Amazon, but they lean in that direction. Never work in Payments.
Are you an employee who worked his/her way up or are you one of those who were acquihired?
I was previously at Cisco (which aquired Sourcefire, where I was at). That acquisition went poor, so I applied to Google. I did the interview process as a normal SWE at Google. Been there around 7 years now, all in payments.
Ask around some of your colleagues who joined as acquihires, especially the early ones.
Title is excessively editorialized. Here is the ONLY thing said by anyone at Google about the subject, "Pichai revisited Google's plan to find efficiencies wherever it could, citing their plan for a 'simplicity sprint' and even discussing a possible reduction in headcount of up to 20 percent."
And even for that I can't find a source either. This article mentions making the company 20% more efficient, and it says that Pichai hinted at cuts, but doesn't give a direct quote there either.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/google-ceo-says-he-hopes-to-...
They just increased their staff by 20% within the past year. To me it looks more like Pichai wants to be perceived by stock holdets like he's doing something.
Google is a de-facto ad search monopoly that can (and continues to be able to) afford dead weight. The real threat to Google is NOT a bunch of unproductive employees. They could probably run the ad search groups, android, g-mail, docs, and more with 10% of their current headcount if employees were worked to the bone. As a conglomerate, Alphabet can and does burn money in attempts to be innovative in a true sense with Google X, Calico, Verily, DeepMind, and more.
What Google cannot afford is for that incredibly talented dead weight that they have go off an make a COMPETING search engine and associated platform ecosystem (i.e. android, g-mail, chrome). That talent is not just sitting on its ass for no reason.
Google was started from a garage with bare-metal linux servers on hardware that is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry Pi cluster today. Making a search engine using someone else's cloud is vastly easier in 2022 than in 1999. Replacing the platform ecosystem lock-in is significantly harder, but doable with the right talent. Its in Google's interest to keep at least a proportion of that talent inside the company.
Also the term "rest and vest" isn't use correctly here. "Rest and vest" refers to people who were acquired during an acquisition. They were too important to fire as they had vital information how the acquired company worked, but also they couldn't leave due to the golden handcuffs they were given in the form of options.
So they "rest and vest".
Maybe this is how the term originated, but I have never heard it used in this context personally.
This will backfire very hard. Pichai just wants to deflect from his incompetence, by blaming those who made Google into what it once was.
It's his fault, that the "Don't be evil" motto had been erased from Google's culture. And it's his incompetence that made Google spending money in areas which were not only not profitable enough, but rather such money pits that he has to squeeze money out from profitable divisions so hard that it makes Google's users switch to alternatives like Apple or make them degoogle their lives.
He and the likes of his are a cancer that is growing at Google.
Did the CEO say that? The article didn't contain a single direct quote.
googler, opinions are my own.
See: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/google_ceo_sundar_pic...
Basically search for any articles about "Google CEO" and "productivity".
The floating advertising and popups on that inc.com url are absolute cancer.
Google has over invested in AI research projects and, while they are pumping out good research, they aren’t exactly pumping out great products. If I were Pichai I’d trim the fat there first. As for rest and vesters, it sounds like it refers to senior people who have climbed the ladder high enough to coast at “meeting expectations” which obviously is not good enough grounds for firing someone.
And there's also quantum computing.
Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.
It doesn't, in my experience. In the previous incarnation of the perf review system(which just slightly changed recently), there were effectively 3 buckets:
Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations.
The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve".
The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role.
The third one is "okay good, maybe i can go for promo if I string together 4 of these performance reviews as exceeds expectations"
Why do people at Google seemingly care so much about promotions?
+25% total comp I imagine. Also a lot of them are in the sf/sv housing market and think they'll never be able to buy a house even making 250k/yr
This is exactly it. After they hit whatever promo level that let’s them buy a home they usually stop trying to climb so hard unless they are really ambitious.
If you want your partner to stay home and help raise the kids you probably have to make L6 at a minimum.
You can make $250k and have zero chance of buying a single family home in the South Bay now. Prob need a household income around $300-350k before it starts to become reasonable. The recent interest rate hikes really jumped up the monthly payments. Dumpy houses can go for $2m, USD but that is slowly trending down.
Pay bands are relatively narrow. The only way to a serious raise is promotion.
That sounds fucking horrifically stressful.
There's a value to having slack. Most novel ideas come from having one's mind wander, not by being constantly busy with coding.
Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.
Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers.
Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).