>* Part of the allure of joining a smaller organization is that you can have a huge impact, creating a business from nothing to $10M/year is huge. At Google adding $10M/yr to the bottom line is chump change and you're a chump if that's all you can do.
Google has 25,000 employees. I was unaware that on average their yearly income was increasing at 250 billion a year. Impressive.
That is one of their challenges, adding $10M to the bottom line gets you no respect, creating a new cool toy, huge respect. So consequently the best and the brightest don't waste their time trying to do that.
I asked once why this was from an 'old timer' (aka someone who had been there prior to the IPO, was on various promotion committees) and their answer was honest and direct, "We have plenty of money, so adding more is irrelevant, what we need are good ideas so we reward that which we need most." (may not be an exact quote, it was a couple of years ago but its close)
Sadly I could see his point. With nearly $8B of free cash flow (after all the perks/salaries/taxes/gear etc) that's $400,000 for each and every employee (back when they had 20K employees) which they could 'pay out' on a whim to individuals (if they chose to). How do you make that feel more "startup like"? I think the challenge would be akin to Prince William trying to make the living experience in Buckingham Palace more like what homeless people feel. Not impossible but very very difficult I suspect.
This is a gimmick. Google did lots of evil things hiding behind its motto of do no evil. Similarly this is only a mechanism to attract smart kids out of the college with an allure of high paying "startup". Google can't be a startup again. It's a public company. Too many people's too much money is betting against it.
Google has 25,000 employees. I was unaware that on average their yearly income was increasing at 250 billion a year. Impressive.