Staying With Google Until You Die
Turns out, though, that the company also wants its employees to enjoy a better death. More specifically: a wealthier death. In an interview with Forbes‘s Meghan Casserly, Laszlo Bock — Google’s, Chief People Officer (in non-Google terms: head of HR) — shares a Google benefit that is all too literally out of this world. “This might sound ridiculous,” Bock tells Casserly. “But we’ve announced death benefits at Google.”Yes. It’s like this: Should someone pass away while employed by Google, that person’s surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50 percent of the deceased’s salary. And that spouse or domestic partner will receive that check every year. For the next decade.
Over at The Atlantic, Megan Garber is taking a look at Google’s death benefits—which includes fully vested stocks for surviving partners, and $1,000 a month for surviving children until the age of 19—and appreciates how awesome that is. She also makes a good point that although the tech giant says it’s just the right thing to do for employees, it’s also a smart incentive to keep employees loyal, because if they run away to Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever the next big thing is, they’ll also give up this awesome, new death benefit. You’re an evil genius, Google. Good to your employees, but still an evil genius. Also, I like your game today on your homepage.
First you hear how awesome their offices are and now this.
This is only encouraging pretty young black widow types to find a Google geek to marry, only to have them “accidentally” die. Obviously I am speaking hypothetically…
@Heather Sundell@twitter man, punctuation is everything.
@Robin huh?
@Heather Sundell@twitter I thought you were envisioning some evil cabal of african-american teenagaged girls on the hunt for google geeks. Then I re-read. A few times.
@Robin omg! That would have been so awful of me! And now I understand the punctuation comment. I RE-READ my own comment several times checking for grammatical errors. I almost went crazy. Phew!
I don’t see how this makes them an evil genius – the whole history of work benefits/social security is based on the idea that a happy/healthy employee also benefits the company. Symbiosis, yeah!
BAN ALL BENEFITS. All they do is make it impossible to tell how much you are worth to your employer.
My husband works for Google. He spent 8 years at a competing company before being recruited away, and during the recruitment process we kept hearing that “Google just wants its employees to be happy. They don’t want them to have to worry about money, or stress about food, or whatever, so it takes care of them and the employees are more productive.” It seemed like a load of shit until he got the CRAZY generous offer package – on top of the salary, there was a significant signing bonus, and the benefits are through-the-roof good. Parental leave is 7 weeks fully paid, PLUS $500 to expense on takeout food or meals at restaurants, plus (I think?) something like $2k in cash to help defray new-baby expenses. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are provided for FREE 5 days a week. I had lunch with him at work a month ago, and there was an AMUSE BOUCHE station with a chef working it and talking about the food, and apparently that’s par for the course. Every day at 3:00, they wheel a snack cart around with freshly baked cookies or brownies or scones. Google donates to charity every day that an employee self-powers their commute to work (walk, jog, bike, pogo stick, etc). I am CONTINUALLY blown away by how well they treat their employees and their families – the hours are humane (if I swing by at 7:00 or 7:30 to pick him up, there might be 2 other people working on his entire floor – VERY different from other tech companies), the pay is great, and he loves what he’s doing. It honestly feels like we won the fucking lottery. I could go on and on (and on) about the services they provide – there is a masseuse on staff and employees get a free massage on their birthday every year, his office is RENTING THE ZOO tomorrow for the employee/family picnic, there is a never-ending supply of organic fruit in each mini-kitchen free for the taking, the morale staff scheduled a parents’ night out last month and babysat everyone’s kids so we could have a date – but in sum, Google is FANTASTIC to their employees and should be (I think) lauded for how well they treat them.
As a side note – the death benefit is certainly something that puts me at ease. If my husband is hit by a car on the way home from work and dies, it’s nice to know that my children and I won’t be destitute while I look for work. The benefits they provide are so generous that *I* don’t want him to ever leave – which is good for Google in turn, because recruiting skilled engineers is a time, labor, and fund-intense process and I think they’d rather keep the good ones than find new ones.
@hotdish *drool*
Honestly, it does sound far better than actually winning the Lotto. If I had the choice between $10mil and a job at Google… I’d have to sleep on that pretty hard.