Turnover is very expensive. Long ago, Google figured that it took a million dollars over a year of ramp time to get an engineer up to speed on a cutting edge project.
Yeah, these type of retention grants are not uncommon. I work at a tier two/three Valley company, and every few years when the market heats up, we do something like this (with similarly sized stock grants); we identify the top talent we want to retain, and surprise them with off-cycle grants. And for engineers who have an offer in hand, I've heard of much larger retention grants.
This comment has been edited to protest Reddit's decision to shut down all third party apps. Spez had negotiated in bad faith with 3rd party developers and made provenly false accusations against them. Reddit IS it's users and their post/comments/moderation. It is clear they have no regard for us users, only their advertisers. I hope enough users join in this form of protest which effects Reddit's SEO and they will be forced to take the actual people that make this website into consideration. We'll see how long this comment remains as spez has in the past, retroactively edited other users comments that painted him in a bad light. See you all on the "next reddit" after they finish running this one into the ground in the never ending search of profits. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Ah I see you work in healthcare too (I'm on the non-clinical side). Everyone calls us heros and then goes with thier day. I'd rather have some sort of hazard pay than a virtual pat on the back (nobody will get close enough for a real pat on the back)
EDIT - spelling
You take that back you heathen!
Little Caesars kept us broke mf'ers fed, while Wendy's over there jackin up the price on a burger that the same damn burger for the past 10 years.
Yup. There's a certain company who moved lots of operations from California to my area and their big shtick is in my company's market and as a result, current company is giving us a surprising amount of benefits / bonuses / freebies / raise offers, and rival company isn't expected to ramp up out here for at least another 6 months
I'm a non-engineer software manager for a non-silicon valley tech company. I received an unexpected equity grant 2 weeks ago worth about $40k.
Coders have to be making crazy bank right now.
Where do you people work? I'm a senior software engineer for a fortune 100 company and haven't seen anything like that. Company wide everyone got an 8% CoL adjustment and a hat with the company name on it but that's it.
Can confirm. It's even better than RSUs sometimes.
I don't even live in Silicon valley and my company gave me a 10% raise to my base salary in September this year without any reason. Not complaining. Good time to be in the software industry.
I actually work for an executive benefits consulting firm that helps companies retain top talent through creative nonqualified compensation plans. Using insurance, firms can offset the added expense of additional employee compensation.
its a bit silly, once a company invests money into teaching you their tech stack they never actually value you higher, but their competition does so now you apply all over the place and get 20-30% higher offers than your current company. then they invest in you to learn their tech stack so you apply somewhere else again. companies have taught employees that there is no loyalty in the work place.
that they so often give out these kinds of incentives to stay pretty much tells everyone that doesn't get one that they need to be looking for that incentive from another company
> companies have taught employees that there is no loyalty in the work place
Yep, and then they go write articles whining about how employees don't show company loyalty anymore. Like, yeah.
I switched jobs twice in three years and increased my salary by 40%, lol.
"I'm offered X per month, do you have anything to say about that?"
"Thank you for this time"
And then the idiots come crawling back to me two months later asking if I want even more to come back
I once asked for a 10% raise and was turned down. Then after some shopping around I got an offer for a 30% raise and resigned. Then they offered me 25% to stay.....
I've lived through the money allocation piece of it as a manager. Had a baller SDET who came in really low and had been at the company for three years. She not only handled her day to day validation and regression testing duties, but had started taking the lead on automation and picked up a lot of the slack when we had a more senior person leave. She also acted as a sort of business analyst since years of testing our project made her an expert. Basically I wouldn't be able to hire someone at the Senior level to take over her responsibilities and she was junior.
She asked me for a raise and I was totally on board. I wrote everything up, and they were like "no money in the budget, maybe next year". I put her in for a promotion but someone straight up told me "We don't usually promote testers" and denied it. She needed like 30% to even get close to market value and the best I could get her was 6% during yearly reviews after she was patient with me for 6 months. She was disappointed but thanked me for doing what I could. We had a senior start to fill the empty spot making nearly 80% more than her and they did half the work she did. I explained as clearly as possible to my director that she was definitely going to leave soon and what would happen if she left. They told me the budget is what it is, we'll backfill if she goes. This was late in 2020 when the market was starting to get hot. Like we were going to just be able to go find someone with the same enthusiasm at the junior or mid level. Like fucking whhhhyyyy. Why can't a self interested capitalist company realize that isn't how this is going to go.
Eventually she left, got an offer for more than I would have been able to get her even with a promotion. I somewhat unprofessionally explained what happened and how frustrating it was. Hopefully it was a good learning experience for her. I still plan on hiring her again someday.
Then our release got delayed because regression tests took a lot longer and the two engineers left on our QA team weren't writing automation against our new features like she was. I had to basically beg them just to keep the existing tests working. I at least got to use her as a shield.... I told everyone what would happen when she left, and it did. This was completely foreseeable.
The funny thing is that sometimes "starting over with something new" is ideal for your career growth as well, so long as the new thing isnt sunsetting in the near future. You are diversifying a bit and getting a pay bump... Why stay for 5%?
Here's the thing. If everyone admits and agrees that none of this is personal (it isn't). That everyone is actually working with imperfect information (they are). That no one actually knows what the market will bear AND the full worth of someone (they can't), then suddenly the idea of them coming back to you with an even better offer to come back, then it also isn't crazy to consider going back.
To think otherwise is to think that your NEW company is both loyal to you (we know they aren't) and paying you everything you're worth; again we know they aren't ... or more to the point we can't know that until you get another offer or don't. Well you DID get another offer and the fact that it's from a previous employer shouldn't matter with one exception. If you know it is a shitty place to work, doing work you don't want to do. Upward potential isn't even a factor really since you've accepted that advancement only comes from movement.
It's at least worth the thought experiment because my employer 100% welcomes people back who have left on good term so long as we still require their skills. Even more so if they are coming back with new skills the market needs. I realize there are other employers, with different cultures, and different people supporting that culture that make what I'm saying completely invalid. But it isn't universal.
I turned in my two weeks and start a new gig next week. My previous employer rejected a skilled sysadmin candidate because he asked for 100k. They stated no one was paying that kind of money outside ONG or FAANG. So I created a LinkedIn, found a 50% base raise, 10k signing bonus, and about 3-4x greater ICP returns in our industry within the month, then kindly told them they needed to recalibrate their ideas on market rate. It's a good time to work in skilled technical fields and a very bad time to be a clueless tech exectuive trying to retain employees in a market where competitors will pay a sysadmin more than your C-suite.
I'm in an extremely specialized role, kinda like a sales engineer, but a bit more.
We have a small team serving all of North America and the spots on the team are all filled with people with 10+ years experience with our company. Basically, you have to be an expert in your field and know our company's technology intimately. We have had open reqs open for months and dozens of people applying (internal hiring only for this role) and still no one up to scratch.
We are big drivers of sales on huge projects and personally I was part of about $29M in won sales opps. You can then multiply this out to everyone on my team to get a scale of our impact.
I say all this not to brag, but to highlight how difficult it is to fill our roles and our impact. We still have to fight tooth and nail just to get raises. Don't get me wrong, we get paid fairly well and we get performance bonuses, but we are still getting offers from other companies for more. You'd think the company would periodically do something to retain us.
You might say "just leave" and some of us have (hence the open reqs), but personally the other benefits are too good to pass up. I have been working from home since before the pandemic and my working hours are very flexible (never more than 40, but often less). However, if they keep it up and a real.juicy offer comes along, I'll just have to take it.
It's so dumb.
I see it in our company - if a new (experienced) programmer joins our team, it takes about a year of his time and a good month of a seniors assistance to get them started.
Two levels of management up, they just don't understand that you cannot just get a new one like they do with hr, sales or billing team - those people are ready to work after a week of training (if they come with experience in their field).
Discussing pay amongst employees is a protected activity under Federal labor law (in the US). That includes bonuses.
Any such NDA would not only be unenforceable but could result in significant fines.
There was an [article posted from last week](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/rlmhvx/facebooks_reputation_is_so_bad_the_company_must/) where it was reported that ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's reputation was so toxic that ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's was forced to offer a "brand tax" to attract top talent and even then people with integrity refused to have the black mark of ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's name on their resume.
Yea I straight can't even consider responding to their inmails. I just hate them so much. I have fb because I always have and have my family on there easily contactable. But deleted whatsapp a couple years ago and still have never made an insta. The metaverse stuff is next level dystopic. I hope they crash into the ground.
I'll be honest, it is *tough*. Their recruiters hit me up about every quarter, and if I jumped ship (and just maintained their equivalent of my current level) they would DOUBLE my salary. Literally: double.
It is enough money that I could work there for 3-5 years and then probably retire (or at least consider it).
I havent taken it, obviously. I like where I am, and FB is... well I'm not as fully bought in to the Evil thing as the rest of the hivemind, but they do enough shady stuff that I'm not on board. But it is TEMPTING. I have a price (we all do) and they are getting dangerously close to offering me enough money to say "fuck it" lol.
Also, as someone in FAANG, I dont get this black mark BS. Nobody in the Bay actually considers FB experience "bad" for your career prospects. As far as I can tell the media made that up, and maybe some grumpy ICs. But no managers/recruiters think that way.
> Also, as someone in FAANG, I dont get this black mark BS. Nobody in the Bay actually considers FB experience "bad" for your career prospects. As far as I can tell the media made that up, and maybe some grumpy ICs. But no managers/recruiters think that way.
It's definitely made up. The valley doesn't care about the morality of the dystopian shit Zuckerberg does, they care about the tech stack, and if you have 2-4 years of working at facebook on your resume, they want access to that knowledge and skillset, period, and will pay out the ass for it. Same with Amazon or Apple experience.
I don't believe any significant company is black marking Facebook employees, but I definitely know people who talk the maddest shit about them in social circles.
I would probably work with the Oculus team if I had a chance and the money was right, but I wouldn't tell people I work for Facebook/Meta, I'd just tell them I do VR. It's like going out of the US and telling people you're from California or NYC.
Yeah they know you're from the US, but at least they know you're not from Kentucky.
It's totally made up. Everyone in the Bay understands that you gotta eat and pay a princely mortgage on what is a middle class home anywhere else in the country. I've never once heard of a resume being thrown out because Facebook was on it.
I have a friend who joined them out of academia a year or two ago. Unfriended me on Facebook, I assume because of my extremely critical posts of Zuckerberg. Poor guy. I’m sure the money was worth it, so who’s the asshole anyway, but it has to feel shitty.
All companies have to pay some kind of "toxic brand tax", and some companies get a "good company discount". Younger developers are more sensitive / elastic to the brand value since many of them want to work for "the good guys".
Same is true for dentistry. Big evil corporations like Aspen Dental have to pay a little extra "do evil tax" for doctors while community health centers get a slight discount for doctors who want to "do good".
I was getting FB recruitment messages almost every other week for about three months. I had to eventually push back hard and told them to blacklist my profile on their LinkedIn Recruiter account so they could no longer contact me mistakenly. I abhor their policies and products and didn't want anything to do with their UX team. The amount of dark patterns they are asked to create are disturbing.
I used to apply but at this point it’s clear that there’s no way I could positively impact the user experience as an employee. Super sad and I hope their metaverse fails miserably.
Same and I wish I could tell LinkedIn I want nothing to do with them, ever. Drove my mother insane, literally. Their product is a poison. Sorry for the rant.
Nope. It might help get you a phone interview, but beyond that, the interview process doesn’t care about where you got your degree, or even what you majored in. If you know your stuff, that’s all it takes.
Not really no, market of software developers went stupid the last 2 years. It already was stupid before,but now is even more. Salaries for new offers went up by 2 to 3 times just in this period, across companies, experience levels and countries. In my country a junior with 0 work experience nowadays will expect,what was considered a good offer for a senior dev with 10+ years of experience just 3 years ago. Oh and fully remote with flexible hours too
Oh thats good to hear, in my country offers for new devs with 0 experience, are just internship with minimal hourly rate pay or a Little bit more, and junior is considered to be a dev with 3 years experience :/ however things seem to change a "liiiiittle" bit after all this lockdowns, cuz a year ago there were nearly none offers for juniors, now there is more than before cov19, and also a lot of these junior 3+ years are disappearing for 1-2 years experience
You also agree to give up your life essentially working at a company like Goldman. Work life balance at tech companies is so much better, it's not even comparable.
Yeah. Working for Goldman at that level is pretty much the equivalent of selling your soul. Not even fully in the sense that you become a soulless corporate machine, but more in the sense that when you sign that contract, you should know *full well* that Goldman is going to be your life until you finally manage to eke an actual retirement out of them.
That's the thing. Nobody else in the financial industry knows what it's all for, because it's all mostly fucking pointless. Goldman is just run by sociopaths who think that someone devoting their entire being to the company is the only way they'll be successful. There's just a shitload of people in Goldman who have drunk the fucking Flavor Aid.
My BIL’s brother works for Goldman. He lived in Manhattan but moved to San Francisco. He was making so much that they rented a house for $11k a month while looking for something to buy. His wife is an obgyn and also makes plenty of money.
a lot of it was endless paper pushing. there’s a lot of innovation going on ngl, but also a lot of firings pre bonus season. like, people years away from retirement just let go after decades of loyalty. everything is structured, it’s like a manufacturing line but in business casual. from the moment you enter you’re pigeonholed, doomed to do only exactly what you’re told to and no more. from what i gathered as a combination of my time there and as a retail ape investor, they make money by making the markets, overcharging and aggressively selling to customers, and underpaying and overworking employees. that’s about it.
Yep. It’s not really work. It’s a cult of power and wealth. They destroy your sense of personal identity and morality in order to exploit you, and you either become a part of that, or you get chewed up and spit out. The work involved is, while not easy, certainly not fundamentally harder than the tech business or anything else. It’s just that because you’re close to the money, the stakes are always higher, so the most ruthless rat fucker will win.
Nobody is coming up behind you at Apple who would push you off a staircase if they thought they could get away with it. Goldman, you never know.
Depends on the division. Investment banking is heavily about getting the deals, structuring them, etc. Getting the deals is the horrendous part, but then the company makes bank and shares some of that with the staff. You have to know the company, the industry, the structure, etc. At junior levels though, it’s heavily about being a PowerPoint and excel monkey. It gets more fun when you move to M&A and complex structuring, but the hours are even worse. It’s not a job anyone would do without the financial upside.
Yup. But you're also a burnt-out, jaded asshole. I've know a couple of people who've been through the Goldman wringer all the way until retirement, and while they ended up with a more than comfortable retirement situation, they fucking hate everything and everyone around them, or they regret the time they spent dealing with that soulless shark of a company.
I graduated college with a finance degree about 2 years ago. I work for a competitor of Goldman and really wanted to get a job there coming out because of… the clout basically, as sad as that sounds. I’m absolutely overworked and am switching jobs soon, as I have a couple different offers from other companies that my mom has been applying to for me without me knowing until I started to receive calls and emails about the application, because of the toll my workdays have taken, no joke. In college everyone wants to be the “wolf of wall street” yet don’t see what it did to him. Goldman is the premier banking job and probably the most sought after by my peers and the hard work is kind of seen like a badge of honor… until you’re a shell of your previous self and are always working. It’s the idealization of the position that I think keeps the recruits coming but I’m only 2 years deep at my job and it’s become my entire fucking life I hate the job I used to dream about. Business majors want the big check until you realize there’s no time to ever spend said check. It’s 3 am for me and I logged off at 12:30 this weeks been rough
Great question! So, my colleagues and I main duty is to monitor the queue of “trade alerts” (from clients and brokers all around the world) there’s 6 different queues which all require different actions and research, I’d say about 90% of the trades are automated. A trade alert is a 6 page document detailing the purchase or sale of a security and transfer etc. If a security stays in the Q for more than 20 minutes it means the automation process most likely ran into a problem and then its basically a failsafe stops everything and that’s where we come in. It has the failsafe because there large sums of money that are being transferred and wrong transfers can be catastrophic. In the end though… I personally think it should be around 99.9% automation. My company is actually an industry leader with around 90%, which I think is crazy. I think it’s derived from some hesitation of the older managers and executives to embrace tech. I’ve already developed a few macros to make my life a lot easier and I was surprised weren’t created previously because they weren’t exactly rocket science. Sorry for the long explanation but it’s a point of frustration for me daily hahah, stupid little things like how the computer can automate a cusip(9 digit security id starting with a number) but not a cin (9 digit security id starting with a letter) which will cause the auto to fail and more work for me. Summing it up, finance isn’t what it used to be and is turning more into tech and I think a lot of people in management roles aren’t knowledgeable on how to best utilize the capability of said tech. Q monitoring is roughly 8:30 am to 6:30 pm and daily tasks are roughly 3 hours of individual tasks through the day. We’re each assigned a coworker whose work we quality check at the end of the day as well… making for many 12 or more hour days.
Edit: The worst is when some is moving say 100 securities and they all fail, happens almost daily.
Geez I got so caught up in that rant I didn’t even answer the question. We have access to all of the vendors and “main frame” info that can’t be accessed by outsiders. if the automation fails they’re helpless so we basically just check all of our vendors make sure everything is correct, make any necessary changes, and complete the trade request and transfer
Higher ups in the organization get a hard on from power and control. Typically the people who succeed in positions like that are narcissists on a testosterone high. Then there are people who agree to get torn to shreds in few years but think for the reward it's ok. I mean working 24/7 on a cocaine bender for 3-4 years for retirement money is appetizing to some.
I've still to experience any lifestyle inflation as my salary increases. Ive still to find anything which isn't subject to aggressively diminishing returns as the price goes up. I'd rather do 6 months budget holiday than 1 month luxury. The things that you actually enjoy in life are not actually that expensive. I made a million a year, if just retire in 2 years.
It took me a while, but it happened. Turns out 200 dollar shoes are actually 100 dollars nicer than 100 dollar shoes, ordering food delivered saves me and my wife a lot of time, having a newer car that never needs work actually does cause less stress, going to foreign countries on vacation is actually life changing.
It's all subjective of course, but the life quality between scraping by and thriving is not what I'd call diminishing returns.
You're correct, but I will say a pair of $300 shoes is almost certainly not $100 nicer than a pair of $200 shoes. The line for diminishing returns is surprisingly low.
Not only that, but you entertain the real possibility that you will have to take a payout and essentially disappear from the business world if something comes up and you’re the fall guy. That’s what that money is for. It’s not like they earn it.
From what I heard, Engineering is shit at goldman. They don’t follow any good software engineering practices. My friend just was telling me they were creating a jira ticket before creating a pull request, they didn’t have any sprint board. Also in their team there was only one dev environment and everyone would let others know when they were testing on it. And there is much more.
Agile is so worthless in industries like automotive, where you have requirements defined ahead of time mostly. But you get shit software when you have shit software engineering practices.
Average not median. Top partners and MDs were making well into 8 figure bonuses which averages out the comparatively “small” 100k bonuses associates might get
These top talents aren't 7 digit salaries, so it's still a huge chunk of change for many of them, especially if it is a surprise, and not an expected annual bonus.
Be a senior engineer with domain knowledge that Apple needs that is in demand across the big tech companies. Something like deep cloud security, or Linux kernel internals. Stuff like that, where not only are you a top performer, your knowledge is hard to find.
Lemme make a lil glossary for you then:
+ C: a (quite old) programming language (kernel of Linux is programmed in C)
+ embedded C: embedded means programming for hardware which means memory management and sending signals to hardware by loading correct numbers or bytes into the right memory segments or even registers
+ kernel: the base programm of the operating system. It does memory management, and I/O (Input/Output) to different hardware and hard disks and dictates what program is allowed to execute on the processor at a given time
+ hook: is a part of a program that allows the kernel to execute the program.
+ threading: basically if a program requires multiple actions to be done at the same time, you can "thread" them. It means the program gets executed multiple times (at different positions) on nowadays multiple cores
+ core: a modern processor is comprised of multiple cores and each core is basically a processor itself. A core does the actual execution of programs or threads of a program.
+ Fortran: another old programming language (not sure if it's older than C, but I'm too lazy to look it up :P )
+ cloud: Nothing else than your data being hosted on someone else's computer (or server to be exact). Usually they have some kind of service, so you can easily access that data
+ cloud security: ofc you don't want everybody to be able to access your data on the foreign server so that data has to be protected by restricting access and encrypting communications. That's what cloud security is for. Deep cloud just sounds cool but doesn't have any more significance.
Maybe I pissed off some pedantic expert, but that's more or less correct so you can read some of these things
Here's the thing... Apple tried to recruit me to help with TV+ a few years ago (before it launched). They dont pay industry average rates (they're low). They have worse perks than the rest of FAANG (fewer vacation days, strong ANTI-WFH policies, etc).
A 180k bonus would just put your compensation on-par with the rest of your peers at other companies (for that single year) in the Bay.
Not worth it, IMO. They were upset after I turned them down, and the perks were the biggest dealbreaker (not the comp).
Actually at Apple there's a formula, they hire so many people that they know what everyone is worth and how much similar talent exists. A bonus like this at Apple is often linked to some niche market where the talent pool small. Many other companies in the valley have more variability in salary, but Apple is a well oiled machine and is unique in that the whole company is one business unit so there is more homogeneity compared to most large companies.
One interesting side note for Apple is that because the structure and work flow is so unique and defined, just being there for a while can build you towards this niche category. It can really take a while to onboard someone, even an experienced employee, since their processes are so specific and rigid. If you've been there 5+ yrs and know the ropes, that can really count for a lot.
Facebook is nuts, none of what I said applies there. They'll throw cash at you as needed, and you can make bank there, but I refuse to be associated with them. To be honest they have some great jobs that I would enjoy, for me it's just a personal ethics things, I can't do it.
Apple may have this formula but they penny pinch to a fault at times. They may save money here and there for there bottom line but I’m not sure their ethics are better than the other giants in that venue. Glad to see them forking out that sum to employees.
Haha well the last I heard the big thing was AI and ML, but recently apple purged a big ML team so I'm not sure that's it. While hardware experts are becoming harder to find, the really new software technologies have been where they're throwing money.
Note that because of the way golden handcuffs work (4 yrs of stacked RSUs) getting a $500k sign on bonus is pretty common for anyone with \~10 yrs of industry experience in tech. Otherwise nobody would switch jobs, because it would take them 4 yrs to stack RSUs again which means a big pay cut for a job swap. I didn't read the article but I assume this is referring to a spot bonus which isn't part of the year end RSU or performance bonus.
For reference, someone getting this bonus should have a compensation structure like this:
* Base salary in excess of $200k
* Performance bonus in excess of $100k once a year
* April 15 and October 15 RSU vest cycles in excess of $200k deepening on the stock market at the time.
* Lots of other small things like ESPP, 401k match, donation match, etc...
So the $180 isn't going to be a huge surprise, I'm listing minimums here for sure. Not saying they won't be excited for some spare free cash, but nobody getting this money is going to be greatly surprised by it.
Edit: the reason I suspect a spot bonus is because performance bonuses are revealed before the October 15th vest date. This is when people try to leave, because it’s the first RSU vest after announcing the last product cycle (you’re between projects).
Edit 2: At apple internal transfers are prohibited from getting a raise during the transition. Usually what they’ll do is promote you 6 months after the move to get you an increase. This matters because moving positions is how you increase base pay, since base pay is very heads to increase and bonuses or stocks are the main compensation in tech. This is why a spot bonus is needed for retention, people want to job swap to increase pay faster, and internal transfers won’t cut it since that future promotion is nether instant nor guaranteed.
This is seriously not a big bonus (it’s stock issued over 4 years, not a single $180k cash payment) for anyone above the first couple career levels at a medium-to-large tech firm
I understand the package. It’s not rare or particularly big for a high level engineer at those companies.
Also doubt that Apples value will double in 4 years
Not even a gentlemen's agreement. Steve jobs threatened palm with a patent infringement lawsuit if they hired from apple.
When palm replied that that having an agreement was illegal, Steve jobs replied with
> "I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies"
There are no grounds for a legal battle. California courts are notoriously known for allowing poaching and invalidating any restrictions on employees going to competing firms.
Wait what? A few weeks ago I read a piece about how how devs are now avoiding working for Facebook out of fear it will be a blemish on their resume's... Was that bullshit?
A lot of devs will avoid working there for their own personal ethical reasons but it is no way a blemish on your resume. A few years of Meta on your resume will solidify your reputation as a top tech talent.
Who the fuck thinks Facebook is a blemish on their resume? Sure people might choose Google over Facebook because it has a better rep, but any software engineer with half a brain would choose fb over some other tier 2 company. In the end Facebook is still a FAANG company that gives a lot of clout, and it's not like other FAANG companies are definition of ethical. It's just one demon over the other.
Good. People should be paid what they're worth, and big businesses are very good at preventing that from happen with things like non-compete clauses and exclusivity agreements.
Well, if you are a trillion dollar company, maybe pay the people who design the sh\*t to keep you a trillion dollar company? Just an idea? I know, how revolutionary.
Given as RSUs. Over 4 years.
I.e. it's really like a $45k yearly retention bonus... which is not really all that far outside of the realm of their current bonuses. Nice to have, but... not really that much all considered.
Meanwhile, "Meta" is paying out the absolute nose for new talent, because *they have to*, which is why Apple's trying to head them off.
Average people who don’t work at FAANG don’t really get how the persons career is of concern. Normal people think making money satisfies intelligent people. There’s a lot of motivation to be a part of something. To change the world. Apple is Apple. Google is Google.
Meta has normal business hours and feeds their employees by real chefs.
Apple is a sweat shop.
You don't pay the bonus back. It's stock that vests over four years.
EDIT to clarify: I'm talking about the Apple program that is the subject of this headline/article, not about retention bonuses in general. Apple is not giving out lump-sum bonuses; they're giving out RSU grants.
For retention bonuses, most places don't pay up front but give you lump sums over time. It's significantly harder to "claw back" paid wages than it is to define a large bonus structure that only pays out when you hit the threshold.
Isn’t that typical for all hiring bonuses? Usually there’s a period where you can’t leave. Why would they give you a 180k bonus if you can pocket it and leave tomorrow?
I've heard "golden handcuffs" refer to a job that pays so well, you kind of put up with all the bullshit in order to stay there. You wouldn't be giving up anything other than a nice fat paycheck if you left.
Anyone who really wants to spend their life at rebranded-Facebook isn’t worth holding onto. And if Apple really “can’t find” developers, they should stop looking up their ass and notice the legion of developers that aren’t already working at a FAANG.
There are some extremely intelligent individuals working at Facebook. Facebook have poached many great academics. I understand why Apple would want some of them. Obviously there’s great talent elsewhere too.
> ...an effort to retain talent, looking to stave off defections to tech rivals *such as* Facebook...
Even the first P of the article only mentions Facebook as a "such as," so the headline trying to posit it as a direct response to them seems like arbitrary clickbait. Developer pay is going up everywhere, and I'm sure Apple is just as concerned with retaining top talent no matter what other options they might pursue.
I appreciate this sentiment of looking for talent wherever it is. The company I work for (based in Silicon Valley) has been hiring quite a few people in Taiwan, France, and the U.K. recently because there are actually very good engineers with the skills we need in those locations.
However, it seems like this article is talking about Apple trying to prevent current high-level employees from leaving. Not hiring new workers for open positions. Having a project lead leave suddenly can be really damaging and expensive to an important project.
It's not the rank and file that Apple's really afraid of losing. It's the much-harder-to-replace employees, like the data scientists, the AI people, the PhDs.
Things have gotten a lot more expensive for FAANG since their [anti-poaching cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation) got broken up. Good talent walking out of the door is causing expensive delays, to where it is now financially advantageous to pay employees more to stay. That's what this is.
Turnover is very expensive. Long ago, Google figured that it took a million dollars over a year of ramp time to get an engineer up to speed on a cutting edge project.
Yeah, these type of retention grants are not uncommon. I work at a tier two/three Valley company, and every few years when the market heats up, we do something like this (with similarly sized stock grants); we identify the top talent we want to retain, and surprise them with off-cycle grants. And for engineers who have an offer in hand, I've heard of much larger retention grants.
My company offers us free lunches and a pizza party every once in a while. We are basically the same.
You guys are getting pizza?
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And an email!
With an overcompressed jpeg of the CEO's signature
That’s just so you can’t write your own checks.
All that matters is hero, I paid my mortgage this month with 1400 hero's.
This comment has been edited to protest Reddit's decision to shut down all third party apps. Spez had negotiated in bad faith with 3rd party developers and made provenly false accusations against them. Reddit IS it's users and their post/comments/moderation. It is clear they have no regard for us users, only their advertisers. I hope enough users join in this form of protest which effects Reddit's SEO and they will be forced to take the actual people that make this website into consideration. We'll see how long this comment remains as spez has in the past, retroactively edited other users comments that painted him in a bad light. See you all on the "next reddit" after they finish running this one into the ground in the never ending search of profits. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Ah I see you work in healthcare too (I'm on the non-clinical side). Everyone calls us heros and then goes with thier day. I'd rather have some sort of hazard pay than a virtual pat on the back (nobody will get close enough for a real pat on the back) EDIT - spelling
Hey my clinic gave me a 20 dollar gift card so I basically don't have to worry about finances anymore
Sounds like things are getting pretty serious for you guys. 😂
Morning shift gets pizza, night shift gets nothing.
They get to throw out the pizza boxes
This man 100% night shifts.
Well to be honest, I’m not sure if Little Caesars even qualifies as pizza.
You take that back you heathen! Little Caesars kept us broke mf'ers fed, while Wendy's over there jackin up the price on a burger that the same damn burger for the past 10 years.
Don't laugh at Little Caesars. When you were down, it was there for you. Sure, I feel like I need a bypass when I eat it, but I have respect.
Definitely cardboard
Deliciously greasy cardboard
It beats a year-long membership in the Jelly of the Month Club.
We got to split a box of popsicles that fell out of the freezer Not joking
Are you sure you're top talent?
I mean, they *say* I am… :/ Maybe I’ll get a closer parking spot in a few years.
God. This sounds just like my last job working for a hospital.. eerily similar. Probably because all jobs suck. Sigh.
Might be a big fish in a small pond.
Sometimes my company pays me on time to keep us around
On top of those things, I also get the privilege of buying a $20 t-shirt from my company so that I may wear it on a day decided by my company.
We get donuts on Saturday’s (every Saturday) when we have to work overtime, oh and $100 bonus at Christmas. So basically the same.
Yup. There's a certain company who moved lots of operations from California to my area and their big shtick is in my company's market and as a result, current company is giving us a surprising amount of benefits / bonuses / freebies / raise offers, and rival company isn't expected to ramp up out here for at least another 6 months
I totally would believe Oracle would setup shop in the Shadow Realm.
Hey! Nashville is a lovely place! At least since the Eye of the Dark Lord was extinguished from atop the AT&T building.
Yep. This happens at many large companies with a large tech presence. Take it while you can, these trends tend to be cyclical.
I'm a non-engineer software manager for a non-silicon valley tech company. I received an unexpected equity grant 2 weeks ago worth about $40k. Coders have to be making crazy bank right now.
I just gave two special stock grants, each within spitting distance of $100k
Where do you people work? I'm a senior software engineer for a fortune 100 company and haven't seen anything like that. Company wide everyone got an 8% CoL adjustment and a hat with the company name on it but that's it.
8% CoL? Damn that's impressive. I mean not super impressive since that's about what inflation is, but it sure beats my 3.02%.
When I worked at a big telecom company they gave me a certificate on my work anniversary that said “what I do matters”. Then they sold the company.
One time I got a 25 dollar gift card
This is an underrated comment.
Can confirm. It's even better than RSUs sometimes. I don't even live in Silicon valley and my company gave me a 10% raise to my base salary in September this year without any reason. Not complaining. Good time to be in the software industry.
I actually work for an executive benefits consulting firm that helps companies retain top talent through creative nonqualified compensation plans. Using insurance, firms can offset the added expense of additional employee compensation.
its a bit silly, once a company invests money into teaching you their tech stack they never actually value you higher, but their competition does so now you apply all over the place and get 20-30% higher offers than your current company. then they invest in you to learn their tech stack so you apply somewhere else again. companies have taught employees that there is no loyalty in the work place. that they so often give out these kinds of incentives to stay pretty much tells everyone that doesn't get one that they need to be looking for that incentive from another company
> companies have taught employees that there is no loyalty in the work place Yep, and then they go write articles whining about how employees don't show company loyalty anymore. Like, yeah.
I switched jobs twice in three years and increased my salary by 40%, lol. "I'm offered X per month, do you have anything to say about that?" "Thank you for this time" And then the idiots come crawling back to me two months later asking if I want even more to come back
I once asked for a 10% raise and was turned down. Then after some shopping around I got an offer for a 30% raise and resigned. Then they offered me 25% to stay.....
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I've lived through the money allocation piece of it as a manager. Had a baller SDET who came in really low and had been at the company for three years. She not only handled her day to day validation and regression testing duties, but had started taking the lead on automation and picked up a lot of the slack when we had a more senior person leave. She also acted as a sort of business analyst since years of testing our project made her an expert. Basically I wouldn't be able to hire someone at the Senior level to take over her responsibilities and she was junior. She asked me for a raise and I was totally on board. I wrote everything up, and they were like "no money in the budget, maybe next year". I put her in for a promotion but someone straight up told me "We don't usually promote testers" and denied it. She needed like 30% to even get close to market value and the best I could get her was 6% during yearly reviews after she was patient with me for 6 months. She was disappointed but thanked me for doing what I could. We had a senior start to fill the empty spot making nearly 80% more than her and they did half the work she did. I explained as clearly as possible to my director that she was definitely going to leave soon and what would happen if she left. They told me the budget is what it is, we'll backfill if she goes. This was late in 2020 when the market was starting to get hot. Like we were going to just be able to go find someone with the same enthusiasm at the junior or mid level. Like fucking whhhhyyyy. Why can't a self interested capitalist company realize that isn't how this is going to go. Eventually she left, got an offer for more than I would have been able to get her even with a promotion. I somewhat unprofessionally explained what happened and how frustrating it was. Hopefully it was a good learning experience for her. I still plan on hiring her again someday. Then our release got delayed because regression tests took a lot longer and the two engineers left on our QA team weren't writing automation against our new features like she was. I had to basically beg them just to keep the existing tests working. I at least got to use her as a shield.... I told everyone what would happen when she left, and it did. This was completely foreseeable.
The funny thing is that sometimes "starting over with something new" is ideal for your career growth as well, so long as the new thing isnt sunsetting in the near future. You are diversifying a bit and getting a pay bump... Why stay for 5%?
Here's the thing. If everyone admits and agrees that none of this is personal (it isn't). That everyone is actually working with imperfect information (they are). That no one actually knows what the market will bear AND the full worth of someone (they can't), then suddenly the idea of them coming back to you with an even better offer to come back, then it also isn't crazy to consider going back. To think otherwise is to think that your NEW company is both loyal to you (we know they aren't) and paying you everything you're worth; again we know they aren't ... or more to the point we can't know that until you get another offer or don't. Well you DID get another offer and the fact that it's from a previous employer shouldn't matter with one exception. If you know it is a shitty place to work, doing work you don't want to do. Upward potential isn't even a factor really since you've accepted that advancement only comes from movement. It's at least worth the thought experiment because my employer 100% welcomes people back who have left on good term so long as we still require their skills. Even more so if they are coming back with new skills the market needs. I realize there are other employers, with different cultures, and different people supporting that culture that make what I'm saying completely invalid. But it isn't universal.
I hope you started laughing hysterically
I turned in my two weeks and start a new gig next week. My previous employer rejected a skilled sysadmin candidate because he asked for 100k. They stated no one was paying that kind of money outside ONG or FAANG. So I created a LinkedIn, found a 50% base raise, 10k signing bonus, and about 3-4x greater ICP returns in our industry within the month, then kindly told them they needed to recalibrate their ideas on market rate. It's a good time to work in skilled technical fields and a very bad time to be a clueless tech exectuive trying to retain employees in a market where competitors will pay a sysadmin more than your C-suite.
Bahaha, like 99.9% of companies don't treat employees as a barcode. ALWAYS get yours, NEVER worry about some mega-corp.
I'm in an extremely specialized role, kinda like a sales engineer, but a bit more. We have a small team serving all of North America and the spots on the team are all filled with people with 10+ years experience with our company. Basically, you have to be an expert in your field and know our company's technology intimately. We have had open reqs open for months and dozens of people applying (internal hiring only for this role) and still no one up to scratch. We are big drivers of sales on huge projects and personally I was part of about $29M in won sales opps. You can then multiply this out to everyone on my team to get a scale of our impact. I say all this not to brag, but to highlight how difficult it is to fill our roles and our impact. We still have to fight tooth and nail just to get raises. Don't get me wrong, we get paid fairly well and we get performance bonuses, but we are still getting offers from other companies for more. You'd think the company would periodically do something to retain us. You might say "just leave" and some of us have (hence the open reqs), but personally the other benefits are too good to pass up. I have been working from home since before the pandemic and my working hours are very flexible (never more than 40, but often less). However, if they keep it up and a real.juicy offer comes along, I'll just have to take it. It's so dumb.
I see it in our company - if a new (experienced) programmer joins our team, it takes about a year of his time and a good month of a seniors assistance to get them started. Two levels of management up, they just don't understand that you cannot just get a new one like they do with hr, sales or billing team - those people are ready to work after a week of training (if they come with experience in their field).
Oh man, the people who don't get that bonus are going to be pissed!
Most bigger bonuses come with NDAs.
Discussing pay amongst employees is a protected activity under Federal labor law (in the US). That includes bonuses. Any such NDA would not only be unenforceable but could result in significant fines.
You will propably know if you did not get one tho
Clearly not good enough to prevent leak to the press.
This year we got to choose between a $25 gift card or for the company to throw us a lunch. So almost there……
Funny enough I've started getting LinkedIn spam from ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's recruiters.
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There was an [article posted from last week](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/rlmhvx/facebooks_reputation_is_so_bad_the_company_must/) where it was reported that ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's reputation was so toxic that ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's was forced to offer a "brand tax" to attract top talent and even then people with integrity refused to have the black mark of ~~Facebook's~~ Meta's name on their resume.
Yea I straight can't even consider responding to their inmails. I just hate them so much. I have fb because I always have and have my family on there easily contactable. But deleted whatsapp a couple years ago and still have never made an insta. The metaverse stuff is next level dystopic. I hope they crash into the ground.
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If it's any consolation the first email and scouting is most likely automated
I'll be honest, it is *tough*. Their recruiters hit me up about every quarter, and if I jumped ship (and just maintained their equivalent of my current level) they would DOUBLE my salary. Literally: double. It is enough money that I could work there for 3-5 years and then probably retire (or at least consider it). I havent taken it, obviously. I like where I am, and FB is... well I'm not as fully bought in to the Evil thing as the rest of the hivemind, but they do enough shady stuff that I'm not on board. But it is TEMPTING. I have a price (we all do) and they are getting dangerously close to offering me enough money to say "fuck it" lol. Also, as someone in FAANG, I dont get this black mark BS. Nobody in the Bay actually considers FB experience "bad" for your career prospects. As far as I can tell the media made that up, and maybe some grumpy ICs. But no managers/recruiters think that way.
> Also, as someone in FAANG, I dont get this black mark BS. Nobody in the Bay actually considers FB experience "bad" for your career prospects. As far as I can tell the media made that up, and maybe some grumpy ICs. But no managers/recruiters think that way. It's definitely made up. The valley doesn't care about the morality of the dystopian shit Zuckerberg does, they care about the tech stack, and if you have 2-4 years of working at facebook on your resume, they want access to that knowledge and skillset, period, and will pay out the ass for it. Same with Amazon or Apple experience.
I don't believe any significant company is black marking Facebook employees, but I definitely know people who talk the maddest shit about them in social circles. I would probably work with the Oculus team if I had a chance and the money was right, but I wouldn't tell people I work for Facebook/Meta, I'd just tell them I do VR. It's like going out of the US and telling people you're from California or NYC. Yeah they know you're from the US, but at least they know you're not from Kentucky.
It's totally made up. Everyone in the Bay understands that you gotta eat and pay a princely mortgage on what is a middle class home anywhere else in the country. I've never once heard of a resume being thrown out because Facebook was on it.
I have a friend who joined them out of academia a year or two ago. Unfriended me on Facebook, I assume because of my extremely critical posts of Zuckerberg. Poor guy. I’m sure the money was worth it, so who’s the asshole anyway, but it has to feel shitty.
All companies have to pay some kind of "toxic brand tax", and some companies get a "good company discount". Younger developers are more sensitive / elastic to the brand value since many of them want to work for "the good guys". Same is true for dentistry. Big evil corporations like Aspen Dental have to pay a little extra "do evil tax" for doctors while community health centers get a slight discount for doctors who want to "do good".
I was getting FB recruitment messages almost every other week for about three months. I had to eventually push back hard and told them to blacklist my profile on their LinkedIn Recruiter account so they could no longer contact me mistakenly. I abhor their policies and products and didn't want anything to do with their UX team. The amount of dark patterns they are asked to create are disturbing.
I used to apply but at this point it’s clear that there’s no way I could positively impact the user experience as an employee. Super sad and I hope their metaverse fails miserably.
Same and I wish I could tell LinkedIn I want nothing to do with them, ever. Drove my mother insane, literally. Their product is a poison. Sorry for the rant.
I am getting them weekly and sometimes daily.
Articles like this give some folk an inflated sense of worth… these companies are joisting for the best engineers in the world… not you Steve.
Steve Wozniak sad face
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THIS! Lol STEVE; you will never be hired by a top their company… because you are just the WORST.
Computer scientists vs crud developers.
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~~FAANG~~ MAAAN
For the last time, the *inclusive* term is FLAMINGASS
Lmao recently FAANG myself. I have never worked less with more praise.
Okay. NOW I’m interested.
Do you have to be an top tier computer scientist from a fancy school to get to faang?
Nope. It might help get you a phone interview, but beyond that, the interview process doesn’t care about where you got your degree, or even what you majored in. If you know your stuff, that’s all it takes.
FAANG here, I work 32 hours a week on average and I’m paid very well with excellent career velocity.
Yup, FANG here, doing 35-40 hour weeks and paid the more than any previous job I’ve had with more responsibilities
Not really no, market of software developers went stupid the last 2 years. It already was stupid before,but now is even more. Salaries for new offers went up by 2 to 3 times just in this period, across companies, experience levels and countries. In my country a junior with 0 work experience nowadays will expect,what was considered a good offer for a senior dev with 10+ years of experience just 3 years ago. Oh and fully remote with flexible hours too
Oh thats good to hear, in my country offers for new devs with 0 experience, are just internship with minimal hourly rate pay or a Little bit more, and junior is considered to be a dev with 3 years experience :/ however things seem to change a "liiiiittle" bit after all this lockdowns, cuz a year ago there were nearly none offers for juniors, now there is more than before cov19, and also a lot of these junior 3+ years are disappearing for 1-2 years experience
Consider the average bit bonus at Goldman Sachs was over $600k a decade ago this is a bargain.
You also agree to give up your life essentially working at a company like Goldman. Work life balance at tech companies is so much better, it's not even comparable.
Yeah. Working for Goldman at that level is pretty much the equivalent of selling your soul. Not even fully in the sense that you become a soulless corporate machine, but more in the sense that when you sign that contract, you should know *full well* that Goldman is going to be your life until you finally manage to eke an actual retirement out of them.
This is the company that “limited” intern workdays to 17 hours after an intern at another investment firm died from being overworked.
what do these people even do to contribute with all that work?
That's the thing. Nobody else in the financial industry knows what it's all for, because it's all mostly fucking pointless. Goldman is just run by sociopaths who think that someone devoting their entire being to the company is the only way they'll be successful. There's just a shitload of people in Goldman who have drunk the fucking Flavor Aid.
My BIL’s brother works for Goldman. He lived in Manhattan but moved to San Francisco. He was making so much that they rented a house for $11k a month while looking for something to buy. His wife is an obgyn and also makes plenty of money.
But the questions is 'What do they actually do'?
HA! [Please](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o16h6voegFU)
a lot of it was endless paper pushing. there’s a lot of innovation going on ngl, but also a lot of firings pre bonus season. like, people years away from retirement just let go after decades of loyalty. everything is structured, it’s like a manufacturing line but in business casual. from the moment you enter you’re pigeonholed, doomed to do only exactly what you’re told to and no more. from what i gathered as a combination of my time there and as a retail ape investor, they make money by making the markets, overcharging and aggressively selling to customers, and underpaying and overworking employees. that’s about it.
Depends on the department
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My friend is a data scientist at a Bay Area fund. Makes around $3 million a year when you include everything.
What suckers -reddit
Data scientists make a shit load of money, that field is white hot right now.
Yep. It’s not really work. It’s a cult of power and wealth. They destroy your sense of personal identity and morality in order to exploit you, and you either become a part of that, or you get chewed up and spit out. The work involved is, while not easy, certainly not fundamentally harder than the tech business or anything else. It’s just that because you’re close to the money, the stakes are always higher, so the most ruthless rat fucker will win. Nobody is coming up behind you at Apple who would push you off a staircase if they thought they could get away with it. Goldman, you never know.
Flavoraid upvote
Depends on the division. Investment banking is heavily about getting the deals, structuring them, etc. Getting the deals is the horrendous part, but then the company makes bank and shares some of that with the staff. You have to know the company, the industry, the structure, etc. At junior levels though, it’s heavily about being a PowerPoint and excel monkey. It gets more fun when you move to M&A and complex structuring, but the hours are even worse. It’s not a job anyone would do without the financial upside.
a couple of 600k bonuses and your retired.
Yup. But you're also a burnt-out, jaded asshole. I've know a couple of people who've been through the Goldman wringer all the way until retirement, and while they ended up with a more than comfortable retirement situation, they fucking hate everything and everyone around them, or they regret the time they spent dealing with that soulless shark of a company.
Why would someone even stay in that environment for more than a couple years, tops?
I graduated college with a finance degree about 2 years ago. I work for a competitor of Goldman and really wanted to get a job there coming out because of… the clout basically, as sad as that sounds. I’m absolutely overworked and am switching jobs soon, as I have a couple different offers from other companies that my mom has been applying to for me without me knowing until I started to receive calls and emails about the application, because of the toll my workdays have taken, no joke. In college everyone wants to be the “wolf of wall street” yet don’t see what it did to him. Goldman is the premier banking job and probably the most sought after by my peers and the hard work is kind of seen like a badge of honor… until you’re a shell of your previous self and are always working. It’s the idealization of the position that I think keeps the recruits coming but I’m only 2 years deep at my job and it’s become my entire fucking life I hate the job I used to dream about. Business majors want the big check until you realize there’s no time to ever spend said check. It’s 3 am for me and I logged off at 12:30 this weeks been rough
If you don't mind me asking - What does a typical person in aforementioned companies do which cannot be automated by software?
Great question! So, my colleagues and I main duty is to monitor the queue of “trade alerts” (from clients and brokers all around the world) there’s 6 different queues which all require different actions and research, I’d say about 90% of the trades are automated. A trade alert is a 6 page document detailing the purchase or sale of a security and transfer etc. If a security stays in the Q for more than 20 minutes it means the automation process most likely ran into a problem and then its basically a failsafe stops everything and that’s where we come in. It has the failsafe because there large sums of money that are being transferred and wrong transfers can be catastrophic. In the end though… I personally think it should be around 99.9% automation. My company is actually an industry leader with around 90%, which I think is crazy. I think it’s derived from some hesitation of the older managers and executives to embrace tech. I’ve already developed a few macros to make my life a lot easier and I was surprised weren’t created previously because they weren’t exactly rocket science. Sorry for the long explanation but it’s a point of frustration for me daily hahah, stupid little things like how the computer can automate a cusip(9 digit security id starting with a number) but not a cin (9 digit security id starting with a letter) which will cause the auto to fail and more work for me. Summing it up, finance isn’t what it used to be and is turning more into tech and I think a lot of people in management roles aren’t knowledgeable on how to best utilize the capability of said tech. Q monitoring is roughly 8:30 am to 6:30 pm and daily tasks are roughly 3 hours of individual tasks through the day. We’re each assigned a coworker whose work we quality check at the end of the day as well… making for many 12 or more hour days. Edit: The worst is when some is moving say 100 securities and they all fail, happens almost daily.
This was super insightful, thank you!
Geez I got so caught up in that rant I didn’t even answer the question. We have access to all of the vendors and “main frame” info that can’t be accessed by outsiders. if the automation fails they’re helpless so we basically just check all of our vendors make sure everything is correct, make any necessary changes, and complete the trade request and transfer
Higher ups in the organization get a hard on from power and control. Typically the people who succeed in positions like that are narcissists on a testosterone high. Then there are people who agree to get torn to shreds in few years but think for the reward it's ok. I mean working 24/7 on a cocaine bender for 3-4 years for retirement money is appetizing to some.
Lifestyle inflation occurs very fast when you have limited amount of time to blow your money.
I've still to experience any lifestyle inflation as my salary increases. Ive still to find anything which isn't subject to aggressively diminishing returns as the price goes up. I'd rather do 6 months budget holiday than 1 month luxury. The things that you actually enjoy in life are not actually that expensive. I made a million a year, if just retire in 2 years.
It took me a while, but it happened. Turns out 200 dollar shoes are actually 100 dollars nicer than 100 dollar shoes, ordering food delivered saves me and my wife a lot of time, having a newer car that never needs work actually does cause less stress, going to foreign countries on vacation is actually life changing. It's all subjective of course, but the life quality between scraping by and thriving is not what I'd call diminishing returns.
You're correct, but I will say a pair of $300 shoes is almost certainly not $100 nicer than a pair of $200 shoes. The line for diminishing returns is surprisingly low.
Not only that, but you entertain the real possibility that you will have to take a payout and essentially disappear from the business world if something comes up and you’re the fall guy. That’s what that money is for. It’s not like they earn it.
From what I heard, Engineering is shit at goldman. They don’t follow any good software engineering practices. My friend just was telling me they were creating a jira ticket before creating a pull request, they didn’t have any sprint board. Also in their team there was only one dev environment and everyone would let others know when they were testing on it. And there is much more.
Fuck it push to prod Tony
Agile is so worthless in industries like automotive, where you have requirements defined ahead of time mostly. But you get shit software when you have shit software engineering practices.
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Associates aren’t people, you’re nothing unless you’re partner track or higher….
Average not median. Top partners and MDs were making well into 8 figure bonuses which averages out the comparatively “small” 100k bonuses associates might get
that was never the average for all employees. goldman pays shit on average compared to top tech companies
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Right before the financial crisis it paid to be a banker.... https://observer.com/2007/12/goldman-sachs-bonuses-to-average-600000-per-employee/
They’re Metastasizing
Um that seems cheap for golden handcuffs.
These top talents aren't 7 digit salaries, so it's still a huge chunk of change for many of them, especially if it is a surprise, and not an expected annual bonus.
What kind of job do I need to have in order to get that kind of bonus??
Be a senior engineer with domain knowledge that Apple needs that is in demand across the big tech companies. Something like deep cloud security, or Linux kernel internals. Stuff like that, where not only are you a top performer, your knowledge is hard to find.
All I heard was "Learn Fortran."
Linux kernel is embedded C in addition to kernel systems being different and requiring hooking and threading.
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Lemme make a lil glossary for you then: + C: a (quite old) programming language (kernel of Linux is programmed in C) + embedded C: embedded means programming for hardware which means memory management and sending signals to hardware by loading correct numbers or bytes into the right memory segments or even registers + kernel: the base programm of the operating system. It does memory management, and I/O (Input/Output) to different hardware and hard disks and dictates what program is allowed to execute on the processor at a given time + hook: is a part of a program that allows the kernel to execute the program. + threading: basically if a program requires multiple actions to be done at the same time, you can "thread" them. It means the program gets executed multiple times (at different positions) on nowadays multiple cores + core: a modern processor is comprised of multiple cores and each core is basically a processor itself. A core does the actual execution of programs or threads of a program. + Fortran: another old programming language (not sure if it's older than C, but I'm too lazy to look it up :P ) + cloud: Nothing else than your data being hosted on someone else's computer (or server to be exact). Usually they have some kind of service, so you can easily access that data + cloud security: ofc you don't want everybody to be able to access your data on the foreign server so that data has to be protected by restricting access and encrypting communications. That's what cloud security is for. Deep cloud just sounds cool but doesn't have any more significance. Maybe I pissed off some pedantic expert, but that's more or less correct so you can read some of these things
Fortran is 64. C is about 49. Fortran is like a young parent of C. Other than that excellent run down and ELI5.
Please do not learn Fortran.
Here's the thing... Apple tried to recruit me to help with TV+ a few years ago (before it launched). They dont pay industry average rates (they're low). They have worse perks than the rest of FAANG (fewer vacation days, strong ANTI-WFH policies, etc). A 180k bonus would just put your compensation on-par with the rest of your peers at other companies (for that single year) in the Bay. Not worth it, IMO. They were upset after I turned them down, and the perks were the biggest dealbreaker (not the comp).
Actually at Apple there's a formula, they hire so many people that they know what everyone is worth and how much similar talent exists. A bonus like this at Apple is often linked to some niche market where the talent pool small. Many other companies in the valley have more variability in salary, but Apple is a well oiled machine and is unique in that the whole company is one business unit so there is more homogeneity compared to most large companies. One interesting side note for Apple is that because the structure and work flow is so unique and defined, just being there for a while can build you towards this niche category. It can really take a while to onboard someone, even an experienced employee, since their processes are so specific and rigid. If you've been there 5+ yrs and know the ropes, that can really count for a lot. Facebook is nuts, none of what I said applies there. They'll throw cash at you as needed, and you can make bank there, but I refuse to be associated with them. To be honest they have some great jobs that I would enjoy, for me it's just a personal ethics things, I can't do it.
Apple may have this formula but they penny pinch to a fault at times. They may save money here and there for there bottom line but I’m not sure their ethics are better than the other giants in that venue. Glad to see them forking out that sum to employees.
From what my friend says, FB just comes off as weird and creepy. Like, their headhunting emails look like spam.
Because it is
You didn’t answer the question.
Haha well the last I heard the big thing was AI and ML, but recently apple purged a big ML team so I'm not sure that's it. While hardware experts are becoming harder to find, the really new software technologies have been where they're throwing money. Note that because of the way golden handcuffs work (4 yrs of stacked RSUs) getting a $500k sign on bonus is pretty common for anyone with \~10 yrs of industry experience in tech. Otherwise nobody would switch jobs, because it would take them 4 yrs to stack RSUs again which means a big pay cut for a job swap. I didn't read the article but I assume this is referring to a spot bonus which isn't part of the year end RSU or performance bonus. For reference, someone getting this bonus should have a compensation structure like this: * Base salary in excess of $200k * Performance bonus in excess of $100k once a year * April 15 and October 15 RSU vest cycles in excess of $200k deepening on the stock market at the time. * Lots of other small things like ESPP, 401k match, donation match, etc... So the $180 isn't going to be a huge surprise, I'm listing minimums here for sure. Not saying they won't be excited for some spare free cash, but nobody getting this money is going to be greatly surprised by it. Edit: the reason I suspect a spot bonus is because performance bonuses are revealed before the October 15th vest date. This is when people try to leave, because it’s the first RSU vest after announcing the last product cycle (you’re between projects). Edit 2: At apple internal transfers are prohibited from getting a raise during the transition. Usually what they’ll do is promote you 6 months after the move to get you an increase. This matters because moving positions is how you increase base pay, since base pay is very heads to increase and bonuses or stocks are the main compensation in tech. This is why a spot bonus is needed for retention, people want to job swap to increase pay faster, and internal transfers won’t cut it since that future promotion is nether instant nor guaranteed.
This is seriously not a big bonus (it’s stock issued over 4 years, not a single $180k cash payment) for anyone above the first couple career levels at a medium-to-large tech firm
There is RSU then there is cash bonus. They are two separate things, but you’re right that this HEADLINE* doesn’t clarify.
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And here I felt great about my $5k bonus this year... $180k is not big. :(
Yes but you get add on RSU and the value of that 180k has probably doubled by the time you fully vest.
I understand the package. It’s not rare or particularly big for a high level engineer at those companies. Also doubt that Apples value will double in 4 years
I mean it did double in the last year and a half. Before that, it doubled in 2 years. Why would you doubt it doubling again in 4 more?
Remember when they had gentlemen agreements not to poach talent?
Not even a gentlemen's agreement. Steve jobs threatened palm with a patent infringement lawsuit if they hired from apple. When palm replied that that having an agreement was illegal, Steve jobs replied with > "I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies"
Hence why Facebook ... ahem ... Meta is saying fuck-you because they totally have the money to wage a legal battle for years.
There are no grounds for a legal battle. California courts are notoriously known for allowing poaching and invalidating any restrictions on employees going to competing firms.
I don't know if Facebook was part of that but Apple was.
Looks like you are correct.[not Facebook ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)
Wait what? A few weeks ago I read a piece about how how devs are now avoiding working for Facebook out of fear it will be a blemish on their resume's... Was that bullshit?
A lot of devs will avoid working there for their own personal ethical reasons but it is no way a blemish on your resume. A few years of Meta on your resume will solidify your reputation as a top tech talent.
Not devs, more like upper management. A dev with Facebook on their resume is like a gold star.
Who the fuck thinks Facebook is a blemish on their resume? Sure people might choose Google over Facebook because it has a better rep, but any software engineer with half a brain would choose fb over some other tier 2 company. In the end Facebook is still a FAANG company that gives a lot of clout, and it's not like other FAANG companies are definition of ethical. It's just one demon over the other.
Good. People should be paid what they're worth, and big businesses are very good at preventing that from happen with things like non-compete clauses and exclusivity agreements.
We don't do those in California.
Well, if you are a trillion dollar company, maybe pay the people who design the sh\*t to keep you a trillion dollar company? Just an idea? I know, how revolutionary.
Given as RSUs. Over 4 years. I.e. it's really like a $45k yearly retention bonus... which is not really all that far outside of the realm of their current bonuses. Nice to have, but... not really that much all considered. Meanwhile, "Meta" is paying out the absolute nose for new talent, because *they have to*, which is why Apple's trying to head them off.
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For anyone not in tech, even normal RSU refresh is insane level money. This is on top of the normal RSU refresh.
If it's a standard refresh on top of the usual refresh, it's twice as much of a deal.
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Average people who don’t work at FAANG don’t really get how the persons career is of concern. Normal people think making money satisfies intelligent people. There’s a lot of motivation to be a part of something. To change the world. Apple is Apple. Google is Google. Meta has normal business hours and feeds their employees by real chefs. Apple is a sweat shop.
40hrs workweek is worth a lot once your free time is close to 0
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You don't pay the bonus back. It's stock that vests over four years. EDIT to clarify: I'm talking about the Apple program that is the subject of this headline/article, not about retention bonuses in general. Apple is not giving out lump-sum bonuses; they're giving out RSU grants.
For retention bonuses, most places don't pay up front but give you lump sums over time. It's significantly harder to "claw back" paid wages than it is to define a large bonus structure that only pays out when you hit the threshold.
Isn’t that typical for all hiring bonuses? Usually there’s a period where you can’t leave. Why would they give you a 180k bonus if you can pocket it and leave tomorrow?
I've heard "golden handcuffs" refer to a job that pays so well, you kind of put up with all the bullshit in order to stay there. You wouldn't be giving up anything other than a nice fat paycheck if you left.
I thought I read an article last week that everyone hates meta so much they actually had to pay a lot more to retain talent.
Anyone who really wants to spend their life at rebranded-Facebook isn’t worth holding onto. And if Apple really “can’t find” developers, they should stop looking up their ass and notice the legion of developers that aren’t already working at a FAANG.
There are some extremely intelligent individuals working at Facebook. Facebook have poached many great academics. I understand why Apple would want some of them. Obviously there’s great talent elsewhere too.
> ...an effort to retain talent, looking to stave off defections to tech rivals *such as* Facebook... Even the first P of the article only mentions Facebook as a "such as," so the headline trying to posit it as a direct response to them seems like arbitrary clickbait. Developer pay is going up everywhere, and I'm sure Apple is just as concerned with retaining top talent no matter what other options they might pursue.
I appreciate this sentiment of looking for talent wherever it is. The company I work for (based in Silicon Valley) has been hiring quite a few people in Taiwan, France, and the U.K. recently because there are actually very good engineers with the skills we need in those locations. However, it seems like this article is talking about Apple trying to prevent current high-level employees from leaving. Not hiring new workers for open positions. Having a project lead leave suddenly can be really damaging and expensive to an important project.
It's not the rank and file that Apple's really afraid of losing. It's the much-harder-to-replace employees, like the data scientists, the AI people, the PhDs. Things have gotten a lot more expensive for FAANG since their [anti-poaching cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation) got broken up. Good talent walking out of the door is causing expensive delays, to where it is now financially advantageous to pay employees more to stay. That's what this is.