What exactly do engineers with an annual salary of $500,000 do, or what technologies do they have that make them so valuable? Is there a way to "learn" these things?
Before Business Insider published an article about a Google engineer who refused a job with an annual salary of 500,000 dollars, because Google attached his article of 3 million US dollars a year, a person who was very interested in this figure went to Quora and asked, how do I do it? like him? I also want to work at Google and earn an annual salary of $3 million (who doesn't want to?)
This entrepreneur named Amin Ariana wrote an answer that was praised on Quora, and the translator of this article, Winston Chen, was inspired a lot, Therefore, after contacting Amin to obtain permission, the original text was translated.
The content of the article is as follows
. First of all, this question is a bit strange and misleading. It seems that as long as the engineer has done a few things or acquired some skills, he can hang up to the guarantee of an annual salary of 500,000. In fact, Business Insider made it very clear that $500,000 is actually the sum of salary and stock.
Class I and Class II workers
To understand the conditions behind high pay, let me draw an analogy first.
Suppose you are a very important worker in the village who is responsible for the water supply. There are two types of labor: Class I labor, and Class II labor.
One type of laborer will pick up one or two buckets, flush them to the water source, fill them up, and pick them back, which should be enough for about 20 people to drink, so that the villagers who have water will be very happy. This laborer may drink some water in the process of fetching water, and then return to the village, he may be able to share some water home as his reward.
The second-class worker doesn't pay much attention to the so-called "fair water distribution" concept. He will pick up a shovel, bring a water stop glass, and then suddenly disappear. He ran to the water source and dug a stream that could lead to the village, hoping to bring the water source. Whenever he dragged his tired body and returned to the village with an empty cup, he would always cause a burst of disappointment, but I don't know why the elders in the village believed in him and what he was doing (and threw him a bone. gnaw, so that he will not starve).
One day, he stood upright in front of the village, and behind him lay a stream of drinking water. The creek immediately drove a class of laborers who specialized in "water express" out of the market, and they had to change careers and join other teams. As for this second-class laborer, it depends on how much control he has over the creek. Generally speaking, he owns a large part of the creek.
Later, the village decided to buy the entire stream and integrate it into the water supply system of the entire village, so the village took part of their property in exchange, such as land, etc. This second-class laborer was instantly upgraded to become a landlord.
The media in the village noticed that the village pays this second-class laborer extremely high, and people from other villages can't hire him at all (he should have signed an agreement with the village, for example, he has to stay in the village for two years before he can receive the full amount. Remuneration, etc.), so a report was published, and it was written as if other villages were poaching at high prices, but because the salaries offered by the villages were so good that the second-class laborers would not consider them at all.
At this time, a group of workers saw the media reports and felt that the village treated them badly and that they were not paid equal wages for equal work (please watch this video: an experiment of two monkeys with equal pay for equal work ), and they were dissatisfied.
Ditcher on the beach
Let's tell a true story.
On New Year's Eve this year, I went to Monterey Bay to play. There was a young man digging a hole on the beach. I stood up high and watched with great interest. My wife was admiring the beauty of the beach. Others didn't care about this young man. Action, no one pays attention to him. I pointed to him and turned to my wife and said, "Wait and see, after 30 minutes, everyone around you will join in and help this young man dig.
" His castle stretches straight to the place where there is water on the seashore, hoping to introduce seawater into the channel and into his moat. The channel wasn't deep enough for the water to get in, so the young man was busy deepening the channel. After another 5 minutes, the children who had been standing by to watch the fun began to join in and help. After 10 minutes, several adults around also began to dig. Fifteen minutes later, a shy foreigner with a camera stepped in to help. Within 60 minutes, the second-class laborer influenced 15 first-class laborers to voluntarily put in the seawater into the moat.
The photo above is the one I took at the time, to forever commemorate my bet on personal power. The guy with the purple bucket is the creator of the channel, but you can't tell from the photo.
News reports always like to ignore a lot of real details. This report with an annual salary of 500,000 ignores the "sweat is not equivalent" part. The second category of workers is willing to break through the status quo, alone, and sometimes starve for a short period of time to bring in the water source that the village depends on for their livelihood. The first category of laborers exchange their work and skills for wages. The difference is risky and not guaranteed to be recycled.
The visionary group of people in the village can be said to be second-class laborers (the group with high salaries in Google). These guys with a lot of stock are probably one of the following:
- The people who have been responsible for creating the core values of Goolge since its inception
- In my spare time, I play with my side projects, and the company finds it super useful and valuable. (Annotation: Gmail actually grew from Side Project to Google's core product.)
- Start your own startup, bought by Google
- (rarely) don't know why there is a way to be the sole provider of a certain core technology or skill
Other than that, this kind of treatment is mostly imagined out of thin air and used to sell many, many Business Insider articles like this.
The $19 Billion No-Admission Notice
Every heart sings, and doesn't sing until another heart chimes in. ——Plato
I received a lot of comments, some of them told me that the above story is difficult to apply to their lives, and the other part of the comments asked about the skills of negotiating equity with companies, hoping to get half a million dollars in revenue, Other comments say my article doesn't answer his question at all. Most of the commenters are a class of laborers, and they are still thinking about how to increase their market value and obtain higher "income".
Then let me tell another story, a story that happened within a week of the publication of the above article, I hope this time it will be more specific and easier to understand.
In May 2009, a class of workers applied for Twitter, but he was rejected, so in August 2009, he went to Facebook to apply again, and he was also rejected, what should I do? He decided to come out and try it out himself, provoking the second-class labor, and digging from the water source of "enhancing human communication", the creek that the two companies that had previously refused his first-class service sorely needed it.
Along the way, he and his friends who were digging the creek with him influenced 55 people to join the team and work together. The elders in the village also gave him some bones. At the beginning, it was only 250,000 US dollars, and then 8 million US dollars. Seeing Xiaoxi becoming more and more successful, Sequoia Ventures later injected $50 million in funding.
3 hours before I wrote this article, CNN just reported that their second-class labor works were acquired by Facebook for $19 billion (you heard that right, $19 billion).
Facebook bought Whatsapp. And Brian Acton, who helped Facebook dig the creek for five years, officially became a shareholder of Facebook, and it was the Facebook who rejected his job application.
Before he started digging (before starting Whatsapp), he once wrote these two tweets:
- Twitter HQ doesn't want me. It doesn't matter, it's a long way from my house anyway.
- Facebook doesn't want me either. But it was a great opportunity for great people to socialize. I am looking forward to the rest of my life journey.
Do you think those 55 people need to negotiate with Facebook for a salary of $500,000? Or do you think that when those people take profits and leave Facebook, Facebook will spend a lot of money and put out stock to keep people?
The second-class workers will not compare or negotiate salaries, because they are not selling their labor to the villages (companies), they are selling undervalued wealth, and those villages who bid have no other choice but to offer relative Given these wealth figures, the wealth brought out by these second-class laborers can benefit both the village and themselves (you can see that Facebook's stock price has surged upwards).
You can think about whether any village would be willing to sit on the other side of the negotiating table when it came time to sell the water you dug. When the village decides to buy water, the extra zeros in the salary slip are just basic conditions.
英文原文：What kind of jobs do the software engineers who earn $500K a year do? / 译文：WINSTON CHEN