Jon

Regarding the complaceny/incentive debate, both sides are right. Central to the economic theory of labour supply is that to a certain level a wage increase both incentivises employees to work more hours, but at some point an employee will decide he has enough money and a wage increase will make him work less hours. If you draw a graph of labour supply with hours worked on the x-axis and wage on the y-axis, it bends backwards, like a U rotated ninety degrees anti-clockwise.

The trick for the employer is to find the right balance, and it sounds like Google has for the moment.

They hire superstars, and compensate them as such.

..this really amounts to peanuts(after taxes) when you consider the sacrifice that is required to live/breathe all things Google. i remember people making this much in one day trading options back in ‘99, while working at startups no less, which then subsequently went public making them paper millionaires.

Sadly…as the saying goes, ‘easy come, easy go’

I think ten an hour is pretty low but when it comes down to it, a janitor shouldn’t be making the same as someone who’s gone to school and has a degree (several perhaps.) That’s not to say that janitors don’t have degrees.

@17

I think his first sentence could have been rephrased a little. Better said (if I may) “Google employees may tend to get complacent since they are well-paid.”

While I can’t find any fault in the base numbers, reliance on these averages create the illusion that the typical worker at Google is financially overcompensated. I can’t deny that the workplace and other benfits are great, but people need to know that the distribution of money is VERY lumpy! Executives are, of course, well compensated with options. And, by the looks of it, engineers get a good number of options too. However, there are a lot of non-executive and/or non-engineers at Google who received far fewer options than those quoted. [These two groups really skewed the average upwards] Basically, there are many (1,000s) more that have options (not fully vested) in the five figures and far fewer 276,000-aires.

You can read more about her and read excerpts from her yet-to-be-published book, Giigle, on that site.

If you’ve got financial security, vibrant social life with like-minded people at the Googleplex, and a high status (”I work for Google” makes people go “Wow”) then you’re “made”.

Add to that: people who started working at Google in their exciting 20s are now in their stable 30s with families; Google is no longer an exciting and dynamic start-up with 20 people, where each person is meaningful and can impact the business. When you’re part of a 12,000 employee godzilla organization with rules and regulations, you start acting like an anonymous bolt in the machine, no matter how cool, open and dynamic your workplace is.

There is no reason to shake things up, no reason to take risks, no reason to change the world. Your best course of action is to maintain the status-quo, whether you’re an individual employee or an entire organization.

Cash-cow organizations don’t change the world. They just keep making money — no reason to risk changing that.

Highly content employees don’t change the world. “Hungry” employees do.

Google is officially the new Microsoft. Microsoft is officially the new IBM (same thing sans the glamor).

Time to look for the next world-changer start-up that’ll shake the net. If you’re too fixated on Google, you might miss it.