I never said that it's
easy.
We both know that it's not "easy" to get acq-hired for $30 million. It's also not easy to win the Powerball, even if any idiot has a chance.
It is, however, a sign of something wrong in the economy.
When a $6-million-per-engineer acq-hire (the team, not the product, is being bought) is going down, the company is paying about 50 years of an engineer's salary for an employment relationship. A job lasts, on average, 4.4 years according to BLS. Particulars to acq-hires only make that expected duration lower, but let's use 4.4 because we don't know what the "real number" here is.
Executives bitch until they're blue in the face about paying 25% for a normal recruiter. It seems inconsistent to complain that your headhunter's charging you 25%, then pay 5000% for an HR acquisition.
This means one of two things. The first is that, possibly, the employment relationship is worth that much. That is, it's worth $1.5 million per year (as opposed to the more typically cited figures, which are around $200,000) to employ an engineer. Well, then engineers are getting screwed. They're only getting ~7% of their total value-add (120k / 1620k) instead of 38% (120k / 320k).
The second possibility is that engineers aren't getting screwed, but that companies are so bad at discovering talent internally that the only way the executives and get their hands on someone good is to buy people on the market at a very high price. That's not saying that there aren't good people at a company like Yahoo; only that the middle-management filter is so dysfunctional that executives don't know what they have.
Let's say that in November, you pay $2000, out of desperation, for a new coat that's worth $175. When your lease ends in August and you're cleaning everything out, you find that you had an equally good coat in your apartment, just sitting there all winter. You couldn't spot it before because the place was such a pigsty. You'd feel like an idiot, then, wouldn't you?
That's how executives deserve to feel if they acq-hire talent for $6 million but have capable people within (and I'm sure they must have some) who are being underutilized on trivial features and fourth-quadrant nonsense. If you simply don't have talent, then go ahead and buy it at a high price. If you have it and can't find or use it, then you need to scorched-earth your whole management structure.
We both know that it's not "easy" to get acq-hired for $30 million. It's also not easy to win the Powerball, even if any idiot has a chance.
It is, however, a sign of something wrong in the economy.
When a $6-million-per-engineer acq-hire (the team, not the product, is being bought) is going down, the company is paying about 50 years of an engineer's salary for an employment relationship. A job lasts, on average, 4.4 years according to BLS. Particulars to acq-hires only make that expected duration lower, but let's use 4.4 because we don't know what the "real number" here is.
Executives bitch until they're blue in the face about paying 25% for a normal recruiter. It seems inconsistent to complain that your headhunter's charging you 25%, then pay 5000% for an HR acquisition.
This means one of two things. The first is that, possibly, the employment relationship is worth that much. That is, it's worth $1.5 million per year (as opposed to the more typically cited figures, which are around $200,000) to employ an engineer. Well, then engineers are getting screwed. They're only getting ~7% of their total value-add (120k / 1620k) instead of 38% (120k / 320k).
The second possibility is that engineers aren't getting screwed, but that companies are so bad at discovering talent internally that the only way the executives and get their hands on someone good is to buy people on the market at a very high price. That's not saying that there aren't good people at a company like Yahoo; only that the middle-management filter is so dysfunctional that executives don't know what they have.
Let's say that in November, you pay $2000, out of desperation, for a new coat that's worth $175. When your lease ends in August and you're cleaning everything out, you find that you had an equally good coat in your apartment, just sitting there all winter. You couldn't spot it before because the place was such a pigsty. You'd feel like an idiot, then, wouldn't you?
That's how executives deserve to feel if they acq-hire talent for $6 million but have capable people within (and I'm sure they must have some) who are being underutilized on trivial features and fourth-quadrant nonsense. If you simply don't have talent, then go ahead and buy it at a high price. If you have it and can't find or use it, then you need to scorched-earth your whole management structure.