Even as the big tech companies are ruthlessly laying off people, knowledgeable employees are still being valued. Recently Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of search engine Perplexity AI, spoke about how Google quadrupled the salary of an employee that Srininas was trying to hire. In a conversation with Big Technology Podcast host Alex Kantrowitz, Srinivas said, “There was one amazing candidate that I tried to recruit from Google. This candidate used to work…I mean he still works in the Google search team, it’s not with the AI people. And, the moment he told them that he is gonna join us, they (Google) quadrupled his offer.” Srinivas added, “I have never seen anything like that before.” This incident shows that big tech companies are ready to shell great amount of money to retain talent.
"The moment he told them he's going to join us, they quadrupled his offer" – Perplexity CEO @AravSrinivas on recruiting from Google (k, here's the video) pic.twitter.com/HRhrLNPrHJ— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) February 16, 2024
During their conversation, Kantrowitz asked Srinivas if he knew why tech companies are laying off so many people and to this Srinivas said, “Honestly, I dont know who they are letting go of. Is it based on performance or something else, I don’t have a clear sense.” He added, “One thing I was told is that they let go of people who have very high compensation but don’t produce that much. So in Google, you can be on vacation and nobody cares, because the company is really not affected by that. But they began caring recently, at least for the people they were paying a lot.”
Commenting on this conversation, an X user wrote, “Google is not allowing it anymore. No more bullies. No more Mr nice guy. They were like, we were the main contributors to AI research and you startups are coming for our talents. let’s match offers now!” An X user joked, “That engineer knew too much.”
Someone suggested, “If you want a raise internally you don’t need to fill in KRA just apply to another ai company.” An X user wondered if the employee Srinivas was trying to hire lied about Google’s retaining offer and commented, “There is another option: Google did not 4x and that person was trying to have another counteroffer from Perplexity.” Another person wrote, “Don’t get me wrong I’d take that money, but doesn’t it feel sort of insulting to that person? Like, you were valuing me at 1/4th what I was worth before this???”
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