140,000 euros for less than part-time work. Sounds like a dream, but for an engineer at Google, it’s everyday life – and he’s not the only one.
The cover image is an icon, not the software engineer.
What kind of job is this? Fortune magazine spoke to a software engineer in his twenties. Fortune calls him Devon anonymously. He has been working at Google for some time and programs program code – entirely from his home office.
He is paid the equivalent of around 140,000 euros a year for his work. However, he does not complete the 40 hours stipulated in his employment contract in any week. Devon says he only works one hour a day at most.
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Not full-time, but full pay
Doesn’t anyone notice? No, apparently not, because “Devon” has apparently been doing this for some time. The programmer says that he does most of his work at the beginning of the week, but keeps it to himself. He then ticks off what is expected of him in small packages over the course of the next few days. He says that he has no problems with his boss.
After the short online visit to the Google office, he will then devote the rest of the day to building up a tech start-up that he is currently preparing for launch together with a friend.
How does it work? We don’t know what he delivers, how quickly and in what quality. It is entirely possible that “Devon” is simply not given enough work. But that is not surprising, as Professor Vijay Govindarajan explained to the Wall Street Journal. The practice is called penning and has been followed by a number of companies for several years.
Google today and tomorrow?
What exactly is “penning”? Penning is the behavior of tech companies that hire highly qualified staff, especially programmers and engineers, even though they strictly speaking have no work for them. But it makes sense as long as:
However, this growth expectation does not always come to pass, which is why, according to Fortune, Google laid off more than 10,000 employees in January. If “Devon” is to be believed, however, staff with high qualifications and sometimes work experience are still sitting out their hours underemployed – or using them in alternative ways.
What is the software engineer planning? If the start-up’s eventual launch fails, he openly plans to simply carry on. In his experience, Google is “great at” rehiring former staff.
He seems to have been there long enough to be able to judge that. Before his current job, Devon successfully completed an internship at the search engine giant – of course with the same work ethic as he does now.
It is unclear whether SpaceX, Twitter or Tesla also practice penning, but there is no doubt that Elon Musk, the head of these companies, is critical of home offices. In an interview, he once expressed himself so grumpily about the modern form of working for many professional groups that it is almost surprising: Elon Musk considers home offices not only unproductive, but also “morally reprehensible”.