>Yet, you can't go about breaking every norm and rule if you are famous and from an under-represented group.

Unless you still work at Google, how do you know she actually broke any rules? As far as I know, her e-mail to the Brain list is not public?

The question is whether that Twitter exchange was an isolated outburst (of the kind that reminds us all to stay away from social media, at least using our real name) or an example of typical behavior that led to this firing.

I've never heard of a 300% pay gap between people doing the same job, how does that even happen? Were you paid significantly under par or did that other person somehow hit jackpot? And at what level are we talking about?

It's not impossible -- with equity compensation and refreshers, it takes ~ four years to plateau. So if you have someone in the same role for the past four years and compare them to someone just hired, the four year employee may have more than half their income in RSUs while the new hire has maybe 10 percent of income in RSUs. If the stock does particularly well and RSUs grants have impeccable timing, compensation of 3x what you got in year one is a possibility. Especially if a level promotion happens, if you consider that 'the same job.'

Yes, it is a bit absurd. And if you're the first minority hire on a team that hires 1 person a year, you will be paid under the team average for a while, just as if you weren't.

> And at what level are we talking about?

Entry level employees at FAANG mostly. For PhDs managing people, such as the person in the article, I expect there's a much wider band of possibilities.

I have personally worked somewhere where the person who did the same work as me was paid 3x as me. I was new to the workforce and he was best friends with the CFO for 15 years. Despite my newness and her experience it was the same work.

Sorry, I'm gonna not answer just because I don't want to make it about myself and also don't want to reveal my identity.

I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. With salary bands imposing constraints, it's not even possible for you to have made a third of what someone doing "the same job" made.

Ohhh yes you can. Especially when you include equity which is outside the salary band stuff.

You can absolutely get paid that much more. Companies make exceptions all the time and justify two people doing the same job by paying more if someone is more experienced even if the technical skills performed and responsibilities by both people are equal. Instead of being rewarded for working twice the hours to learn something faster due to whatever reason someone can still be paid more for basically accomplishing the same amount of progress in their career but taking more time to do it.

Trust me there are all kinds of reasons you can get paid three times more.

That's not quite right. Salary bands tend to be guidelines, not constraints. And in ML there are plenty of people getting paid far out of band.

Equity and bonuses. How can you not be familiar with how those work, and just how much they amplify TC and distort bands? Don’t know anyone in finance? You shouldn’t even need to since you’re in tech! Our spreads may not be as bad as theirs, but we can still easily see 3x differences when you take things like sign-on bonuses, target bonuses, initial RSU awards, refreshers, and vesting cliffs into account.

Were you a vendor or did you work in sales/management. I have honestly never seen such a scenario in swes. Would love to know more.

Both full time SWEs. The gap exists, you can ask around. It's widely known at Google.

Fake news, I'm underrepresented and I never felt like one, I hate playing the minority card and I just focus on being a top performer. Some teams at Google cry all day specially non-eng folks playing the minority card because their work can't be quantified. So they mix up their lack of skills with race BS. I was a SWE and was actually pay very fairly for the work I did, that was my presentation card.

> I'm underrepresented and I never felt like one

What does this mean? That you don't feel like the race you actually are because you don't play the race card?

I hope I misread that and there is a more charitable explanation.

The most charitable interpretation would be something like "I'm underrepresented and I never felt like I was part of the out-group"

You cannot even say one interpretation is idealism and the other is realism because it is US pop culture bullshit. You notice because your remark has an added indignation.

Have you looked at the self reported salary data? It doesn't really seem to bear that out (although of course any self reported data is going to have issues)