Google Gave Me A 0% Raise And I’m Not Happy.
Couldn’t even match inflation
About Me
I’m a current software engineer at Google and have been with the company for close to a year. As someone who recently met all expectations, I came into my yearly compensation review with average expectations.
Google couldn’t even meet those expectations and I’m not happy about it. Before we get into what happened during our yearly compensation review, let’s breakdown my Google compensation as a regular software engineer.
Google Compensation Breakdown
At Google, employees don’t compare salaries as much as they compare their total compensation. This is because salary isn’t the only way they’re getting money. Here’s a breakdown of the compensation components.
- Salary
- Performance Bonus
- Signing Bonus
- Equity Grant
Salary
Salary works the same way at Google as it does at any other company. I’m paid a set amount every two weeks or bi-weekly for being at the company.
It doesn’t matter if I do well or not, or how well the company is doing. As long as I’m at the company, I’m promised to receive this amount.
At Google, my current salary is $169,000. This breaks down to $14,000 a month before taxes. It’s an amazingly large amount for someone with 3 years of experience and only a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
Performance Bonus
A performance bonus is how much an employee receives based on how well they perform at the company. Employees who perform well receive more, and employees who struggle receive less.
At Google, this amount is set by the manager and what they believe that individual should receive for their contributions. The standard amount is set at 15% of their base salary. Meaning someone who works as an average employee relative will receive this bonus.
The bonus is split and awarded in two amounts, 80% of the 15% bonus in January and 20% of the 15% bonus in March. Meaning I receive an additional $20,000 in January, and $5,000 in March.
Signing Bonus
Signing bonus are one-time additional bonuses for joining the company. Some employees may receive this, others may not. This is negotiable with the recruiter, especially if the candidate has a competing offer.
This bonus is also a contract for a one-year commitment at Google. Meaning leaving the company sooner requires the employee to repay back a pro-rated amount. If I stayed for only 6 months, I would owe 50% of my sign-on bonus back.
When I joined Google, I was offered a $25,000 sign-on bonus. My tenure is almost at 1 year so I won’t have to pay the bonus back if I move on the company later on.
Equity Grant
Google offers an equity grant to employees who join the company. This means those Google employees will receive Google stock that can be sold on the stock market for cash.
This is the most complicated topic and how it works is the employee will receive some stocks in their stock brokerage account from the company on certain days. It can be every month, every 6 months, or every year depending on the company.
My award is $296,000 of equity, that is split over 4 years and given every month. If it was split evenly at 25%, then every month I would receive $6000 worth of google stock.
At Google, it’s split for me at 33%, 33%, 22%, 12%. For the first 2 years, I’ll receive $8000 stock per month, and then $5,400 my third year, and then $2,900 my forth year.
Compensation Review
For the first year, my total compensation including all these components would be salary + equity + signing bonus + performance bonus.
This amounts to about $318,000 for my first year joining Google. It’s an incredible amount and I didn’t think it could get better than this. It actually did not get better than this.
Most companies will review an employees compensation every year and adjust it to be more fair with their performance and every other employee’s compensation at the same level. With inflation rate at close to 6% in 2022, not getting any increase means you’re losing money if you don’t get a pay bump to match the economy.
Most companies would match the rate of inflation during this yearly review. I received a 0% salary adjustment, an amount that didn’t meet the economy’s inflation rate.
Am I unhappy about it? Absolutely. Anyone would be upset not to receive a base increase that at least covers inflation.
But what’s more concerning is that not being able to match inflation can mean more layoffs are coming soon…
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