[no_wave]

Excellent journalism - anonymous sources speculate as to what might have caused people to leave a company.

Also pushes the new business-friendly narrative that it's good for companies to pay their engineers less.

Well done, I hope the author's boss is proud.

[AlexC04]

You don't feel this is a strong argument in favor of the de-regulation of minimum wage? Freeing businesses from the growth stifing yoke of employee voluntary attrition?

/s

Ughh... reading this is ridiculous. Do we think bankers' salaries prevent them from staying at banks? Doesn't the first sentence answer the question of what really happened?

     > For the past year, Google's car project has been
     > a talent sieve, thanks to leadership changes,
     > strategy doubts, new startup dreams and rivals
     > luring self-driving technology experts. 

Poor leadership & competition. Easy to point fingers elsewhere, but everything we know about motivation says that autonomy, making a difference and a whole host of other "soft reasons" are the factors that drive it forward.

The people who left didn't STOP working on self driving cars. So they still love the work and are engaged by the dream of doing that. So theoretically - if Google had adapted to their needs & wants they could have retained the employees. Instead poor leadership drove them out the door.

[no_wave]

But the anonymous sources are saying that the only problem was that Google was too generous. Clearly we should believe them at face value.

[maxxxxx]

I am all for higher salaries but there is some truth to the dangers of overpaying. Give me 5 million dollars and you will never see me again. Give my CEO 5 million dollars and he'll keep going. On the other hand, give me 250000 dollars and you will have a very happy and loyal employee.

[JackFr]

I doubt very much that you would quit after getting a 5mm bonus. I've seen some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

I think a more typical response would be, "Hmmm. That wasn't so hard, let's see if they do it again next year." And when they don't -- that is typically when you walk.

[ryandrake]

Really, because $5M seems like an enormous fortune to me. It's an amount you could stick in a savings account yielding only 1% interest and pretty much live the rest of your life with a decent lifestyle somewhere with a low cost of living. OR, you could quit your high-stress job and augment that interest with a more fulfilling career.

I can pretty safely say a single $5M bonus would amount to an instant lifestyle change (namely less pressure to work) for me.

[pjdemers]

5 million before taxes is 3.5 after taxes (probably less). If you want to stay in the bay area, another million goes to a reasonable house (probably more). That leaves 2.5 million. For anyone under 50, a reasonable withdrawal rate is more like 3%, or 75k per year. Taxes and MRO on your house are at least 15k per year. Private health insurance for a family is at least 30k per year. Which leaves at most 30k per year for everything else. Plus, if you have a family, there is still college that needs to come out of the 2.5 million at some point, so the "everything else" budget will go down into the 20s. And last but not least, social security is based on last few years wage earnings, so, by the time you are old enough to collect, you will only get the minimum having not worked for a decade.

I think I would keep working.

[gmarx]

The trick is you don't move someone to that bonus immediately. let them rise to that level incrementally and make them fight for every step. In the mean time they will be upping their lifestyle until $5 million just doesn't seem like that much anymore

[CryoLogic]

Or put it all in the market in highly diversified low-ish risk mutual funds, withdraw 4% per year and live a lavish lifestyle.

[JackFr]

So assume you get a bonus which allows you to maintain your previous salary with just interest income. The problem is the cost of your leisure time (as measured by the cost of foregone wages) just went up dramatically, so the leisure has to be worth that much more to you for you to take it.

Two things to note: 1) this is different than winning a lottery, because with a lottery there is no expectation of a change in wages; 2) your first week of leisure is worth much, much more than your 50th, as is your 1st dollar worth more than your 5 millionth. There is some level at which you stop working. I think it's much higher than you realize.

[1024core]

> I've seen some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

That's anecdata. Not everyone is the same. I know friends who would quit in a heartbeat and pursue other passions (music, teaching, non-profit work, etc.) if they got F-you money.

[pcsanwald]

Everyone is different, and I realize that the actual number doesn't matter, but most people able to make 5MM in bonus on wall st wouldn't consider that amount anywhere near "F-you money".

[maxxxxx]

I would quit after even less money. I would dabble with tech but no way I would ever go into an office again. Some people like CEO's genuinely seem to enjoy business but I personally don't.

[waisbrot]

If I pay you $5M and your job is "work at this hellish call center" then yeah, you probably will take it as a lottery ticket and get out. If we make the CEO miserable (every day you must call each board member individually and explain why the company's stock has not gone up yet), I bet they quit too.

The important factor here isn't the money.

[throwaway40483]

1. If you work at Walmart you'll quit whether you're happy or not

2. If you work at Waymo you'll quit only if you're unhappy

[beering]

I think part of the problem in this case was that it didn't seem likely they would get such a big payout again.

On Wall St, there's always a bigger bonus to aim for at the same firm next year. At Google, if you wanted to take your big bonus and turn it into more millions, you'd better try starting a new business.

[pvelagal]

5 million dollars will look great only until you have them. Once you get your 5, your next target may be 25, then 125.. x=5*x. Engineers who work to create amazing things, work to get a kick out of creating cool stuff.Same case with CEOs. money feels great, but never enough..

[maxxxxx]

Some people may be wired that way but plenty are not. Especially in the US people believe that it's in human nature to always want more but I think it's only a small percentage that are wired that way. Most people are happy living a stable life where their basic needs are met. The top guys should be happy about this, otherwise they wouldn't find employees that are willing to work a for a stable salary.

[ryandrake]

You're probably right on, despite the down-votes. This is almost certainly a Submarine Article [1] pushing the tired "engineers are overpayed" narrative. Wonder who's funding whatever PR firm put it out...

1: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[dang]

The problem here isn't that such things don't exist (no doubt they do) but that readers frequently confuse that with what feels like it simply has to be true based on the strength of their pre-existing opinion.

The usual path from "I don't like X" to "X is objectively false" to "no one would ever X in good faith" to "How much did they pay you for X, asshole" (not that you said that, but it's the flamewar end-state) never actually consults with reality. Since substantive discussion depends on looking beyond our pre-existing opinions, this is a problem for substantive discussion. Worse, it feels like being a champion of truth, so a lot of intense energy flows into it, so flamey passion goes up as substance goes down—a perilous combo.

I don't know what a full solution would look like, but at a minimum, HN comments on such issues—if they're to be good HN comments—need to show some sign of breaking out of that self-referential cycle. That's why we tell users that they're not allowed to accuse others of astroturfing or shillage without evidence, and always add "an opposing view is not evidence".

[ryandrake]

Is it even possible to have a high quality discussion of an article that itself is based on speculation from unnamed sources? This content could easily have been automatically generated by a bot, for all we know.

I don't know if this is a submarine article--it's impossible to know for sure, of course. It really, really reads like one though, and if pointing that out is unacceptable, then feel free to detach my comment and mark it as off-topic. I won't be offended.

[tptacek]

Almost certainly, you say!

It's hard to think of something Paul Graham wrote that has done more damage to discussions on HN than his piece about submarine PR pieces.

[SilasX]

When people thought that every published article was some journalist independently deciding something was newsworthy and thus writing up their neutral research on it, they were wrong.

When people thought every published article was some propagandist's attempt to sway public opinion, they were wrong.

But the second view is a lot less wrong than the former.[1]

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." -- George Orwell.

[1] Didn't feel like following Asimov's pattern for the third line.

[clock_tower]

That doesn't mean they aren't real. Did you see that article on cursive writing? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193539)

[skj]

The submarine piece was a submarine piece to try to get people to generally ignore the press for anything substantive and instead elect Trump as president.

[metaphorm]

are you saying that the post you responded to did damage to this discussion? I think you should justify that claim. what damage? to whom?

I think that your comment might be the damaging one because it attempts to delegitimize the opinion of another community member without any reasons given.