[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.