Google raises salaries of 'best employees in the world' by over $200,000,000
A sign that the recession is truly over?
Search engine beast and Android maker Google Inc. is officially granting 10 percent raises to all 23,000+ of its employees next year.
Google, consistently ranked one of the world's best employers due to its unprecedented generosity toward staff, had to cut back during the recession in 2008 and 2009. Clearly, they're back to their old shenanigans of awesomeness. Quoth The Globe and Mail:
The good times are back at Google this year, though. Revenue rose 23 per cent to $21-billion (U.S.) through the first nine months of 2010. Confident of even more prosperity ahead, Google has added 3,500 employees so far this year to expand its work force by nearly 20 per cent. It also has been spending heavily on acquisitions and investments in the data centres that run its online services.
The raises are yet another sign of Google's bullishness. The company didn't disclose how much the added payroll would cost, but assuming an average employee salary of $100,000 – not outlandish by high-tech standards – the across-the-board raises would amount to an additional $233-million annually.
Google can easily afford that, with $33-billion in cash as of Sept. 30.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt cited his 23,000-strong army as “the best employees in the world,” though some suspect Google's move is less about rewarding and more about protecting—essentially, Google may be worried about losing its core talent to competitors like Facebook, and thusly is filling their pockets with as much money as it can afford. However, Facebook nor other competitors were mentioned in the announcement.
“While we don't typically comment on internal matters, we do believe that competitive compensation plans are important to the future of the company,” a Google spokesman said.
In a memo, Eric said Google's internal employees prioritized the size of their pay cheques over stock options and bonuses due to Google's now-mature (therefore slow) growth phase.
