Comments on: It’s Just Compensation

By: The Director

The Director — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:10:50 +0000

What really struck in my craw, though, is the whole column defends the practice of not giving monetary rewards. Not a situational thing where he didn’t particularly care if the intern hired on or not. That employees should just be happy making him millions for nothing more than a “Hey, good job.”

By: ftdcjp

ftdcjp — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:52:47 +0000

I don’t know, Spolsky strikes me as probably intelligent enough to have done the right thing if he really wanted the person as employee. He must have known the offering of stock with no market value was a deal not-too-good-refuse.

By: calkelpdiver

calkelpdiver — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:18:03 +0000

Typical story if you ask me. Bottom line is the bottom line, money. In some companies I’ve worked for they have been good about compensating people for their work and ideas, others have been “well you still have your job don’t you”.

I guess if it was me in Joel’s position I would have told the kid he has a job when he gets out of school, given him a bonus of about $5,000, and finally told him that if he does hire on that after 6 months of service he would get another $5,000 bonus if the profitibility of the ad system continued to grow.

But again, he was offered a job by Google. That in itself is a presitge thing and can lead to other higher end & better paying jobs down the road. Tough to compete with that, even if you do throw money at the kid.