I'm bouncing back and forth between "ah shit, and I thought they were cool..." and... Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?
Is a man not entitled to his own worth and value? I see nothing wrong with that, if your engineer can easily be sniped by a competing company willing to offer enough salary increase to convince somebody to move out of his job and jump to a new platform/environment/learning process, maybe you should be paying him more. You're not willing to? Well maybe that single engineer wasn't that vital to your company after all.
It seems easy to avoid to me. You either pay the wages required to keep important people in the building or you illegally collude with your competitors to keep them in the building. Bonus that the second option lowers your payroll costs as well.
Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?
Not true in comparison to other job types. I think engineers enjoy on-boarding the least. If you have 5 jobs in 10 years, that's 5 periods (about 6-9 months) of being "the new guy" and (a) performing at a suboptimal level, because you're learning idiosyncratic details of a closed-source tech stack, and (b) being unlikely to get useful projects because, no matter how good you are, every organization's going to put new people through a dues-paying period. That ends up taking 3-4 years out of your career, time essentially wasted on learning parochial details of internal codebases rather than getting better at the craft in general. Not fun.
Engineers move around so much because they have to, not because they want to. Wages are too low relative to housing costs, and advancement is often political, and interesting projects are too thin on the ground because engineer-driven companies are a rarity.
That tells me he's doing the right thing for his company and his shareholders.
It's not like Google and friends are the only tech companies in the world. They simply cannot really screw over engineers. All they can do is bargain. Everyone bargains in trade and tries to get the best price.
>> That tells me he's doing the right thing for his company and his shareholders.
Except when he does something illegal that leaves his company vulernable to a massive class-action lawsuit from his own employees. That doesn't seem like the right thing for his company and his shareholders.
Plus, in order to get this conspiracy off the ground and keep it running, he had to produce documentation of the conspiracy that would be embarrassing and possibly incriminating when it was made public. I'm not sure that he did the right thing for his company there.
It's now clear to current and future employees that he has conspired against them with other companies. That doesn't seem so good for his company either.
> They simply cannot really screw over engineers. All they can do is bargain.
We say this now, because the industry is growing so rapidly that it's hard to feel shafted given the sea of opportunity.
But being shafted is independent of whether or not you could've found another job elsewhere; the agreement they made prevented engineers from being able to bargain to their fullest extent.
Some say money changes you. Others say money just reveals who you really are.
Either way, the founders back in the day had different motivations and influences than the founders today. From my very limited and decidedly not rich point of view, the CEOs of seriously large corporations seem destined or doomed to turn into absolute shit spears when they receive their billions and see more down the road.
Never trust a billionaire. It's unfair, but probably mostly safe.
That behaviour from Steve Jobs I can kind of expect - he's fairly consistently shown that he's basically just a bad seed.
However, the behaviour from Brin also sounds like pretty a*sehole behaviour.
Curious is anybody can confirm if they're actually like this?
Or was this all taken out of context?
Surely he's actually nicer than this in person?