I interned at Google back in the day, and when I came back to school, I can only remember raving about one thing -- the food. It was absolutely fucking amazing. I gained 10 pounds that summer (starting at 145, this probably wasn't a bad thing).
There was a lot I could have raved about. The fact that around my area in ads there was probably a 20% chance that an individual had his own Wikipedia page. The debugging tools I got to work with and the MapReduces I got to write. All of the geeky stuff that makes Google a cool place to work at.
But when I got back to school, the food is really what stuck out about the experience. I would argue that those cafeterias are one of Google's most marketable benefits.
A bad programmer who is overcompensated just blends in, a great chef gets singled out.
No matter what, equity distributions are going to look insane in retrospect. Probably the most glaring ones are not even going to be the under-performers who plodded along or folks in less-important roles that were hired early, but the crappy execs that were hired well after the risk was decreased, but got a huge stock grant anyway. Start with those guys.
Let's be honest here -- how hard someone works isn't directly relevant to the discussion, it's how much value they end up adding. But to that point, I'm pretty sure Charlie added a lot more value to the company than many software engineers there had.
There was a lot I could have raved about. The fact that around my area in ads there was probably a 20% chance that an individual had his own Wikipedia page. The debugging tools I got to work with and the MapReduces I got to write. All of the geeky stuff that makes Google a cool place to work at.
But when I got back to school, the food is really what stuck out about the experience. I would argue that those cafeterias are one of Google's most marketable benefits.
A bad programmer who is overcompensated just blends in, a great chef gets singled out.
No matter what, equity distributions are going to look insane in retrospect. Probably the most glaring ones are not even going to be the under-performers who plodded along or folks in less-important roles that were hired early, but the crappy execs that were hired well after the risk was decreased, but got a huge stock grant anyway. Start with those guys.
Let's be honest here -- how hard someone works isn't directly relevant to the discussion, it's how much value they end up adding. But to that point, I'm pretty sure Charlie added a lot more value to the company than many software engineers there had.