Rank and file employees owning hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars of shares is not unheard of in companies like Google. It’s obvious that you havent worked in the tech industry because you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
1 million on 1.36T (Google’s market cap) is 0.00007%. Let’s say Google has 25,000 engineers and they each own 1 million. That’s less than 2% of the company. And obviously 1 million is unlikely to be the average engineer ownership stake.
You’re conflating two things: earning a decent salary and having power with management. Current Google engineers have good salaries, but they hold no power with management. Their positions could eliminated without them having a say.
I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
Probably you’ll answer with something like: “software has 0 marginal cost so software engineers have extreme productivity numbers.” That’s true, but your wage, absent a union or scarcity of skill, is not tied to your productivity. Take construction nail production. Nails used to be made by hand. Now someone with some rolls of steel wire and a machine can make hundreds of thousands of nails in the time it took to make a few by hand. Yet the person making nails probably earns less than the person who made them by hand. The surplus value is captured by the owner of the machine.
You, as an engineer, are not special. You have no moat. From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
> 1 million on 1.36T (Google’s market cap) is 0.00007%. Let’s say Google has 25,000 engineers and they each own 1 million. That’s less than 2% of the company. And obviously 1 million is unlikely to be the average engineer ownership stake.
It doesn't matter. Compared to the average person, they will still reap a lot of the benefits of rising stock value. Given that stock is a major part of compensation, owning $1 million or more dollars worth of shares is more common than you think, but how should you know? You haven't worked in tech, and judging from your comments it doesn't seem like you've even joined the work force yet.
> I highly recommend you look at other industries. How many people are earning 500K? Not many. Do you really believe software engineers are so special? No. We existed in a specific period of time: explosive economic growth, coupled with low interest rates, coupled with low supply of software engineers. The industry is maturing. Money is no longer free. Tens of thousands of software engineers are pumped out of universities every year. The writing is on the wall. The lifestyle software engineers have come to enjoy is under threat. Why will software look any different than any other professional industry?
We are talking about circumstances in the past and present ie right now, and not in the far off future of 10-20 years from now. It is nonsensical to unionize when both the pay and benefits are decent. When this changes, then behaviour will naturally change.
> From this conversation, I get the impression you’re not even particularly intelligent. Get over yourself.
Given all of the convoluted logic from your comments, that applies more to the person you see in the mirror rather than myself. You live in an ivory tower; you need to experience the real world first before you double down on a subject that you're not very familiar with.
""" As of 31 December 2021, Larry Page and Sergey Brin owned 85.9% of the company’s Class B shares meaning that they controlled approximately 51.4% of the company’s voting power. """
I have no idea what you guys (esp sibling comment) are arguing about. Larry and Sergey control the company and no other shareholders, no matter how many millions of shares they hold, would be able to block a decision that Larry and Sergey approved of.
I wasn’t arguing about control. If you actually read the arguments the gist of it is that shareholders are the only financial benefactors at companies, implying that employees don’t own any shares. I just reminded people who weren’t familiar with Silicon Valley that it isn’t true since stock is a big part of compensation for rank and file employees
