Millionaire Employees Starting to Leave Google

Google’s vice president of corporate marketing, Cindy McCaffrey, is the first top executive to leave after the IPO. After 5 years with the search giant, McCaffrey has decided to take her IPO jackpot and go off and do nothing.

Way to go, Cindy! All that hard work meant you contributed to the great success of the company and you were paid very well for it. Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work?

One question I have, though, is what has taken the millionaire employees at Google so long to jump ship? And now that one has jumped ship, how long will it take until the floodgates open?

It must be a very strange situation at the Googleplex, where your buddy in the next cube may be a millionaire because of working a few more months than you before the IPO. I’m curious to know how Google internally will deal with the jealousy factor.

As more millionaire employees leave Google, they will be replaced by your typical, everyday Average Joe worker who is living paycheck to paycheck. So there will be a mix of millionaire employees with average employees. This sounds like the makings of a good soap opera or reality TV show (This also may make for a few hard spikes on the Googleplex volleyball court).

Also, if the millionaire employees start to flee with their riches, and these are the employees with the expertise that got Google where it is today, how will this affect the future performance of the world’s most loved search engine?

Lots of questions, I know. What is interesting to me is that this drama is just now beginning. With Yahoo! and MSN nipping at Google’s market share, Google’s ultimate demise may not be caused by outside forces but by internal forces such as the Human Resources nightmare that Google needs to solve in order to keep going forward.

I think this is just the beginning of a long story to follow.