Does it pay to be an engineer?
Till a few years ago, engineering was seen to be a stepping stone to move into other roles such as management, design or business development. However, in the new decade of the 21 st century where social networks like Facebook are being valued in excess of 50 billion dollars (read here for more) and other online businesses are booming it surely seems that software engineering will soon be the most sought after career.
This is brought to light by the recent incident of Google offerring a staff engineer $3.5 million to turn down a rival offer from Facebook.
“We’ve confirmed today that a staff engineer at Google being heavily romanced by Facebook was offered a jaw dropping $3.5 million in restricted stock by Google (this means Google is handing over stock worth $3.5 million based on its value today, and that stock will vest over time). He quite wisely accepted Google’s counter offer. Facebook lost this one.”, as quoted by the technology blog Techcrunch in November, 2010 (read here for more)
Many analysts are suggesting that such offers and sky-rocketing valuations of web companies such as Facebook and GroupOn will result in a another dot-com crash similar to the one in 2000-2001.
For now though, engineers are calling the shots just like this guy in the video below:
Exception talent does get paid exceptionally…I’m impressed!