The most open secret in Silicon Valley is called "resters and vesters," or "coasters" – which refers to engineers who get paid big bucks without doing too much work, waiting for their stock to vest.

We talked to engineers in the "rest and vest" world who explained how it happens and how they spend their days.

As cushy as it sounds, there are some real career risks and pitfalls for doing this rest-and-vest thing.

On a sunny summer morning, a Facebook engineer woke up to go to work but felt ill, ran to the bathroom and threw up. "I thought I was getting sick," the engineer recalled.

It wasn't a virus or food poisoning. The engineer was having a bad reaction to the thought of going to work.

This person was making $1 million a year, mostly in stock, and running a team of about three dozen people. And in the few years since joining Facebook, this person had worked to the point of exhaustion. The project this engineer was managing had been highly political, had required herculean effort to make it more successful and to protect the people working on it from losing their jobs over its problems.

As tired as the engineer was, there was no way to just up and quit the job. There were taxes to pay, thanks to that stock and the incoming salary was needed to pay those taxes.

But after getting violently ill, the engineer decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And the person knew that they wouldn't get fired.

But after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work, she decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And she knew she wouldn't get fired.

Because not going to work was actually the manager's idea.

The previous day the engineer had told the manager of plans to leave the company at the end of the year, six months away. The engineer wanted to spend the rest of the year wrapping up projects but not taking on any more, collecting on the stock that would vest by year end and making the money needed to pay the taxes.

"My manager and I had lots of conversations. I teetered on leaving so many times," this person said. "But this time was for real. I was going to see these projects to a healthy state and then I needed to go. I felt good about it. The next thing, he told me not to come in."

The engineer panicked thinking the manager was calling for an immediate termination, but the manager explained that this wasn't the case at all. "Just don't come to work," the manager told engineer. "You're burned out and need a break. Just don't talk about it, and everyone will assume you're on someone else's team."

The manager's proposal didn't go over well. "I was livid and I never would have done it," the engineer said. "I had every intention of joining another team. But then I woke up and started vomiting."

And that's how this hardworking, conscientious person wound up joining the least secret secret club in the Valley, known as "rest and vest."

The least secret secret club in Silicon Valley

Google headquarters. Scott Beale/Laughing Squid "Resting and vesting" is when an employee, typically an engineer, has an easy workload (if any job responsibilities at all) and hangs out on the company's payroll collecting full pay and stock. Stock is often the bigger chunk of total compensation for a senior engineer than salary.

Once the engineer was in rest-and-vest mode, this person spent the days attending tech conferences, working on pet coding projects, networking with friends, and planning the next career move.

The engineer later realized that the manager offered "rest and vest" as a way to buy silence about the problems with that project, by giving the person a soft landing, a time to find the next thing. "Everyone knew I had a big mouth and would speak out," the engineer said. "He figured, 'Hey, it costs us next to nothing keep this person happy for six months.'"

Business Insider talked to about a half a dozen people with direct knowledge of the rest-and-vest culture. Some were "fat cats" themselves. Some were hiring managers who tried to lure these folks back to the world of productivity. Many acknowledged that resting and vesting was a common, hush-hush practice at their own companies. Internally, these people are often referred to as "coasters."

Their lives counter the other reality for many in the tech world: long work hours and pressure for workers to pledge unrelenting devotion to their companies and jobs above all else.

'My days began ... at 11, and I took long lunches'

Engineers can wind up in rest-and-vest jobs in a variety of ways.

Manny Medina, the CEO of the fast-growing Seattle startup Outreach, has been on all sides of it. He briefly was a coaster himself, and he says he saw how Microsoft used it to great effect when he worked for the software giant. He has also tried to lure some rest-and-vest engineers to come work for him at his startup.

Outreach CEO Manny Medina experienced the "rest and vest" phenomenon from all sides. Manny Medina Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in graduate school. He finished his project months early and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.

It kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.

"My days began at that point at 11, and I took long lunches," he laughs. "They didn't want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else. But you have to stand by while they bring people up to speed."

Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, within both its engineering ranks and its research-and-development unit, Microsoft Research. The company, he says, would nab hard-to-find experts in up-and-coming fields like artificial intelligence, robotics, natural speech language, quantum computing, and so on, often allowing them to collect their Microsoft pay while maintaining a job as a professor or researcher at a university.

"You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it, and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure."

Of course, Microsoft Research's mission is to conduct research that contributes to Microsoft's products. It also collaborates on research in fields ranging from healthcare to economics. And it does so through partnerships with leading universities and research organizations, the company says.

Another person told us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model."

'Mid-30s pulling in 7 figures a year'

At other companies it's less about defense and more about becoming indispensable.

Facebook, for instance, has a fairly hush bonus program called "discretionary equity," a former Facebook engineer who received it said.

DE is when the company hands an engineer a massive, extra chunk of restricted stock units, worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's a thank-you for a job well done. It also helps keep the person from jumping ship because DE vests over time. These are bonus grants that are signed by top executives, sometimes even CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"At Facebook the OGs we know got DE," this former Facebook engineer said of engineers who worked at the company before it went public. "Their Facebook stock quadruples and they don't leave," this person said. "They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days."

Facebook declined to comment, but several engineers told us Facebook had a reputation of requiring long hours from its engineers.

These DE bonuses are not specifically designed as a mechanism for resting and vesting, but they can play a role in enabling it. Those with DE packages land in a self-fulfilling prophecy of success. They become known to top managers. They get choice assignments with plenty of resources, which means they can work less with good outcomes, this Facebook engineer said.

"These are really smart people and they don't leave," he said. "They're in their mid-30s, pulling in seven figures a year, and they don't have to work as hard. We say they're just coasting."

The 10x engineer

Other rest-and-vest types are part of a tribe in the Valley known as "the 10x engineer," a term used to describe someone said to be 10 times as effective as a so-called ordinary engineer.

Legend has it that a 10x engineer can do in one hour what it would take others 10 hours to do. Some of these folks are just plain brilliant. Others aren't necessarily smarter but know every detail of a critical system.

"When people have been there long enough, they often bring a value that's not easy to see. They might know where the bodies are buried on some project, be called in as a last resort to debug a project, or they are known as a great pinch hitter," the former rest-and-vest Facebook engineer said.

"One guy at Facebook didn't seem to work a lot, but when the site would go down he could find things that couldn't be found," the engineer said.

Google and the 'rest and vest' joke

Other members of the rest-and-vest set are the coasters, the long-timers who have reached a company's top engineering ranks and don't need to work hard to stay there.

They may not be 10x engineers, but they are institutional employees who know how to do just the right amount of work to get a good annual review and collect their next batch of stock grants.

According to all the folks we talked to, Google is known as a place where this type of rester and vester flourishes.

"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day," one engineer said. "They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs."

A Google manager who recently left the company agreed. "There are a lot coasters who reached a certain level and don't want to work any harder," she said. "They just do a 9-5 job, won't work to get promoted, don't want to get promoted. If their department doesn't like them, after a year or two they move somewhere else."

The term "rest and vest" even became a term jokingly associated with Google when "Silicon Valley" did a bit on it. In the hit HBO sitcom, Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti, played by actor Josh Brener, got a promotion at the fictional tech giant Hooli, which is inspired by Google. Bighetti was not assigned to any project and instead joined a group of other unassigned employees squandering their days on the company's roof.

"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year.

While those pictures were most likely jokes sent to Brener by fans of the show, several people from Google told us that when very senior engineers wrap up a big project, they may find themselves unassigned for a while, reporting to Google cofounder Larry Page, until they decide what they want to do next, not unlike the Hooli rooftop crowd.

'Life is good, you maximize your vacation — I'll come in when I want to'

Google Engineering Director Chee Chew demonstrates using the climbing wall during the grand opening of Google Kirkland October 28, 2009 in Kirkland, Washington. More than 350 employees work in the Kirkland facility, which includes amenities such as a gym and soda fountain, and consolidates several offices throughout Kirkland Getty/Stephen Brashear The moonshot research unit known as X, run by Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a Valley-wide reputation as a place to land a rest-and-vest gig, several people told us.

An engineer working at X said X's extremely long-term view, and its tendency to cancel projects, has given it that reputation.

"At X, we don't have a sense of budgetary concerns," this person said. "Engineers get paid $250,000 to $600,000 range, but there's no sense of urgency. It's like a startup but not really. It's like a startup with unlimited funds."

Alphabet's CFO, Ruth Porat, a Wall Street veteran, is said to be reining in the idea of unlimited funds at X and elsewhere in the company.

People inside Google say her office reviews new hires these days for all units except cloud computing, which reports to Diane Greene. (We hear cloud is growing so fast that Google is ramping investment in it, hiring like crazy.)

Even so, it's the nature of X that can tempt people into coasting, this engineer says.

While other tech companies "sear" a product's ship date into their engineers, who work nights and weekends to hit that date, "at X, people think, 'If my project is canceled, oh well, I'll just find another project,'" he said.

"You get paid so much after a certain level at Google, that once you get there, there's no real reason to work that hard. Life is good, you maximize your vacation. I'll come in when I want to," the X engineer said, estimating that very senior engineering positions could command up to $600,000 in total compensation at X, including bonus and stock options.

"What incentive do you have to work harder when you are already making $500,000 in salary and there is no more upward trajectory?" this person said.

Google declined to comment, but a representative for X wholly rejected this characterization.

"We have a compensation program here that has been tailored to encourage intellectual honesty from our teams," X spokeswoman Courtney Hohne told us. "So we developed this program to reduce any incentives to just hang around until some far-off payday."

Come to work each day and play

An employee plays with Legos at the New York City offices of Google. REUTERS/Erin Siegal Whether coasting long term, unassigned short term, or resting and vesting for another reason, these engineers typically do head to the office every day and are expected to show up, a former Google manager told Business Insider.

"You have to be physically present," this person said. But "there are so many distractions within Google," the person said, that it's easy to come to work and still spend hours playing.

"You want to have lunch at a lovely café, or maybe attend a tech talk, or a class, or you want to go to a bodywork class at 6 p.m. or to get juice at the Slice Cafe and it's on another campus. So you end up working six hours. There are times you have to put in nights and weekends, but in general, the company is so big and has so much money, you can work less," this person told us.

Google certainly isn't the only tech company to offer such distractions. Facebook has classes, a wood shop, and a video arcade for its employees. Oracle has a sand beach-volleyball pit and a swimming pool. Microsoft has a soccer and cricket sports field, plenty of Xboxes, and an on-site day spa. We've been told rest-and-vest engineers can be found at all of these companies.

From cushy to dead-end

Companies say extraordinary campuses are a necessity to recruit and retain top talent and to spark innovation and creativity in the workplace. And there are business benefits and financial results for companies that keep their workers happy. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu If this sounds like a dream-job situation, there is a dark side: The rest-and-vest life can also be a career killer.

In an industry that worships workaholics and the Next Big Thing, ambitious engineers want their résumés to be full of products used by millions of people.

But rest-and-vest engineers can wind up spending years "never shipping anything," the X engineer said. That can be particularly true for those coasting at a long-term research facility like Microsoft Research, where academic research doesn't easily leap into commercial products, or at X, where projects are frequently canceled by design.

"They know staying at X can be a career deadpool," the X employee said.

Hohne, the X spokeswoman, said this criticism missed the point of X.

"X is not about polishing products or optimizing systems that support millions of users," Hohne said. "X is designed to be a place for early-stage prototyping and de-risking. Different engineers (and business people) like different stages of the innovation process, and that's OK."

Still, Medina, the former coaster and Outreach CEO, agrees that doing the rest-and-vest thing too long can be dangerous for a career.

"These engineers are highly, highly paid, but there is no other company that will take them," he says.

If the engineers are willing to adjust their pay expectations downward and roll up their sleeves again, startups like his have been known to offer them jobs.

"Eventually, they get tired and want to go get real work," he said.