A 4X salary hike offer: Why Google's counteroffer to existing employee is making waves

Offer, counteroffer, and poaching are common practices in the corporate sector often used to hire or stop an employee with a high level of productivity. If it is a counteroffer, what do you expect? A 20 per cent hike; a 30 per cent, or 50 per cent, or just the double of the current salary. Even if someone gets a hike of that proportion, they may consider themselves lucky. But what if an employee gets a counteroffer of four times their current salary package? And what if the company counteroffering is Google. Such an enormous hike may leave people with their mouths agape, and the one who receives such an offer might have to pinch himself to realise they are not daydreaming. But this is what happened with a Google employee recently.

It was revealed by the person who tried to poach the Google employee.

He was Arvind Srinivas, CEO of the US-based Perplexity AI startup, who told Alex Kantrowitz on the Big Technology Podcast show about what happened when he tried hiring a Google employee.

Kantrowitz has posted a small part of this podcast on Twitter.

The IIT Madaras-educated Srinivas was trying to poach the Google employee for his Perplexity AI startup.

Listen to my pod with @AravSrinivas https://t.co/3JPT90UbHh

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) February 15, 2024

When the Google employee informed the management of the tech giant about the offer, the best the employee would have expected was an early relieving letter from the company or a counteroffer of a modest hike.

In their wildest dreams, the employee would have thought of a 300 per cent hike or a 4X increase in their existing salary.

"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

But this is what Google offered, as Srinivas said in the podcast.   

What is interesting is that, though an AI startup was approaching this Google employee, the said employee is reportedly not with the AI team of the tech giant.

The employee is part of Google's search team. 

Google had laid off thousands of employees

Google's four-time hike counteroffer came at a time when the tech giant is trimming its staff worldwide. It has laid off more than 1,000 employees in the last one and a half months.

The fired employees were working in different departments of Google, including Google Assistant, hardware, and central engineering.

However, Google has also given them relaxation by allowing them to apply for other positions within the company.

But if these employees fail to secure another position at Google by April, they will have to exit the company.

Amid such paradoxes, the question arises: what kind of strategy is Google working on?

Srinivas talked about it in his podcast.

He said that, as per what he had heard, the tech industry is laying off those employees whose salaries are very high, but they do not give that much output.

He pointed out that earlier, even if Google employees were on vacation, no one would think about it, but now they are thinking about it.

Even though Google is cutting down on jobs, it is not letting employees go who it finds productive.

Even if it comes at the cost of a four-time counteroffer.

And this is what was said to be done in the recent case.