[saalweachter]

Or, if you take a company like Google, give every engineer a 5% haircut, bring the chefs and cleaning staff and groundkeepers and building maintenance back into the company (rather than contracting out), and distribute the money and stock grants among the support staff.

[c0vfefe]

That'd cause a big morale hit & big incentive for engineers to leave. Support staff are great, but at the end of the day they're not what drives growth for the company.

[saalweachter]

Eh, you take it out of the stock grant refreshes and the noise of stock fluctuations will make it rather difficult to notice in your total compensation.

EDIT: Also, you're taking income off the top of the tax brackets and giving it to someone at the bottom of the bottom, so you get a tax multiplier where you take $1 from me and give $1.50 to someone else. Also, you probably don't need even a 2% or 3% haircut off the engineers' salaries to make every support position a $100k/year job with full benefits and 401k matching, unless your engineer : support ratio is crazy.

EDIT EDIT: Yeah, pushing everyone to $100k/year is probably overselling the idea. You could still free up a life-changing amount of money for people making minimum or near-minimum wage.

[Kalium]

Google's published numbers put their engineering headcount at below half their overall headcount.

I'm not sure a 3% haircut on engineers at Google would give them enough funds to make every support position $100k while also doing what you suggested and bringing all the contracted services in-house.

If we assume a 3% haircut on an average engineering compensation of $250k, and 45% of the organization, you have $6k and change per support headcount. And this is without bringing TVCs in-house.

Unless the support staff are all making right about 95k, this seems like it might not quite work out.

[saalweachter]

I actually don't have enough numbers available myself to support this, so this conversation is doomed to a lot of hand-waving.

However, one point of definitions, I am not using "support staff" to refer to "non-engineers", I am using it to refer to "workers who perform services that are not part of the company's operations, such as building maintenance, cleaning, and cooking". Most of the non-engineering staff at Google are not support staff, they are non-engineering employees doing non-engineering work equally related to the core operations of the business. Sales, partner relations, data center management.

I also don't know how much these individuals are payed, although I hope to god it is "well above minimum wage".

In any case, sure, you're probably right and you can't actually bring everyone up to SWE-minimum-wage (100k$+benefits) with a small haircut off the engineering staff, but a small haircut off engineering, distributed to the 10-20% of employees and contractors being paid the least is a life-changing amount of money. +$15k / employee / year to the bottom 20% of earners is "quit your second job" money, it's "get the car fixed" money, it's "have money to put aside for a rainy day" money, it's "send the kid to college" money, while $7.5k less per year is "retire three months later" money for an engineer.

[skinnymuch]

A lot of the non engineering staff would still be other white collar jobs, no? Sales, admin, HR, etc. $100K is a high number OP reached for, but I’d think a vast majority of Google’s job total comp is in the 6 figures. Or close to it with some junior employees not in certain cities.

[c0vfefe]

What you're saying makes rational sense, but people's egos are not rational. It's the principle of the thing: why tolerate a pay cut when there's a long line of companies in the valley itching for your skills?

[thelock85]

At least for Google, IMO I don’t think it would generate long term consequences if engineers with this mindset who also aren’t in love with their work left the company.

[asdff]

Let the sociopaths leave then, they aren't emotionally valuable for a company. Plenty of people in the world outside of engineering take large pay cuts to work on something they believe in vs. taking a job that gives them the most wealth.

[c0vfefe]

Being offended by a pay cut doesn't make you a sociopath, just makes you selfish. And "emotional value" is much less relevant to a company than engineering value.

I know lots of people focus on less profit-driven motives for their career, but I bet even more do not, especially at places like Google.

[asdff]

That's a terrible mentality. Exponential growth is not sustainable. The worst thing about technology companies these days is that putting out a polished product and covering overhead + emergency funding is seen as a failure. Products must be modified to extract money from the consumer at every turn, and the market cap must rise and rise. If engineers would leave a company because its no longer growth driven, then our universites have failed to teach empathy in their engineering curriculum.

[c0vfefe]

That focus on increasing shareholder value above all else is definitely a regrettable inevitability of publicly-traded companies.

I know my engineering curriculum hasn't focused on empathy, or ethics much at all. Unfortunately you can't educate the selfishness out of humanity.

[Kalium]

Last time someone tried to teach me empathy, all I learned is that they had a poor understanding of how emotions connect to actions. They assumed that if I had a real, true, genuine emotional experience of empathy then I would be compelled to take some specific action. Generally the action assumed is either something directly to alleviate the perceived pain or the one prescribed by the person evoking the empathy.

I find these notions curious, and rather at odds with how I expect thinking humans to interact with the world around them.

Perhaps there's something else you think our universities might be failing to teach?