140,000 euros for less than part-time. Sounds like a dream, but for an engineer at Google, it’s everyday life – and he’s not the only one.
The title image is a symbolic image, not of the software engineer.
What kind of job is this? The magazine Fortune spoke with a software engineer in his twenties. Fortune refers to him anonymously as Devon. He has been working at Google for some time now and is programming code – completely from his home office.
For his work, he is paid around 140,000 euros per year. However, he does not fulfill his approximately 40 hours that are stated in the employment contract in any week. According to his own statement, Devon manages at most one hour per day.
No full-time, but full pay
Doesn’t anyone notice? No, apparently not, because “Devon” has allegedly been doing this for some time. The programmer says he completes most of his work at the beginning of the week but holds it back. In small packages, he checks off what is expected of him over the coming days. He has no issues with his boss, as he narrates.
After his brief online visit to the Google office, he then devotes the rest of his day to building a tech start-up, which he is currently preparing to establish together with a friend.
How does this work? We do not know what he delivers, how quickly and to what quality. It is entirely possible that “Devon” simply gets too little work assigned. However, this is not surprising, as Professor Vijay Govindarajan explains to the Wall Street Journal. This practice is called Penning and has been pursued by several corporations for several years.
Today Google and tomorrow?
What exactly is ‘Penning’? Penning refers to the behavior of tech companies that hire highly qualified staff, mainly programmers and engineers, even though they don’t technically have any work for them. However, it makes sense as long as the following applies:
- It is expected that there will be strong growth in the near future, as was the case during the waning pandemic, and
- Staff is virtually retained and parked to keep it away from competitors. As much as possible, they will receive sufficient work soon.
However, this growth expectation does not always materialize, which is why in January according to Fortune, more than 10,000 employees from Google were laid off. However, if we are to believe “Devon”, highly qualified staff with work experience continues to be underemployed, counting their hours – or using them in alternative ways.
What does the software engineer plan? Should the eventual founding of the start-up ultimately fail, he plans unabashedly to just keep going. Google, in his experience, is “great at” re-hiring former staff.
He seems to have been around long enough to judge that. Because before his current job, Devon successfully completed an internship at the search engine giant – of course with the same work ethic as currently.
Whether SpaceX, Twitter, or Tesla also practice Penning is unclear, but it is undeniable that Elon Musk, the head of these companies, is critical of home office. He once spoke angrily in an interview about the modern form of working for many professions that it is almost surprising: Elon Musk considers home office not only unproductive but also “morally reprehensible”.
