A 20-something-year-old software engineer with Google has said that he works for only an hour a day and earns a salary of $150,000 (about Rs 1.2 crore) a year. What's more, the techie -- identified only by the pseudonym Devon -- received a sign-in bonus and is expecting a year-end bonus, Fortune reported.
Ideally, he's supposed to spend his days writing code for Google’s tools and products and when the publication spoke to him a little after 10 am, Devon admitted he’d not yet opened his laptop. When asked if he was concerned about missing a message from his manager, Devon said that if he does, “it’s not the end of the world --I’ll just get back to it later tonight.”
Elaborating on how he works, Devon told the publication that he begins his week writing code for “a decent part” of any given task before sending it off to his manager. That “basically guarantees” smooth sailing for the rest of the week.
Ninety-seven percent of Google employees call it a great place to work as compared to 57 percent of workers of a typical US company said the same, Fortune reported. Google is popular for its host of benefits: a quirky campus, free meals, and high salaries.
Devon had interned with Google and he knew that he wouldn’t be working very hard if he got the job. Also, he wasn’t slacking off work so much as carefully underselling how quickly he worked. During his internship, Devon said he finished writing all the code early on which allowed him to eke out a week-long trip to Hawaii.
“If I wanted to work long hours, I’d be at a startup,” he told Fortune. “Most people choose Google because of the work-life balance and benefits. You could work at Apple, but Apple has such fan appeal to software engineers. They work long hours… but at Google, most people know what they’re doing is a job.”
Devon says he is among the thousands of software engineers who, by their own admission, are paid to do nothing. During a business boom in the early days of the pandemic, giants like Meta, Google, and Salesforce were hiring ahead of demand, Wall Street Journal reported. The trend was dubbed “penning,” in which tech giants were desperate to hoard workers to be prepared for what they were certain would be a prolonged growth period and hired workers with lucrative offers in roles that weren’t needed.
This is exactly what’s happened at Google, Devon told Fortune. Leaders were just “buying up everyone they can so they don’t go to another company…building a product that competes with Google,” he said.
Read more: Google techie in Bengaluru lists 7 reasons for not moving to the US
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