> The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low?
The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
> They also pay a lot of money because that's the only way to attract enough candidates who can pass their hiring bar. If they stopped asking hard interview questions and increased their candidate acceptance rate they wouldn't need to pay people 300k/year to fill their open positions.
I have 16 years of total experience. Their initial offer to me indicated they thought I would take $231k/year for the privilege of working there. I got them up to $253k/year. Both numbers are less than I make now (though the latter is close).
As far as I am concerned, and based on my direct experience, Google pay is not the hit shit everyone claims it is. Maybe it would be if I played the competing offer game, but I shouldn't have to do that.
Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it.
> A simpler explanation is that they pay well and are prestigious and so get a lot more good candidates.
Their pay and prestige will attract even more bad candidates.
> there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google
I think this is largely because of brand cachet and good pay. How many people would take a serious paycut to work for Google? I'm sure there are some, but I doubt there are many. And amongst those I bet a non-trivial amount would just be in it for the perks (free food, busses to work, childcare, etcetera).
I obviously have no way of verifying this, but amongst my circle of friends (not representative of the general population at all) most people no longer want to work for Google. It's more than just talk - I just turned down a job offer from Google recently.
Not anymore, really. It was the case a couple of years ago but right now, for rank-and-file employees, Google downlevels heavily and targets around 80% of the market rate. For some reason, people are still flocking at their doors and because of high supply of candidates, they can afford to be both very selective and very cheap.
> So people just take whatever is offered. Because, there are tens of thousands of people applying for these jobs. Most of them are likely to better than you and they didn't crack all competitive coding style interview to land a job like you did. So people just find it hard to turn down the offer and take it.
I don't speak for everyone obviously but the reason I took the offer is that it will still >50% what I was making previously. I didn't bother looking into how much other people make.
> It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.
Somehow I feel you have a bone to pick? I've been on 3 different teams and this has not been my experience at all.
People at Google seem to be just like people at other companies. They're happy they have a good job but look forward to retirement.
>Forget the money for a moment, when there is nobody to pick from or you are constantly entering into a bidding war with Application A who has received an offer from Google for $250k per year and all you can offer is $125k and perhaps some other perks, is that fair? Google aren't paying $250k because they think the applicant is worth it or that is the going market rate, they are paying this much because they know the application nine times out of ten will say yes to a ridiculous sum of money, because they need a developer and the cost is irrelevant to them and because they can.
How is this not fair? If Google can offer more money to hire a skilled developer, they will. To get top talent you have to pay for it.
>Smaller companies with half the profits and budgets shouldn't have to compete or die, it just is not fair.
Yes it is. Compete or die is the entire basis of the US economy, isn't it?
> The sort of developers who only come in because you're paying 200k rather than 150k are usually not the sort Google wants to hire.
A listed-company with a market capitalization of USD 100+ billion cannot count only on its employees' passion anymore. If it pretends like it's doing so is disingenuous.
During last few years me and 2 of my friends passed the interview and got offers there. Everytime Google came up with noticeably (like $10K-$15K) lower salary than the then current pretty typical SSE salary of the candidate with barely balancing that decrease by stock (with total being $5K-$15K higher on a good market day). One of the friends even took that offer with obvious result - more disappointed by the offer than enthusiastic he barely made through the first year and run away.
> The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time
Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.
>Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic.
It would be pretty difficult to make completely objective formulas for salary. I assume it maps back to perceived performance (in the interview, or after hiring), which is always biased, conscious or not.
>Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it.
Compared to who? They pay more than AMZN/MS/FB/AAPL/etc. for equal level, but are stingier with levels. You might be correct that certain other companies pay more than Google (Netflix maybe?), but they're certainly above average.
>Google is some kind of anamoly where they pay high _and_ are a gold-star on your resume; don't know how that works.
I think Google has an extraordinarily high need for engineers due to their blatant attempt to take over the world by moving out ahead of everyone else in every industry they can reach.
When you're trying to corner markets that don't exist yet while also competing to keep other firms taking a slice out of your cash cow core business, you need a lot of R&D.
> and you hire as many as you can within your budget
If you believe this then what's your explanation for why Google hires a smaller number of expensive engineers, rather than a larger number of cheaper engineers? They could hire 10x if they went for only lower-tier college new-grads!
>> Not to mention they apparently pay many people these sort of salaries to do basically nothing [1]: they've decided it's better to simply retain talent than risk them going to a competitor, regardless if they provide any value or not.
I don't think Google is purposely ok with some of their employees doing basically nothing. I've heard the theory that companies pay for some top talent who don't generate value just to prevent them from going to competitors, but is there any hard evidence for it?
> 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.
> Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.
Given that Google is known for using filtering methods with a high false negative rate because they have a great surplus of qualified candidates that they need to weed out, even if it was true, that's probably not a concern for them.
>I don't believe many companies can compete with Google on salary. Paying "market rate" is well... market rate.
In my broader circle, I see a lot more movement towards the likes of Google than away from--and most of the latter are senior people who don't need the money (or really didn't click with the job). Most companies that can will do creative things to snag or hold onto the people they want but I expect that most people who can land a Bay Area-salaried Google etc. position will just take that if money is the deal-breaker. Because most companies won't match in general.
The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
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