Hacker News Reader

Comment by VectorLock | Hacker News Reader

>as one Google exec directly described it to me, have people inside the tent pissing out rather that outside the tent pissing in

I'm having trouble trying to parse the meaning of this metaphor.

View on HN

A lot of the early FAANG hiring was to prevent staff from going to (or founding) a competitor. So build a pipeline to identify the people who are likely to build a competitive threat to e.g. Search and hire them before they get a chance to do that. Pay them enough over the years that they get lazy and start thinking about retirement by 35.

It's a bonus if they ship anything useful, and you have in theory increased the odds of that happening by hiring so many of the talented young programmers that graduate every year.

Every developer for Google who has on payroll is a developer that competitors can’t hire.

Google is large enough to impact local labor markets for specific roles.

If you tell the world that you can make $200k at Google to dick around all day, you’ve now caused your competitors to need to pay developers more money to attract talent and make them perform at a high level.

I’m equally confused, but my guess is it’s a metaphor for ensuring talent is in your company rather than outside of it working for a competitor.

If someone is going to urinate, you'd rather have them stand inside the tent and piss towards the outside (which is unpleasant) rather than stand outside the tent and piss towards the inside (urine landing in you). Similarly, better to have a disrupter on payroll causing issues within your organization than disrupting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com