[HN Gopher] What I learned getting acquired by Google
___________________________________________________________________
What I learned getting acquired by Google
Author : shreyans
Score : 548 points
Date : 2023-11-09 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shreyans.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (shreyans.org)
| olivierduval wrote:
| > "At Google's scale, the external world ceases to exist and is
| only rarely and carefully allowed to enter their walls"
|
| OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users
| (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
| avidiax wrote:
| The insularity isn't behind that, in my opinion.
|
| It's more that almost all of Google's features are ad-funded,
| and the company has chosen to make lots of (apparently) free,
| but poorly supported and uncertain products, rather than a
| smaller set of well supported products. It's a tradeoff, and
| Google has made a good tradeoff for both themselves (who
| collect more data and have more ad supply) and the majority of
| their users (who get a wide variety of "free" services), but it
| has downsides, of course.
| esafak wrote:
| But other big companies are the same. Engineers just don't
| communicate with users; that's reserved for product managers.
| The most you will get is a bug report.
| ska wrote:
| I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over
| this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts
| unless I can get engineers/developers and end users
| together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations
| can even conceive of how that might work once they are big
| enough.
|
| Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they
| build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev
| and customers.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I think the insularity is caused by that, they literally
| don't build for normal humans. They think the rest of us that
| don't work at Google aren't smart enough to understand what
| they do.
|
| This is something I've noticed among dozens and dozens of
| Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into
| the water supply.
| freefaler wrote:
| They're just the user, not the customer. For the real
| customers (big ad spenders) they do provide support, account
| managers and SLA agreements. In their world a couple of
| dollars for your cloud storage isn't enough to pay for
| support and reading your email, browsing history and your
| site usage is a way to earn back the money they've put into
| creating and sustaining the "free" service.
| hbn wrote:
| Maybe it /was/ a good tradeoff for users but the past few
| years I think people have become very disillusioned with
| Google. If anyone still gets excited about a new Google
| service being announced it's either because they're new to
| the Google ecosystem and haven't yet experienced year-after-
| year of having products and services you rely on repeatedly
| cancelled out from under you and replaced with something
| noticeably worse, or they're a masochist.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I used to think about this when I was a kid. If 5 billion
| people pray to God at the same time and ask for mutually
| exclusive things, how can he possibly answer or even listen to
| them all? And it's now up to 8 billion and the problem isn't
| getting any easier.
|
| I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively
| concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational
| models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the
| possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so
| they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think
| they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to
| provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but
| their users have not yet accepted that.
| mattigames wrote:
| Im pretty sure that if there were only one single human in
| the world the success ratio of the communication with God
| would be just as bleak, and the situation there is more like
| a company that after digging a tiny bit you discover only
| exists on paper.
| svieira wrote:
| > after digging a tiny bit
|
| What makes you so sure that "the company" doesn't exist?
| Sounds like you've discovered something almost axiomatic to
| have that level of certainty since there isn't a state-of-
| Deleware for the perfect being.
| rand846633 wrote:
| Or maybe god just is really good at making use of caching and
| has cloudflare tuned in properly?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Or maybe there just shouldn't exist a company so large if
| it's clear that it won't be able to listen to its users?
| goalonetwo wrote:
| "When I was working at Google, we ..."
|
| Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories
| about Google!
|
| Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to
| see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of
| pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog
| at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
| marcinzm wrote:
| 99.999999% of software engineering is being a cog in a machine.
| Startups included. Even your own startup if you have VC money
| and clients. Google is a nicer cleaner machine than most other
| machines.
| greatpostman wrote:
| As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some
| sense still an employee of the VC firm
| JanSt wrote:
| As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are
| in some sense still an employee of the client
| gomox wrote:
| Next up:
|
| As a human in a capitalist system
|
| As a mammal on Earth
|
| As a cell-based organism on this arm of the galaxy
| sebastiennight wrote:
| As a conscious mind needing carbohydrates to sustain
| compute
| kbknapp wrote:
| I've worked in large companies (thousands of employees) and
| startups (<20) and I actually felt more like a cog in the
| machine at the startup size companies.
|
| I was literally just a means to an end to churn out code on a
| product. I could have been (and eventually was) replaced at
| any moment with another generic cog willing to churn out the
| same code without much of a thought.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| After working at Google and Startups, I totally agree. You
| are much more of a cog at a startup due to the desperate
| need to grind out the next A/B test or customer
| requirement.
|
| People WAY over glamorize startups.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Don't agree at all. Have you worked at a startup with <10
| employees? It's more like 25% cog at that level. Even at 50
| employees you're at worst 50% cog.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That there is a denyonym for it--and an ex-denonym even--tells
| you enough.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Do you mean demonym? Sorry I'm pre coffee and don't know the
| word/words.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Yes.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There was a time when it was true that being a Googler meant
| you were pretty hot shit, but that was decades ago at this
| point. Not insulting any of the talented people who work there,
| it's just a much bigger company with 1000x more people on
| staff, so obviously it's not just the top, _creme de la creme_
| nerds in the world, even if many of them are there.
|
| On the other hand, I'm not sure that this article is an example
| of pride or bragging. It seems like an inventory of what's
| unusual about Google. It also includes some somewhat cutting
| remarks about its dysfunctions, e.g.:
|
| > Most 10-50 million user problems aren't worth Google's time,
| and don't fit their strategy. But they'll take on significant
| effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and
| someone's promotion goals.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Ah, the classic Promotion Oriented Architecture.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think it's useful for people who are founders or employees in
| a startup that Google (or similar BigCo) might acquire to read
| things like this.
|
| Also, I think there's things to be proud about working at
| Google. In general working there _does_ teach a diligence of
| quality that is often missing in SWE in other orgs, though many
| companies are picking up on the same practices anyways.
|
| Personally, I found my time at Google to be useful from the POV
| of that, but also, yeah, just having it on my resume.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| People usually don't hand the keys to their company when
| things are going amazing. Very first sentence:
|
| > As we started to raise Socratic's Series B in 2017, we
| quickly learned that our focus on getting usage at the
| expense of revenue was going to bite us
|
| As folks here seem be eager to read between the lines how
| terrible it was maybe they should read between this one too
| Domenic_S wrote:
| You may have missed the point of the article, which was
| explaining just how dystopian a place it is to try and get
| things done
| yunohn wrote:
| You always effectively a cog in the wheel. You're never
| actually making a meaningful difference. There's only a handful
| of universally "impactful" causes, the rest are just things
| that are part of the intricate world we've created. A job is
| almost always just a job, whatever the industry.
|
| Source: I've been in IT for over a decade, across all sizes of
| companies.
| izacus wrote:
| Maybe you should read the article before bloviating about
| things (seriously, what's with this ranting and raving that
| doesn't even have the article it's supposedly answering in
| context?).
|
| It's not really a positive one.
| JCharante wrote:
| To the average person working at NASA feels the same. Most
| professional achievements are being a part of a cog and society
| functions by people working together as cogs to make a system
| function.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This sounds so old school - people today don't think NASA is
| an impressive or prestigious job.
| wbl wrote:
| Where else does your stuff go to space and make headlines
| regularly?
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| SpaceX, BlueOrigin fits the bill
| JCharante wrote:
| I think you're very disconnected from the average american
| if you believe that.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > general public has started to see those bigTech more as a
| dystopian place than a source of pride
|
| It really has not. Unless you consider commenters on HN and
| r/technology the general public.
| paganel wrote:
| Things are slowly but surely changing, and this goes for the
| tech world/culture as a whole, i.e. how we're seen by the
| "outside" world.
|
| I'd say that the high-point of the nerd/tech stuff was around
| 2017-2018, i.e. just before the pandemic, but ever since then
| techies have started being seen as a nuisance (and worst) by
| more and more people.
| zhivota wrote:
| Very nice and sneaky article. It seems like a cheerleading
| article at first but if you read to the end you can see the
| cutting criticism, delivered in a way that makes perfect sense if
| you've lived it, but you might even miss much of if you haven't.
|
| I was part of a similar acquisition story and feel many of the
| same things, but the company was eBay so all the talk about great
| things wasn't as applicable. Just mostly the bad things.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I agree. It really shows that at a large scale it is no longer
| possible to deliver new value. Google has reached that level.
| It can only go downhill from here. Albeit very slowly.
| butlike wrote:
| Large animals require large amount of food. It's why there's
| countless fish but only one humpback whale.
|
| The question for Google is: how much are they willing to bet
| they're the whale and not just a fish that's too big?
| dwroberts wrote:
| > On the other, both Chris and I left Google to found startups,
| and neither the Socratic team nor Google as a whole have yet
| produced an AI powered tutor worthy of Google's capabilities. But
| a few Socratic Googlers might yet make it happen, unless they've
| been re-org'd
|
| Feels a bit like the post is upbeat padding to share the real
| experience/criticism which is this part (ie exactly what you
| expect for a small focused app getting acquired by a giant
| directionless company)
| moritonal wrote:
| Is this a happy story? Having read it my takeaways are that they
| were immediately asked to rewrite their app in Google's way, then
| a separate research team went off and wrote them a new API for
| their core functionality. And now given Socratic by Google on the
| Play Store was last updated on Oct 21, 2020, and is not available
| for my Android 13 device, so seems to have just died?
|
| Kind of seems like Google bought the company, mushed the team
| into the rest of Google and killed the app off.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Was it an aquihire?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Aquire a company not for the product, but to hire specific
| people working there. Like experts in a field. For instance
| if you have a competing product and want to build something
| using expertise or if you think the technology can be applied
| elsewhere.
| bennyg wrote:
| I think the parent you're replying to knows that, they were
| asking if this was an example of that.
| freedomben wrote:
| I know almost nothing (I read the article but that's all) but
| my gut tells me it could have been a "scoop this potential
| competitor up early" as there was so much overlap between
| Socratic and what Google research is doing. Could also have
| been a "we need a product to justify this research work, and
| Socratic is a good one." Or it could just straight be an
| acquihire -\\_(tsu)_/-
| gizmo wrote:
| A 10 person startup without a business model? And all the
| tech got thrown out. Clearly an acquihire.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How can you tell them difference between that and early
| removal of a competitor?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| You often can't, which is why they can get away with
| these anti-competitive practices
| Keyframe wrote:
| Well google did buy photomath recently as well, which is
| basically the same thing so who knows.
| screamingninja wrote:
| What is the difference? If your competitor is competent,
| acqui-hire them. If they are not, there is no real
| competition.
| xeckr wrote:
| That's an interesting word. I assume it's when a large
| company buys your startup just to have access to the talent,
| without much regard for the startup's product? What sorts of
| offers do they make to the founders?
| beambot wrote:
| Varies heavily depending on background labor market. In
| 2021: $1M+ per solid engineer. These days it's closer to $0
| as they're not aggressively hiring and plenty of talent
| floating around.
| cj wrote:
| An acquisition of a failed startup where the purchasing
| company is "buying" the team of people rather than the
| product they built.
| e_y_ wrote:
| Normally I'd consider it an acquihire when a company acquires
| a startup / smaller company and immediately announces the
| discontinuation of the product. Less so if there's an attempt
| to continue developing the product, even if it eventually
| gets shut down.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > they were immediately asked to rewrite their app in Google's
| way, then a separate research team went off and wrote them a
| new API for their core functionality
|
| waves to Matt Hancher
| izacus wrote:
| I mean... it's both? It reads like real life - good things and
| bad. Which is why the insight is interesting.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| To me it reads more like someone with a positive disposition
| (or someone who has founded a start up and doesn't want to
| burn bridges) laying out the problems without saying they are
| problems. I mean come on - the upsides: we "merged cultures",
| "our app lives on", "careers have bloomed" versus downsides
| "we quit", and "we don't think we actually delivered what we
| wanted to". But it's ok because after everyone who cared
| about the product quit, maybe someone else will might make it
| happen -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| You could change none of the facts of this blog and write it
| as an aggressive rant about how Google murdered their
| startup, forced them to re-write the entire thing, stopped
| them shipping by being a bureaucratic nightmare, and the big
| take away is you can succeed at google if you "play the right
| game" if you know what I mean. It's ... not positive.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Maybe it's ok for writing to not be so editorialized as
| what you're used to? To me this read like a trip report
| from which the reader can draw their own conclusions
| without the author telling them what to think.
|
| I wish more things I read on the internet were written in
| that style. I don't need to be told what conclusions to
| draw, I can figure it out myself.
| ccb92 wrote:
| Agreed, very earnest style.
| ido wrote:
| > I mean come on - the upsides: we "merged cultures", "our
| app lives on", "careers have bloomed" versus downsides "we
| quit", and "we don't think we actually delivered what we
| wanted to". But it's ok because after everyone who cared
| about the product quit, maybe someone else will might make
| it happen -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Do we ignore the most obvious upside, that this guy (and
| possibly/probably everyone in that startup) got paid a shit
| ton of money as a result of Google buying the company?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| And can now watch his dream of so many years languish in
| the app store. Money is only a part of the equation.
| zymhan wrote:
| Nuance is an underappreciated form.
| danans wrote:
| Code and infrastructure must evolve, and Google excels at
| building secure, scalable, performant, maintainable systems
| that squeeze every last bit of signal from noise. Startups
| don't have the resources to do that, and Google can't launch a
| product built in the startup way.
|
| For an example, _anything /anyone_ that wants to access user
| data at Google faces an extremely high bar for access, with
| layers of access control, auditing, approvals, and enforcement,
| starting at the design phase through to implementation.
|
| At Google that's a good thing. However it would be pretty silly
| at a 10 person startup.
|
| What Google isn't great at is taking risks on new product ideas
| (for many good and bad reasons), and that's why they often
| acquire companies that do that sort of thing.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just
| squandering money. You can't change that reality by praising
| Google's way of doing things.
| underdeserver wrote:
| The founders got money, a line in their resume (sold a startup
| to Google), and the experience of working at Google. They
| didn't stay very long.
|
| I'd be pretty happy.
| andrewparker wrote:
| Socratic by Google still exists today and is a widely beloved
| app based on reviews. They had to rewrite the code and
| infrastructure, but "killing off the app" implies that they
| just shut things down. That never happened.
|
| As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned
| a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not
| celebrate or mourn.
| suprfsat wrote:
| > This app isn't available for your device because it was
| made for an older version of Android.
|
| Not "killed off" exactly, no.
| autokad wrote:
| its a PR piece IMO. The google way is terrible for producing
| products people want, which is why they always have to purchase
| their way into new products.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Having been through this myself -- but as an individual-
| contributor rather than some kind of Thought Leader... and seen
| others go through it.. Sounds about typical for Google acquires.
|
| Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their
| acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As
| soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior
| folks -- leave.
|
| I stuck around (for another 6 years) after my 3-4 years of golden
| handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as
| well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same
| acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.
|
| Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions
| on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google
| is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is
| familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k
| engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.
|
| In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us
| (or so the DOJ is saying now
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ...
| though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of
| just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they
| just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly
| without us.
|
| 2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from
| Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a
| while.
|
| It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the
| opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of
| bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.
| jrockway wrote:
| This sounds approximately like acquisitions I've been through,
| except working at Google you get paid 3x as much. There are
| many, many huge enterprises buying startups; few have the pay
| scales of Google. (The general inability to act annoys me more
| than comp, though, which is why I left Google to go to a
| startup in the first place! I really miss the days of "rollout
| new code on green"; you could have an idea in production in
| less than 5 minutes. Not so in the enterprise world.)
| s1gnp0st wrote:
| I left early and left a lot of money on the table. If they
| carved out a space for people to get weird and creative, I'd
| come back, but otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life in the
| chaotic fun of startups.
|
| Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.
| gniv wrote:
| Well-written article with some interesting insights. In
| particular the part about process debt.
| xnorswap wrote:
| This picture from the post is worth a thousand words:
| https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jp...
| dekhn wrote:
| I remember a startup that had a great product that would match
| you, a person with a questiojn about a topic, with an expert on
| that topic, over gChat. Google acquired them, and they
| immediately were told they had to port their infra into google3
| and borg. This was a short window where the new hotness was help-
| over-chat.
|
| They rewrote their whole system and then Google told them they
| didn't actually need the product (and from what I can tell, the
| help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more). So
| they pivoted and made user profiles- that is, for every user at
| google, they inspected all the history of that user, and made a
| simple model that represented them. at the same time, several
| other groups were competing to the same thing- and a more
| powerful team licked the cookie and took ownership of user models
| at google (often, the leadership would set up various teams in
| competition and then "pick a winner").
|
| After a few years, all the acquihires left google in disgust,
| because google had basically taken their product, killed it,
| forced them to pivot, and then killed their pivot.
|
| What a shame and waste of resources.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| This tracks with what I've heard from other friends &
| colleagues; one data point could be an anecdote but
| seeing/hearing similar stories multiple times over the past
| decade+ creates a trend.
|
| Google Product Management is almost meme-level bad, and is
| carried + boosted by such great talent in virtually 95% of
| other departments at the company.
|
| As an easy litmus test, think about whether or not you could
| quickly name 5 Google products still around that the company
| released in the past 20 years that _weren't_ seeded from
| acquisitions.
| caturopath wrote:
| What are a couple somewhat-comparable companies with really
| good product management?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| competition isn't a waste. for a google kind of company it's
| fine.
|
| is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for
| note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely?
|
| google happens to be big enough to have an internal market,
| that's all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work
| output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some
| of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave? and
| you move on to the next project. (promo considerations aside)
|
| different people will of course internalize it differently.
| some bitterly.
|
| I'm not referring to the plethora of chat apps. Those are
| wasteful and demonstrative of google's failings.
| Retric wrote:
| It is actually wasteful to build 15 note taking apps that
| die. Free markets limit inefficiency as individual actors can
| only run out of money individually unlike governments who can
| bankrupt everyone.
|
| Google gets the worst of both worlds by having multiple
| internal projects and having management pick winners. It's
| exactly the kind of waste you get from monopolies where
| efficiency takes a back seat to politics.
| eep_social wrote:
| > help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more
|
| Couldn't disagree more, most web presences in B2C have a chat
| box where you can talk to someone or something on the other
| end. Usually they're horrible but when they're good they're
| fucking great.
|
| I think the other problems you outline, plus the fact that
| google went through this process with gchat itself (anyone
| remember Allo?) are probably the main contributors. As a
| sibling comment notes: google's product org is meme-level
| terrible from top to bottom.
| dekhn wrote:
| help-over-gchat and B2C chat are two different things.
|
| help-over-gchat was a matching system that allowed you to
| either ask a question about a topic, or declare that you know
| about a topic, and the system would match question-askers
| with question-answerers, all through gChat.
| eep_social wrote:
| Good point.
|
| In my eyes it's a PMF problem and an issue with their
| product team that Google couldn't pivot. I know in 2023 a
| major CRM vendor has been rolling out the same idea as part
| of their SaaS. They're trying to match individual customer
| service reps with depth of expertise across a broad product
| range. Not sure how much success they're having but the
| idea is solid and requires an interesting combinatorial
| solver to figure out "good" matches within various
| constraints beyond expertise like individual workload, time
| zones, etc. with the goal to drive down case resolution
| time. Google is terrible at product and terrible at taking
| the long view, despite having known for decades that
| they're going to struggle with innovators dilemma.
| fidotron wrote:
| I think the outside world massively underestimates the
| viciousness of politics in the upper echelons of Google, and
| how it has been that way for a very long time. (It predates
| Sundar ascending to CEO). I have never worked for Google, but
| closely enough with teams and execs in those upper regions to
| know how the sausage is made and it forever soured me on
| possibly working there (and I believe that is entirely mutual).
| The post acquisitions which are not quite merged into the
| mothership teams tend to be on the receiving end of much of the
| worst, and it leads to the result where the survivors are the
| most obnoxious.
|
| "Licking the cookie" has to be the single most common phrase
| that came up, but my general sense was that both Google and FB
| are full of weasels, only the latter is much more honest about
| it. Neither is particularly desirable.
|
| EDIT: Feel the need to qualify, there is a lot of superb
| technical work there on many many teams, but it is the co-
| ordination of that (especially fights over gatekeeping that
| which goes forward) which is a total mess. The resulting
| strategic blunders and failure to execute create huge friction
| with the outside world.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| The second passport thing is definitely true. When I'm abroad--
| even, recently, Buenos Aires--I have access to office space, free
| food, a gym, and even a music room where I can practice guitar
| and piano.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood
| and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Yep. Another perk is that Google always seems to lease the
| best/coolest office real estate anywhere.
|
| Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice
| everything is.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Not a googler, but their office in Toronto is in pretty meh
| area tbh
| otalp wrote:
| Do they have a dev office in Toronto? Thought it was in
| waterloo
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| In the past it was sales&marketing only with smattering
| of a few "guest desks" for visiting engineers. And the
| site leads at Waterloo (at least) lobbied hard to prevent
| Toronto from ever really having engineering for real.
| Probably out of worry about centre of gravity being
| sucked away, etc.
|
| IMHO it limited Google's hiring ability in Ontario. And
| it made me (and others) have to sell my house in Toronto
| and move when my employer was acquired. I tried the
| van/bus commute for 6 months and it was too hard.
|
| Then the Geoffrey Hinton folks moved in there I believe.
| And I think some AI R&D was happening there?
|
| And then COVID happened, and everyone was WFH but when
| you _did_ go into the office and book a desk, it became
| possible to go into the Toronto office instead.
|
| I left after that so can't say how it is now. Google goes
| through waves of "defrags" where small groups and teams
| in peripheral offices are... purged and merged because
| there's a feeling that "strength in numbers" for a
| particular project pays off. I wouldn't be surprised to
| see what happen post-layoffs.
|
| The Toronto office, when I visited it, was small. Food
| was good though.
| dboreham wrote:
| > best/coolest office real estate anywhere
|
| Hence the focus on RTO.
| monksy wrote:
| Sigh
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| In reality they were out of room at many of their offices
| pre-COVID, and they hired like crazy during COVID, and
| had no room for everyone to RTO.
|
| Before I quit you had to book a desk if you wanted to
| come into the office, hybrid. I pushed to get myself my
| own assigned desk because I despised the stock monitors,
| etc.
|
| At that point (fall 2021) hardly anybody was coming in,
| so it was a ghost town. But they would not have been able
| to fit everyone in if they'd demanded people come back.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My friend/coworker made the observation: Elysium. (the
| movie)
|
| Always felt kind of gross to me.
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| Meta also has exceptional offices.
|
| Both are amazing.
| elwell wrote:
| > Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice
| everything is.
|
| Tell me more about this.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's almost literally a sidekick passport. If you fly into a
| city with a major Google office and you say you are there for
| work and you work at Google, the customs agent might ask to see
| your badge.
| eloisant wrote:
| It has nothing to do with it being a passport, when you tell
| a custom agent you come for work and you work for company X
| they can ask for some proof. Nothing more to it.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| I know you guys are being told you are special but this has
| nothing to do with Google. I Had the same thing happen to me
| for different companies.
| decaffjoe wrote:
| It's common for Google offices to have gyms and pianos?!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Gyms yes, pianos - only really big/fancy ones like MV,
| Zurich, London, etc
| bigmanwalter wrote:
| Even some smaller ones too. The Google Montreal office has
| an excellent music room!
| asdfman123 wrote:
| In my experience nearly every Google campus has a music
| room, and nearly all of them have at least a weighted
| keyboard.
|
| In the Bay Area there are a lot of acoustic pianos
| available. There's even a special building that has like 12
| practice rooms, each with an acoustic piano.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yeah i was thinking of full size acoustic ones since
| electronic keyboards are pretty common everywhere
| milesward wrote:
| While an employee, I stashed 6 colored "p-bone" plastic
| trombones in google colors in various Google Cloud
| offices... (tokyo has blue, green in UK, etc)
| cbarrick wrote:
| Google Pittsburgh has a music room. We're definitely a
| smaller office.
| paddez wrote:
| A few of the offices even have a pool (Google Dublin, and
| soon Google London)
|
| Because the buildings are usually located in very central
| city locations - I've often used the offices as a way to kill
| time til' check-in opens for hotels after a long-haul flight
| (grab food, caffeinate, have a shower, etc)
|
| Recently I took a night train between Stockholm and
| Copenhagen.
|
| Showered in the Stockholm office, walked 5 minutes to the
| train station, slept, woke up in Copenhagen, grabbed a hearty
| breakfast in the CPH office.
|
| It's a little perk that is honestly vastly underestimated
| itronitron wrote:
| I assume the data centers get to have heated pools
| quietpain wrote:
| Even the toilet water is heated
|
| https://www.wired.com/2012/03/google-sewer-water/
| milesward wrote:
| eheheh solid
| dgacmu wrote:
| Google Pittsburgh has (or, had, I haven't been there for four
| years) a Theremin. Not sure if that counts. :-)
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| The HQ has a halfpipe (https://ocramps.com/blogs/builds-
| installations/google-headqu...)
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Often just an electric keyboard but yeah
| latenightcoding wrote:
| TIL google has an office in Buenos Aires, wonder how that works
| with the current inflation, do engineers get paid in pesos? do
| they have to re-adjust their salaries every few weeks?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| About 50% of my comp as a Canadian was in the form of RSUs
| which were in USD, so there's that. But of course, the amount
| you're given is indexed (in the past quite generously, but
| less so over time) against local compensation rates.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's funny because later in the article he mentions the
| difference between Google and Amazon, and this is a huge one.
| At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without
| approval.
| rescbr wrote:
| When I went to other sites I just had to file a ticket and
| that was it. If something were to be approved, it was
| automatic, unless it was a restricted office/building. Maybe
| it depends on the job role.
|
| Not too unusual, other companies I've worked were very
| similar.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Doesn't work in China (I've heard).
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| Worked for me. Maybe someone filled a ticket to make it
| happen, I sure didn't have to do anything.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I've heard blockages in the Beijing Wudaokou office, but
| that was before I started working at Google (I left China
| in 2016 and started at google in 2020, so maybe a big gap).
| Maybe it changed? (or my info was wrong)
| kccqzy wrote:
| Definitely did work. At least the Shanghai office before the
| pandemic.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Should be fine (although your ability to access work
| materials might be limited). Visiting the Shanghai office is
| a decent alternative to the tower's paid observation deck
| (similar situation at the Taipei 101 office)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Another great thing is you can usually find someone who is up
| to have fun, even if you have no social connections in a place
| you're travelling to. I was visiting Barcelona a few years ago
| and emailed the misc- alias seeing if anyone wanted to visit
| Montserrat with me, and 5 of us went up there and had a great
| day together. Best part is, it is usually cool people who say
| "yes" - the abject nerds aren't going to respond to that kind
| of email.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| I found the mention of most of Google's code stored in a mono
| repo to be pretty crazy.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146
| jiveturkey wrote:
| it's not a monorepo in the git sense of monorepo. git won't
| scale that way.
| dboreham wrote:
| This is not the monorepo you are thinking of. And yes I've seen
| $M in developer time burned by people who didn't understand
| that.
| vkou wrote:
| There's no other way to run a firm this size without half of it
| being mired in dependency hell.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It worked far better than you'd think. The ability to
| atomically change massive chunks of Google's code across
| projects was amazing. At some companies I worked at, if you
| wanted to make a breaking change in a common library, like say
| rename a method, it'd be a serious issue. You'd need to release
| a new version of your library, then you'd start migrating teams
| using that library one by one or cajoling them into it, and
| then, years later, you might be able to delete the old version.
| And you'd have to maintain it the whole time. At Google, you
| could just rename the method in the library and in every client
| of that library in the same single commit. It was magical!
| Almost all development at Google was done at HEAD in a single
| branch, and it was a beautiful thing. It's probably also why
| Bazel and Google's open source stuff are not great at
| versioning and backwards compatibility; it's not something they
| worry about internally.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Google does things the Google way. Just about every piece of
| software and infrastructure used at Google was built at Google
|
| And now we have most using everything built by Google. Sad times
| when compared to times when everything was once individually
| created.
| b20000 wrote:
| i've tried reaching out to various corp dev teams at FAANGS
| without any results. i guess it pays to know people.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I think your success with this entirely depends on what and why
| you're reaching out to them, no?
| b20000 wrote:
| no, it depends on whether you know people on the inside
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn't. While
| there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3
| hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people
| I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work.
|
| > What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent
| re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and
| the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage.
| Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
|
| I started as someone excited to learn, make things happen, and
| work hard. Within a few months I realized that the team I joined
| was the "wrong" version and the "right" version of that team was
| in another department I couldn't transfer to. My manager was in
| denial, my team-mates were quitting rapidly, and my skip manager
| was incredibly toxic.
|
| But the worst part was that doing even a simple thing was a
| monumental task. Something that for a startup could take an hour
| to pick up, turn into a PR, get review, launch and get analytics
| on would take 2 months at Google. You could do other stuff in
| parallel of course but the iteration cycles were horribly slow
| and the ability to get feedback almost non-existent. The team I
| joined had worked on their product for 6 years and only just got
| the most primitive feedback metrics a few months into my joining.
|
| 3 months in and I knew I had to quit. I was out of there 15
| months after joining. I'm going back to the startup world on
| Monday and I'm actually really excited!
|
| The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. The extra scale of
| Google doesn't matter to me. I never want to work at a big
| organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished
| than rich and depressed. I came to Silicon Valley to learn as
| much as possible. If I work on a high-scale system I need to have
| earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system
| from step 0. If I get big pay I need to have earned that from
| excellent product development.
| sarora27 wrote:
| > I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible.
|
| This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came
| across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset.
|
| Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your
| secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity
| pkilgore wrote:
| The tone of this is so different from the factual content it was
| really hard to read. Like a story about a machine that crushed
| your hand, and you wrote note to yourself that next time it would
| have crushed it faster had you sharpened the gears first.
| rand846633 wrote:
| This made me laugh so hard! I really want to know what lead up
| to this comment and was some llm involved?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Where did all your negativity come from? "A machine that
| crushed your hand?" The author clearly learned a lot, had fun,
| and also recognized the issues at Google and quit on their own
| accord. Sounds like any other job to me.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Not who you replied to but often even if significant parts of
| your job is shitty, if the fundamentals (incl having a good
| boss who bats for you) are in place, you'd speak
| favorably/with fond nostalgia. This didn't sound anything
| like that.
| dekhn wrote:
| when building industrial tools, one builds them to do their job
| as painlessly as possible, so I could totally see writing a
| note to self that the gears should be sharpened.
|
| Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
| zerr wrote:
| They do anthropomorphize - Flutter and Golang mascots.
| pram wrote:
| The Gopher is solely because of Rob Pike and his wife I assume.
| cdibona wrote:
| Yup, we wanted Renee to make the mascot for Go.I personally
| really loved Glenda (the plan 9 bunny) and was enthusiastic.
| It turned out pretty cute! We even ended up ordering a few
| containers full from squishables in that first year of go
| being released outside google.
| raybb wrote:
| I had the pleasure of working with Shreyans as a SE at Maven last
| year and it's funny to see how this blog post explains some of
| the experience working together. There was a strong aversion to
| meetings and process and big emphasis on empowering the employees
| to make judgement calls and just reach out for comment if they're
| unsure. Those things just made sense to me so I didn't question
| it but coming so recently from Google might have made those
| aversions stronger. At the end of the day, I enjoyed that way of
| working (which is probably much harder to do with bigger teams)
| and I hope to bring it to the next place I go.
|
| I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an
| urban studies masters (https://www.4cities.eu/) but it wasn't an
| easy decision. I hope we work together again in the future. If
| anyone is looking to work at an education startup check out
| maven.com for sure.
| xnacly wrote:
| How would one go about working at google as a junior fullstack
| developer? I wanted to work remote or onsite in germany but there
| seem to be no open positions
| okdood64 wrote:
| Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack
| developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.
| hbn wrote:
| This is maybe getting offtopic but I still have no idea why
| the term "full stack developer" exists or why it's so
| widespread. Sure, if you specialize in JavaScript and you
| mainly work writing web UI libraries, you might mainly
| consider yourself a "frontend developer." Same thing for
| working on server frameworks that would, I guess, make you a
| "backend developer"? (I'd think in that case you'd probably
| just be into general programming, and not call yourself that)
|
| Does a person that wires up a backend to do some business
| logic, hit some APIs, etc. and then send it to a frontend to
| be displayed really need a name like "full stack"? It almost
| implies your doing both of the jobs of a frontend and backend
| developer, but if you go by the example work I mentioned
| previously, you're not doing that. That's what I do for my
| job and it feels like I'm doing the Sesame Street of
| programming jobs compared to other areas of the industry.
|
| I don't like how the term "software engineer" is overused
| either. Maybe just cause most of what comes out of the
| software industry really shouldn't be compared to what comes
| out of industries that build bridges and large machinery. I
| don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-pasting
| code snippets from Stack Overflow are really implementing
| proper engineering practices.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > I don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-
| pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow are really
| implementing proper engineering practices.
|
| I think most people say this in jest; regardless, writing
| low-effort code that would be "helped" by this practice is
| just a small part of the job anyways.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| As a backend dev, I probably know which teams are calling
| me but not necessarily why, and I rarely have occasion to
| try to read their code. I can't call myself full stack
| because I haven't seriously touched frontend for a while
| and it changes rapidly.
| max_hammer wrote:
| Does google hire Data Engineers ? What is the title for data
| engineer
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Google isn't hiring much right now, so the options are pretty
| limited. I expect it will loosen, but have no inside info.
| guessmyname wrote:
| Definitely DO NOT work remotely as a junior developer.
| Achieving the appropriate career progression requires
| meaningful interactions with your more experienced colleagues,
| which may be limited in a remote work environment.
|
| That said, here is a small list of things you'll need to get a
| job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies:
|
| * Educational Background: it seems that you're a student at
| https://www.dhbw.de/startseite, so you're good.
|
| * Develop Technical Skills: you're already familiar with Go
| (https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories&language=go).
| Consider getting some knowledge of C++ or Python as they are
| common at Google. Python will help you a lot during the
| interviews.
|
| * Build a Strong Portfolio: junior developers usually have much
| more free time to work on personal projects. I see you already
| have a GitHub account with a good amount of Go code, so I think
| you're on the right track --
| https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories
|
| * Gain Practical Experience: consider internships, co-op
| programs, or contribute to open-source projects, participate in
| hackathons or coding competitions to demonstrate your problem-
| solving skills.
|
| * Networking: attend industry events, meetups, and conferences
| to connect with professionals in the field. Google often looks
| for candidates through referrals. Join relevant online
| communities, forums, and social media groups to stay informed
| about job opportunities and industry trends.
|
| * Prepare for Interviews: LeetCode like a madman! --
| https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/
|
| * Apply for Positions: obviously, apply for a job; connect with
| a recruiter.
|
| I could go on and on with this list, but you'll discover the
| other things you'll need once you have done most of the ones
| above.
|
| Good luck!
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > which may be limited in a remote work environment.
|
| That "may" is carrying a lot of weight there. Almost makes it
| sound like a fact, while in fact being merely an unsupported
| opinion.
| EspressoGPT wrote:
| First and foremost, remove that red "Google is actively hurting
| the open web with its browser chromium" banner from your
| personal website[1].
|
| [1] https://xnacly.me/
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| The "red badge" thing was very real. It was really weird having
| TVCs on your team. You'd all work hard together to launch a
| thing, and then everybody except the red badge would get a
| celebratory team tchotchke or a team lunch or something. If you
| asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things
| directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be
| like an employee." There'd be all-hands meetings they couldn't go
| to, or seemingly arbitrary doors they couldn't open or internal
| sites they couldn't see. If you worked with a TVC, you'd get
| training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf:
| "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And
| report them if they ever claim to work for Google."
| gnfargbl wrote:
| That's how it works with contractors in most large
| organisations. The other side of the coin is that they're
| usually rewarded better than employees are, on the basis that
| they can be fired at any time with no notice.
|
| In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-
| retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.
| quux wrote:
| I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC
| tenure.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Not necessarily. I was a tech lead where I could only hire
| contractors. The run of the mill CRUD staff augmentation
| contractors were making about $65 and the contracting company
| was billing $100 a hour for them with no health care
| benefits, no PTO, no 401K match.
|
| On the other hand, the "cloud consultants", who were just old
| school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and
| shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200
| an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners.
|
| Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two
| years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in
| the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got
| Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to
| negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour
| and even that was low. I did it because I found the project
| interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend.
|
| FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.
| carabiner wrote:
| Most large orgs don't have the perks of Goog, Meta. Amazon
| and Cisco don't have free food, massages, etc. so it doesn't
| matter contractor vs. fulltime.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I've never seen a contractor have better salary/pay unless
| they're a fully independent subject matter expert and have no
| interest in being employed. I've hired a quite a few
| contractors and there is usually two cases, I need workers,
| or expertise that is highly limited.
|
| Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing
| agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a
| salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing
| these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract,
| at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper,
| but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The
| staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even
| close to what in house staff are getting.
|
| It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from
| partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the
| resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter
| because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I'm don't think it's true at companies like Google that
| contractors get paid better. My impression was they get a
| similar salary but no equity and worse benefits. I'm assuming
| we're talking about the TVCs who basically act like ordinary
| contributors on a team. Not some specialist consultant, I
| don't know about them.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| While FB had the same badge color for TVCs and FTEs, everything
| else was exactly the same. I later saw the red/white badge
| dichotomy at Google and thought that the explicitness of it was
| a bit better.
| slater- wrote:
| thank you for mentioning this.
|
| i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of
| stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an
| earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care
| if i lived or died.
|
| the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated
| my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre
| Velveteen Rabbit fetish game.
|
| i loved watching how Google would continuously pat themselves
| on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and
| then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the
| company but technically weren't FTEs.
|
| it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be
| run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they
| somehow took over San Francisco.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| This isn't just google, it's every company with contractors
| and employees.
|
| Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like
| employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-
| us-findlaw-...
|
| Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
| coldtrait wrote:
| Yea I've experienced this in capital one. Some smaller non
| tech companies are chill, where there is really no
| difference in how they treat contractors and employees.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| I worked at a big insurance company for a while.
| Contractors could have their birthday celebrated, but
| cake was not permitted.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That's brutal.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| The cake was a lie ?
| allenu wrote:
| Yup, when I read the blog post, my immediate thought was,
| "Hey, this sounds just like Microsoft when I was there."
| There it was blue badge vs. non-blue badge.
|
| All the other stuff, too -- wanting to innovate but finding
| everything so slow, lots of process, feeling very pampered,
| etc.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever
| hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract
| out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing
| than being an employee
| no_wizard wrote:
| Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to
| dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a
| schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're
| _not_ an FTE.
|
| I think some folks have this illusion of software
| contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't.
| The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type
| work environment, and thats at the _better_ places.
|
| I've worked at a place where contractors were treated
| like they weren't human, basically. Worst equipment,
| forced to work in an old warehouse that barely passed
| code to be considered retrofitted for an office, people
| routine got sick out there because they were exposed to
| the elements. Not to mention, during fire season (this
| was California) they were in a building that didn't have
| a good enough air filtration system, so they were forced
| to sit in smoke all day, more or less
|
| I quit that place pretty quickly, but it was nothing
| short of terrible
| ethbr1 wrote:
| As a contractor, you are an FTE... just for a different
| (almost always much worse) company.
|
| And that arrangement exists solely so that the company
| whose work you're actually doing can fire you more easily
| or avoid legal liability.
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| I wish we could somehow get this comment more visibility.
| Especially the 1st sentence.
|
| People that complain about the plights of contractors
| need to understand the above.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the
| legal equivalent of creating a shell company.
| lmm wrote:
| The US loves its purely procedural legal distinctions.
| Shell companies are often not only legal but encouraged.
| rewmie wrote:
| What surprises me the most is how a corporation like
| Google is incapable of meeting temporary staffing needs
| internally, by shifting people already on their payroll
| around projects. It's as if they are just admitting that
| they are shit at managing projects and workloads and
| scoping work to the point that they need external help to
| plug these gaping holes in their load management.
|
| How many people do they need to pay to manage this
| contractor circus? How much effort do they waste sourcing
| contractors, tracking work assigned to them, treat
| contractors differently even interns of security
| processes, and dealing with higher attrition levels? So
| much waste.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's not legally a contractor then. As someone who has
| done contracting, both for software and in construction
| plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers
| around the legality of what makes or breaks a
| contractor...
|
| If you are setting their hours, bossing them around
| and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they
| are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United
| States.
| ponector wrote:
| How would you call people who are hired by bodyshop(IT
| service providers like Infosys, Cognizant, Epam) and then
| leased to Google?
| jasode wrote:
| _> That's not legally a contractor then. [...] If you are
| setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing
| equipment they are not a contractor they are an
| employee._
|
| There are 2 different uses of _" contractor"_:
|
| (1) contractor : official IRS tax classification of _1099
| independent contractor_
|
| (2) "contractor" : a _W-2 employee_ of a "temp agency"
| or "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" that is sent to a
| client company (such as Google) needing _contingent
| workers_. Adecco[1] is an example of a staffing company
| that sends people to Google. These temp agencies with
| workers classified as W-2 employees act as legal cover to
| "avoid repeating Microsoft lawsuits". From Google's
| perspective, these Adecco employees are "contractors".
|
| If the above working arrangement looks convoluted with
| the economic inefficiencies of paying for an extra
| middleman (the temp agencies), it is. But it cleverly
| avoids the IRS claiming, _" Hey Google, your so-called
| contractors are misclassified and should be employees!"_
| ... and Google can say, _" They already are employees!
| They're Adecco employees!"_
|
| The "1099 real contractor" is not as common as "fake-
| contractor-but-really-somebody-elses-W2-employee" ...
| because the "1099 contractors" won their lawsuit against
| Microsoft.
|
| [1] https://www.adeccousa.com/
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I'm a mostly fake contractor. I miss the good old days
| when I could fake contractor directly to companies. Now I
| have to go through a middle-man that takes a cut. I still
| make triple what I was making before, but it bothers me
| that the middle man is likely taking 30-50% off the top.
|
| These laws do not protect workers, they protect
| entrenched wealthy body shops.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the GP's point was that's how it _should_ be. If
| a company is going to -- for "legal reasons" -- not
| treat contractors the same way they treat employees, then
| they should be doing so not only in bad, exclusionary
| ways, but also in good ways, with the expected perks of
| being a contractor that FTEs don't get: freedom to set
| their own hours, work where they want, and subcontract
| out their work.
|
| But no, companies like Google want to have their cake and
| eat it too: they want a class of workers where they can
| _require_ of them more or less the exact same things that
| they require of their employees (and much more easily
| fire them), but can _give_ them a lot less, and treat
| them like a second class.
|
| That's entirely Google's choice. It does not have to be
| that way. But they've decided to create this two-class
| system for their own benefit, not for anyone else's.
|
| Also consider that these people are probably often not
| contractors in the legal sense. They're likely W-2
| employees of some sort of staffing agency, who are then
| placed at Google. Google pays the staffing agency, the
| staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary
| (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing
| agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.
| ssharp wrote:
| >> Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency
| pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than
| what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine...
| legally, anyway.
|
| The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the
| same as an FTE.
| Galacta7 wrote:
| I used to work for a temp agency (clerical, not in tech)
| and I remember once seeing what my agency was getting
| paid for me on an hourly basis. Iirc, it was something
| like 3-4x what I was getting paid hourly. It was kind of
| sickening tbh. Plus many agencies forbid temps from being
| hired away without paying an outrageously hire fee to do
| so.
|
| It felt like being an indentured servant in many ways.
| The only upside was that if you hated the place you
| worked, you could always ask to be reassigned someplace
| else. But that's the only major plus I can think of.
| bozhark wrote:
| You cannot dictate those terms of a contractor.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work
| whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and
| subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be
| more appealing than being an employee
|
| Depends on the agreement. First off, probably 99% of
| these contractors work for a contracting company, so as a
| contractor you have no say: You are an employee of
| (another) company and they'll set the rules.
|
| If you're truly independent, then sure - try to make
| whatever agreement you want with Google.
| secondcoming wrote:
| No, not really.
| ponector wrote:
| Every US company. European companies somehow have
| contractors without caste system.
|
| Obviously there are different policies for internals and
| contractors, but fruits and pizza are for everyone in the
| office.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Which is because it is extremely rude, like meanest of
| meanest, to not share food with each other. Like, of all
| mean but not illegal things you can do to contractors,
| not sharing food is probably what people consider the
| worst. Small every day things are way more provocative
| than abstract things like retirement funds or whatever.
|
| Been there. Done that. The FTEs got strawberries. I
| didn't. I don't think I have been that pissed off in my
| life. If someone had wrecked my car on purpose I'd be
| less pissed.
| sjburt wrote:
| At least with regard to 1099 vs W-2, a huge amount of
| this is due to IRS rules.
| rightbyte wrote:
| No, that's a rationalization. It is because psychopaths
| are running the place. I have never heard of an employer
| paying benefit tax on pizzas, and if they did, surely
| they can bill the consulting firm in some circle if that
| is the case.
| ponector wrote:
| I had the same two-caste system enforced in European
| office of US company. Legally it was a local company with
| parent in US. But anyway, "food is only for employees".
| Funny enough, even student who was there for 20 hours per
| week and did anything but work was allowed to eat.
|
| This is a cultural thing.
| zopa wrote:
| This is in Europe:
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/contractors-accuse-
| eur...
|
| A very similar-sounding caste-system. Europe's great and
| all but it isn't Utopia.
| ponector wrote:
| Different treatment is a thing. But I couldn't imagine
| someone is ESA will say fruits and pizza are for
| employees only. Please leave the room while your
| coworkers eat.
| whydoyoucare wrote:
| I'd like to as in what ways is Europe great? From my
| narrow point of view, most if not all successful startups
| were founded outside Europe, most countries in Western
| Europe tend to be monolithic cultures where outsiders are
| made to feel like outsiders, and many European nations
| are socialist utopias (which means they take away a HUGE
| chunk of salary as tax).
|
| (And I am asking this in a friendly tone, as a genuinely
| curious question, and not a combative one. These nuances
| get lost, so putting them down in words). Thanks.
| ponector wrote:
| It is great for living, for raising kids. For life.
|
| Taxes in Europe are huge, but comparable with taxes in
| California. Just sum all federal, state, local taxes on
| the salary, property taxes, sales taxes, health insurance
| fee, college tuition fee. Don't forget to add 25% tips to
| that. Count also small vacation, maternity leave and sick
| leave.
|
| And then compare for example with France.
|
| And not to mention you wouldn't find anywhere in EU
| thousands of homeless junkies shitting on the streets.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The difference is unions.
| collaborative wrote:
| Spain and UK also run on castes. I don't know about
| others
| blagie wrote:
| It's not the same.
|
| The Microsoft problem was * _independent*_ contractors.
| I.E. treating people as self-employed.
|
| Normal contractors are employees of a temp firm. None of
| these issues apply there.
|
| Footnote: I started my career as an IC, before I had family
| or kids. It was great. 32 hour work weeks and time (and the
| legal right) to do startups on the side. Ton of flexibility
| relative to a real job.
| szundi wrote:
| In my company I almost fired someone from HR for constantly
| forgetting how these contractor people are part of the
| team, invited to every event etc
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| In the UK at least, if you are a contractor you are
| legally not an employee.
|
| If you took any employee benefits, the tax man could
| retroactively classify you as an employee and demand a
| huge tax bill from you.
|
| So many contractors would refuse any such benefits even
| if they were offered. Some didn't care of course and took
| them anyway, but they were potentially setting themselves
| up for a huge legal and tax problem.
| dudus wrote:
| I had the same experience as a contractor for IBM.
|
| Real IBMers got all kinds of stuff. We had to pay full
| price for the GR meal.
| omoikane wrote:
| I remember Google had something like contractors need to
| pay $1 to use the gym, meaning it wasn't free so it doesn't
| count as a benefit, but the amount was clearly not
| something that was material.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Microsoft contractors while not getting the benefits
| package of an FTE, may actually make more money than the
| same role as an FTE.
|
| I have known some folks getting insurance through their
| partner's work who passed on going FTE because it would be
| a pay cut.
|
| Yes, they are not allowed access to a lot of stuff (source,
| telemetry, etc.).
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| Not at Google but I was a contractor at a hospital. All the
| employees got active shooter training. I guess the
| contractors were meant to be fodder.
| itronitron wrote:
| No doubt there are some HR/legal folks wanting to avoid the
| liability of 'training' someone on something that goes
| badly. The workaround to that is to have the training in an
| auditorium and not keep attendance on who is in the room.
| no_wizard wrote:
| or mandate the contracting entity do the training. I've
| seen that in places that tried to be equitable about the
| relationship with their contractors.
|
| Typically the business gets billed for the privilege
| though
| xwdv wrote:
| Why would they train you? It's the responsibility of your
| parent company and for all they know you've already been
| thoroughly trained for active shootings in numerous other
| companies you've worked at.
|
| You are not their problem.
| criddell wrote:
| As a hospital contractor, are you different than, say, the
| HVAC contractor that comes in to work on mechanical
| equipment?
| orangecat wrote:
| _a company that behaves this way should be run out of town_
|
| It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.
| gumby wrote:
| But remember that is because these companies were
| exploiting the use of contractors to deny them employee
| protections.
|
| True contractors won't care: they work for themselves and
| have multiple clients anyway. But these "red" people are
| employees in all but name, so that the companies can save
| money and other protections. A small slip up by Google
| (Apple/FB/MS/tons of others) and these folks get the
| protection they deserve.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Exactly. The mistake was thinking that the responsibility
| stemmed from the employeeing entity.
|
| It shouldn't.
|
| It's clearly more linked to the type and structure of
| work performed.
| bentt wrote:
| Yeah being an actual contractor/consultant should feel
| GOOD. You should not be married to a single company for
| too long. You should have a sense of freedom.
|
| There should be a simple test that if a person is working
| at only one client for too long (3 mo?) then they are to
| be converted to an employee. There's no reason for these
| middleman employers to exist except to make people
| disposable to companies. If that's the case, then they
| should be cycled in and out with a higher frequency.
| Nobody should remain a "red badge" at Google for any
| significant length of time.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's not illegal - they'd just have to provide them
| employee-like benefits which would be expensive. So it's
| just _costly_ to treat contractors too well.
| eloisant wrote:
| I think the way it works is that if they provide some
| benefits, then they would have to make them into FTE and
| give them all the benefits.
| thomasahle wrote:
| Exactly. And that's perfectly legal to do.
| resolutebat wrote:
| > _the expectation was that if i sucked up enough (
| "demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like
| some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game._
|
| Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion"
| does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the
| same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't
| interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC
| are discounted completely.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If what OP said is true, Google goes at least both ways,
| then.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >it's a caste system
|
| One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound,
| or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading
| temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular
| employees and contractors.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > One required by federal policy.
|
| Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish
| between regular employees and contractors, the contractors
| are considered regular employees.
|
| It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as
| regular employees and treat them like regular employees.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you
| bought printer ink, and then lots of people started
| getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds
| for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy
| printer ink.
|
| Of course, it could separately be the case that people
| buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons
| for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings
| about these new insults might be complicated. But if the
| goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen
| mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do
| X", I'd call that questionable policy design.
|
| Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to
| say that this regulatory situation with contractors
| wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged"
| out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe
| asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside
| the point.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you
| full time who you don't want to call an employee because
| it's cheaper not to.
|
| The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee,
| they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be
| hollowed out. If companies participate in certain
| shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap
| employees.
|
| The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to
| operate in an identical way with identical costs, just
| _meaner._ It 's not even a perverse incentive resulting
| from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only
| superficial, administrative features define an employment
| relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered
| to, the fact that you work full time completely under the
| control of someone for years on end is not sufficient.
| There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have
| ever met your "actual" employer.
|
| This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient
| outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the
| people who pay the people who work in government, it's
| ideal.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > The idea is that if you treat somebody like an
| employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed
| to be hollowed out.
|
| Other way around. The status quo was that you could treat
| a contractor like an employee in everything but pay and
| benefits (like healthcare), and they were still a
| contractor.
|
| A court ruling decreed that was no longer the case, so
| now for companies to have contractors at all they must
| draw a bright-line demarcation in perks between FTEs and
| TVCs. A line that is frequently dehumanizing, because
| dehumanizing is visible and easy to argue in a court of
| law.
|
| Anyone who predicted any other outcome was naive, and
| those of us who want this silly pageant to end should be
| agitating for a law that functionally bans contracting.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Not unlike how the GDPR resulted in banners everywhere,
| because the law stops short of banning contracting,
| companies have, of course, sought the optimal just-up-to-
| the-edge balance.
|
| The biggest two reasons it matters (i.e. two biggest
| disincentives from just hiring contractors) are
| healthcare and quarterly reports. Healthcare provision is
| very expensive, even amortized across the employees in a
| company, and TVCs get no healthcare from the client
| company. And the client company can grow and shrink TVC
| contracts all day long without having to tell
| shareholders they went through a mass hiring cycle or a
| layoff cycle.
| einpoklum wrote:
| What they should be bound to is making "temporary-but-not-
| really" staff, just staff. But for that, strong unions are
| necessary, and US unions have been very week for decades
| (especially w.r.t. rate of unionization and centralization
| of power away from rank-and-file workers).
| quantified wrote:
| Because chintzing your full-time employees by calling them
| "contractor" and denying benefits is against the law.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "Full-time" is misleading noise here; the
| employee/contractor classification distinction doesn't
| hinge on term (temp/permanent) or time base (full/part
| time). Its true that some shops only bring contractors in
| for one side of one of those divides, but that's not what
| defines the status (or what defines who can be assigned
| each status.)
| depereo wrote:
| IBM basically invented this particular kind of caste shaming
| in a business organization. Hardly their worst crime, and
| they're still allowed to operate.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Can we please just starting using the term House Elf for this
| sort of thing? It would be awesome shorthand.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| This is a case with contractors in all big companies. You are
| not a company employee. The expectation is that your employer
| will compensate you and take you out to lunch, etc, etc.
|
| But otoh you don't need to deal with performance appraisals,
| office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work,
| take the money.
| ponector wrote:
| In such companies you are not truly a contractor, but
| employee of the bodyshop company which lease you to the
| client. As the result you deal with politics in both
| companies: your employer and their client. And bodyshop has
| performance reviews as well.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Not really. A staffing co like randstadt won't give you
| perf reviews etc. You just work through them for tax
| reason. You hardly even interact with your account
| manager.
| pseg134 wrote:
| That's incredibly disingenuous, randstadt is not a body
| shop. You are basically lying.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear about that. I always went out of my way to
| make the contractors feel seen and important. I'd find their
| manager from the contracting company and write glowing
| reviews. I'd talk with them, treat them as equals, give them
| extra swag I got as an employee.
|
| To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous
| is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I worked at a small company in London and got treated the
| same way: feeling left out, excluded.
|
| It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was
| actually being done _for my own benefit_ , as I was a
| contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party
| etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an
| employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could
| not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was
| fine with it, but it did hurt initially.
|
| I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss
| had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter,
| he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as
| his own of course!)
| BMorearty wrote:
| I've worked as an employee and as a contractor in Silicon
| Valley (never at Google). While it was nice to be treated
| like an employee by some companies, my attitude was that it's
| just understood that as a contractor I'm not as much a member
| of the team as the employees are, and I'm the first to be let
| go if the money gets tight. Those were the tradeoffs of the
| flexibility I got. If contractors are the same as employees,
| why even have a distinction?
| tgma wrote:
| You were an adult when you took the job, weren't you?
|
| Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment
| too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment
| agreement is consensual.
| firecall wrote:
| It sounds truly awful.
|
| In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs.
|
| We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra
| to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They
| have to charge this by law!
| raincom wrote:
| I worked as a contractor for a decade before, I didn't find
| it demeaning when employees didn't invite me to team lunches
| or special meetings. Just charge more for your services. Do
| you care when you get paid $200 per hr, if you are invited to
| employee only meetings/lunches? Definitely not. The issue is
| about the right pay, not so much about demeaning/or that
| 'caste system' everyone invokes whenever someone sees
| unfairness.
| pcl wrote:
| In my time at Cisco, I was impressed with how well they
| integrated contractors. Wasn't like this at all.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent
| (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge
| cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets
| ponector wrote:
| According to some reports, only half of the people in
| Google are full time employee. Isn't it a large contingent
| of second-class workers?
| sangnoir wrote:
| Whatever fraction it is at Google, I'm willing to bet
| Cisco's is significantly larger, especially on "core-
| business" teams whose work is mentioned in analyst calls
| ajross wrote:
| For those unaware, these rules are pervasive in the US
| corporate world, and stem directly from Vizcaino v. Microsoft
| in 1996. See:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp
|
| Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary
| employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the
| same perks) _is construed by courts as evidence that they are
| not temporary_.
|
| So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they
| just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about
| deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or
| reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google.
|
| Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for
| exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its
| intent.
|
| > If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like
| you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give
| them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever
| claim to work for Google."
|
| Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and
| it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same
| thing happen to them.
| gumby wrote:
| > Blame the courts, basically.
|
| No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace
| protection.
| ajross wrote:
| No, it's got nothing to do with workplace protection or
| wages. The original suit was actually about participation
| in the stock purchase program (which in the mid-90's was
| extremely lucrative at MSFT!), something that no contractor
| would normally expect to get. But because the contractors
| got free food at the cafe (or whatever), they did. Or
| rather they got a settlement making up for the stock the
| courts said they should have been able to get.
|
| Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to
| salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too
| unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all
| your other benefits not related to their job."
|
| And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's
| universally enforced at every US employer large enough to
| have a legal department.
| svachalek wrote:
| The game is that the contractors are supposedly not
| working for the company that they're actually working
| for. Anything that might break that illusion puts the
| company at risk of needing to treat them as the actual
| employees that they are.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yes, it has everything to do with workplace protection
| and wages
| hughesjj wrote:
| Yup, these companies could always just hire outright
| esafak wrote:
| So if they want to trim costs and not do that it would be
| better if they hired no-one?
|
| It is the same with undocumented workers. Would it better
| if they were deported than to be denied benefits afforded
| to citizens?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision,
| for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its
| intent.
|
| Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the
| companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny
| benefits?
| ajross wrote:
| Again, to repeat: the desire in the suit (to prevent
| employers from inappropriately using temporary labor) was
| valid. The _EFFECT_ of the suit is exactly the opposite: it
| 's forced employers to performatively discriminate against
| temps in every way they can find as a way to prevent the
| kind of finding that hurt MSFT.
|
| Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor
| labor laws, but this decision broke things.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics,
| it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal
| community. MSFT was guilty of what they were accused of.
| If they don't misclassify workers, they won't lose such a
| suit.
| ajross wrote:
| > No one is forcing employers into performative
| hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate
| legal community.
|
| "The rest of the world is wrong, only I know the truth in
| this thread on a random web forum" is an unpersuasive
| frame to be arguing from. Corporate legal departments may
| be inflexible and hidebound, but they surely know this
| stuff better than you do.
|
| No, this is the way it works. If you do what MS did and
| offer unrestricted perks to your temps, they'll sue you
| and you'll lose. Period.
|
| What you're arguing amounts to "no one should hire
| temporary labor to work alongside salaried employees".
| And, OK, that's a position. But if that's what you want
| then you should make that case and not argue that somehow
| Viscaino doesn't exist, because it does.
| pseg134 wrote:
| They will only win if you are violating labor law. Why is
| that so hard for you to understand. If they hadn't
| violated labor law they would have appealed and won. And
| here you are 26 years later trying the case again on a
| "silly web forum".
| arrosenberg wrote:
| They weren't temps, read the case - average tenure, 11
| years. And the entire thing started because the IRS said
| they were dodging payroll taxes, so the common law
| employees sued for what they were rightfully owed. MSFT
| acknowledged wrongdoing and settled the case.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| I do think the net result of this wad bad.
|
| I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where
| people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even
| 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was
| usually a mix of developing competency and department having
| budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got
| immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was
| dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal
| year.
|
| The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a
| company switching treadmill.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no - the reason the issue went to court in the first place,
| was MSFT and Apple and others, not hiring (stock, health
| insurance) and then making contractors "prove themselves"
| a.k.a. extra overtime, demeaning social situations, lower
| perks etc
| ponector wrote:
| Do you really think that Google should not be blamed that in
| cutting costs they don't want to provide same benefits for
| people they lease?
|
| If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to
| provide same level of benefits.
|
| This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported
| headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of
| such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not
| treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another
| company.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Corporate feudalism
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Ah yes, the TVCs. Nothing said "We're evil" more than the
| subclass of contractors. It is almost a trope in Sci-Fi
| literature that our characters in this Utopia world discover
| there are people who are essential to the utopia and yet aren't
| "part" of the utopia.
|
| Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the
| Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil
| overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is
| established. But that's why they call it fiction right?
|
| Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired
| 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic
| problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually
| kill Google as a company, I feel sad.
| Nekhrimah wrote:
| >TVC
|
| Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.
| kyteland wrote:
| Temps, Vendors, and Contractors
| dgacmu wrote:
| Temps, Vendors, Contractors
| no_wizard wrote:
| Temporary Vendor Contractor
| nlewycky wrote:
| Temps, Vendors and Contractors.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Textured vegetable contractor
| senderista wrote:
| Same at MSFT (I know because I was on both sides).
| nineplay wrote:
| I went from full time employee to contractor at the same
| company once and it was honestly a huge relief.
|
| No awkward team lunches
|
| No useless tchotchkes
|
| No boring all hands
|
| No forced participation events like 'hackathons'.
|
| I just worked. It was great
| foota wrote:
| It was Microsoft, wasn't it? :)
| paganel wrote:
| > And report them if they ever claim to work for Google.
|
| Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about
| producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium
| to long term.
|
| In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for
| really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at
| Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the
| other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for
| their wasted intellectual potential.
| tgma wrote:
| I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of
| hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or
| at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do?
|
| Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them
| was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because
| Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.
|
| FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job
| functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge
| plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little
| margin, but a lot.
|
| If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the
| blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one
| ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar
| would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-
| badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing,
| comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A.
| Break.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| My experience as a red badge person was very good. While it is
| true that I was unable to bring my wife to lunch and I didn't
| get free massages, everything else was great.
|
| I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two
| books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and
| then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at
| Google.
|
| Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class 'end to
| end' that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one
| day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I
| would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting
| stuff. Pure joy, that one!
|
| I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to
| invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn't counting this
| against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author
| or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation
| with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian.
|
| I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a
| problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave
| early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at
| least two hours a day with no interruptions.
|
| Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a
| contractor, go for it!
| FpUser wrote:
| >" Google used to have a set of internal values they called "The
| Three Respects": respect the user...."
|
| I see, this why whenever anybody has problems with Google they
| just dial a number and get immediately connected to a caring live
| person ready to solve whatever issues user might have.
| tech234a wrote:
| "careers across the Socratic team have bloomed" nice reference to
| Bloom, which is what I assume to be the codename for the Socratic
| rewrite :)
|
| The most valuable part of Socratic to me as a user was not as
| much the fancy technology, but rather the explainers, which
| provided useful information on a variety of topics in an nice,
| brief manner that made them easy to understand. However, I never
| understood why more weren't written and they were never made
| available outside the app, such as inside Search. However, the
| explainers might be available under a Creative Commons license
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://socratic.org/principles
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent
| re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and
| the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage.
| Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
|
| I wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in
| the LLM space right now.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Google hasn't innovated on anything in over a decade. Just
| continuing to ride that search monopoly. Entire company of rest
| and vesters.
| moomin wrote:
| Except, as pointed out, a lot of the tech was literally
| developed at Google. It's like Xerox Labs all over again.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| They literally invented transformers, one of the key
| innovations that enabled this LLM boom.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Google didn't invent shit, the following people did. None
| are still with Google.
|
| * Ashish Vaswani - Founder, Stealth Startup
|
| * Noam Shazeer - Founder, Character.AI
|
| * Niki Parmar - Founder, Stealth Startup
|
| * Jakob Uszkoreit - Founder, Inceptive
|
| * Llion Jones - Founder, Sakana AI
|
| * Aidan Gomez - Founder, cohere
|
| * Lukasz Kaiser - OpenAI
|
| * Illia Polosukhin - Founder, NEAR
| crazygringo wrote:
| Then by your logic no company ever invents anything.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| You're inferring things I didn't say. Google's inaction
| on the invention and letting that entire team leave the
| company is proof they're inept.
| basiccalendar74 wrote:
| if the same invention happened at a university, no one
| would say MIT/Stanford invented transformer. We credit
| the people involved. Somehow, if it happens at a company,
| company gets most of the credit. Even when the papers and
| authors are publicly available. this is different from
| say iPhone which probably would not be developed at a
| university.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| "researched" it, yes. But they are completely unable to
| operationalize it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I used Google Bard today.
|
| Is that somehow not operationalized?
| pseg134 wrote:
| Ahh so you were our user today. How was the experience?
| gen220 wrote:
| Eh, as outsiders we're all quick to judge.
|
| OpenAI and friends are able to move quickly, but (so far)
| they're not able to translate their LLM innovations into high-
| margin revenue with any significant moat.
|
| Give it a couple years to see where all the cards settle and
| who's actually making money "with" LLMs.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm still not convinced that the best strategy isn't just to take
| the acquisition money and bail. Any sort of large corporate
| acquisition is going to lead directly into a few years of
| spending an outsized amount of time just converting code, tools,
| security rules, and processes into the parent company's
| preferences.
| ekanes wrote:
| Fair, but often there's a retention package that can be a large
| part of the acquisition offer total that could be hard to
| resist.
| jedberg wrote:
| Usually you don't get the acquisition money right away, you get
| it over a few years. They know you would just bolt if they gave
| it up front.
| croisillon wrote:
| a new post for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ ;)
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Wow. I just realized for years that I had been mistaking Socratic
| with Socrative. When Socratic got acquired I thought it was
| Socrative they bought. This explains why google never integrated
| Socrative stuff into Slides. Reading is hard.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Crew 'we're building a ship to go somewhere but we need money
| lol'
|
| Google 'we'll buy your ship and crew'
|
| Crew 'cool what do we have to do'
|
| Google 'Well we need you up to code for sailing on our ocean, so
| you need to rebuild a lot of your ship to look like our other
| ships'
|
| Crew 'ok we're done, now what'
|
| Google 'drift between our many beautiful ports'
|
| Crew 'whats the end goal'
|
| Google 'we'll forget about you, stop maintaining your ship, and
| you'll drift aimlessly on our ocean for some years until one of
| the directors scuttles your ship on a whim'
| inamberclad wrote:
| Ah, and this app isn't available on my up to date Pixel 7 Pro.
| Google software not being released for Google software, running
| on Google hardware, is no shortage of ironic to me.
| somethoughts wrote:
| From the Google side I wonder if the underlying logic of these
| types of acquisitions is actually more originating on the Google
| M&A department side.
|
| There's probably some infrastructure needed to maintain a
| corporate Google M&A team which is probably is essential at the
| size of Google, but I can imagine there is a bit of downtime in
| between large deals that are actually exponentially value
| accretive (i.e. Youtube, Nest, etc.).
|
| If the downtime between rational M&A is too long, you probably
| start having staff attrition, in fighting/restlessness, lack of
| practice - not to mention a need to justify the existence of the
| department via OKRs to the rest of the company. Hence the need
| for some smaller, slightly less rational M&A deals to get done in
| order to keep the team in a ready state.
| bradstewart wrote:
| No knowledge of Google specifically, but that M&A team is often
| part of strategy unit that's constantly looking at potential
| acquisitions to fill gaps in product offerings, valuing
| internal business units for possible sale, etc.
|
| So it's not _just_ actually executing M &A. Once the target is
| identified, the actual deal execution often falls to
| lawyers/bankers.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I'm curious about how compensation works for such internal
| M&A teams.
|
| Definitely I don't have any real insight into IBanking but as
| I understand there's usually IBanking M&A division whose
| activity (and corresponding compensation) generally revolves
| around two activities - generating pitch books to generate
| transactions and then generating transactions. I imagine for
| IBankers there's only incentives to generate transactions
| regardless of whether they are good or bad for the two
| parties actually involved in the M&A transaction. I'm not
| aware there's any activity/compensation tied to the long term
| (i.e. 10 year ROI) success of deals.
|
| It'd be smart if internal M&A divisions were held to higher
| standards - not only being measured on number of pitch books
| generated and transactions closed but also additional
| OKRs/compensation regarding the long term success of previous
| transactions for the company.
| EspressoGPT wrote:
| > Look at Google's collection of app icons and you'll see four
| colors and simple shapes.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/jlcw0w
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If you have enough money, you can do everything that doesn't
| scale; manually review every change, rewrite entire codebases,
| require 12 conversations to try one new idea, kill icons that
| don't look bland enough. Terrible ideas normally, but who cares
| if you're making money? These are the signs of a rent-seeking
| incumbent. It's not a monopoly, because other companies are doing
| the same thing, but the customers don't have much choice but to
| use them. A wonderful place to be business-wise, terrible to
| actually work for them or be their customer.
| orsenthil wrote:
| > But they'll take on significant effort on problems that do fit
| their nature, strategy, and someone's promotion goals.
|
| I had to briefly stop reading this. I realize how _someone_'s
| promotion goal plays a part in a huge team making significant
| effort on solving a problem or building one of their chat apps.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| I find this part inspiring, regarding how to "respect the
| opportunity": Practically, what this means is to
| first do the work that is given to you. But once that's
| under control, to reach out into the vast Google network,
| to learn what's being planned and invented, to coalesce a
| clear image of the future, to give it shape through docs and
| demos, to find the leaders whose goals align with this
| image, and to sell the idea as persistently as you can.
| drewg123 wrote:
| What I learned getting acquired by Google is that if your company
| is below a certain size, everyone will need to do a technical
| interview to be hired and leveled. They tell your management to
| lie to you, and tell you its just a meet and greet, with
| questions about projects you worked on, general background stuff
| etc. But its actually a full on surprise technical interview.
| (NOTE: This was true in the early-ish 2010s, not sure if it is
| still the case).
|
| Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad
| school. Then again, I'm honestly not sure if being relaxed and
| able to sleep the night before helped more than spending a few
| weeks doing interview prep would have helped.
| modeless wrote:
| Nobody lied when we were acquired in 2016. Everyone was told
| ahead of time that they would be interviewed and not everyone
| would be hired.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I hope things have changed, but then again, it could have
| been your management's decision. A friend from grad school
| came in on another acquisition as CTO of the company being
| acquired. He told me that he ignored M&A's suggestion to lie
| about the interview process to his team.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of
| grad school.
|
| So just like when changing jobs?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I could have worded it better.. I should probably have said:
| "Imagine walking into a _surprise_ technical interview 20+
| years out of grad school. "
| henry2023 wrote:
| Yeah plus a few millions in the bank because of the
| acquisition.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >Amazing things are possible at Google, if the right people care
| about them. A VP that gets it, a research team with a related
| charter, or compatibility with an org's goals. Navigating this
| mess of interests is half of a PM's job. And then you need the
| blessing of approvers like privacy, trust and safety, and infra
| capacity. It takes dozens of conversations to know if an idea is
| viable, and hundreds more to make it a reality.
|
| This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass
| kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much
| bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get
| anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half
| of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had
| to leave to get their work into production
| didip wrote:
| I don't understand authors who criticized the acquirer post
| acquisition.
|
| There is only one reason why you would sell: lots of money. You
| understand this going into the transaction. Once the company is
| acquired, it's no longer yours.
|
| And you understand very well why you sold to Google: Because they
| are so big that they can give you a lot of money. Unfortunately,
| a large company always has a lot of bureaucracy. Surely the
| author knows this.
|
| That's it. No need to criticize, you got the money, you got to
| the finished line.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Just to toss this out: I really wish huge companies like Google
| were completely prohibited from any sort of M&A activity. Buy up
| startups that might, someday, be competition. Absorb them and
| destroy their product.
|
| Sure, it's great for the people who sell their startup, but it's
| bad for the rest of the world, which might have benefited from
| the product that was assimilated into the Borg.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > which might have benefited from the product that was
| assimilated into the Borg.
|
| I think a partial solution to this is to ensure a minimum level
| of support for say 10 years. A planned and community-agreed
| roadmap, bug and security fixes. Google could afford it without
| any practical cost. Founders get the money. Consumers get a
| product for a decade.
| leros wrote:
| It's really sad seeing startups get purchased just for a core
| piece of tech or for one of their teams. And 90% of the time,
| it never goes anywhere anyway so it just ends up destroying the
| startup for no reason.
|
| On the other hand, as a big company, it's really nice letting
| the plethora of startups try various approaches and then buying
| one that is working, rather than making an attempt or two in
| house. You usually end up with better solutions for cheaper
| that way.
| esafak wrote:
| This is a bad idea if applied too broadly. Founders often build
| companies with the intention of selling them to bigger
| companies. Products that are intended to replace or complement
| one of their products.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Please don't get acquired by Google. We need to bring people
| _out_ of their ecosystem, not into it.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >And counter-intuitively, adding more people to an early-stage
| project doesn't make it go faster.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
| ctvo wrote:
| It's a mixed bag of Google's internal infrastructure is amazing,
| but the company has culture and operational challenges. Just from
| the bottom half, mostly headings:
|
| > _Most problems aren't worth Google's time, but surprising ones
| are. Most 10-50 million user problems aren't worth Google 's
| time, and don't fit their strategy. But they'll take on
| significant effort on problems that do fit their nature,
| strategy, and someone's promotion goals._
|
| A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving
| product.
|
| > _Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts._
|
| > _Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn't._
|
| > _Top heavy orgs are hard to steer._
|
| > _Technical debt is real. So is process debt._
|
| > _Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right
| game._
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Socratic isn't available on Android? I can't install it because
| it was 'made for an older version of Android?'
|
| GJ!
| aprdm wrote:
| > What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the
| smart people who could argue against anything but not for
| something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the
| uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a
| clear project to work on, but must still be retained through
| promotion-worthy made-up work.
|
| This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've
| worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against,
| but not for something.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things
| that I noticed:
|
| Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: this is
| because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty
| low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high
| up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time,
| this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy..
|
| On the other hand, it was way better for your career to be an
| acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.
|
| IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture
| (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to
| get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but
| boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational
| Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue
| dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce
| licenses).
|
| At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a
| need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives
| internal invention and development. My experience was that few of
| these succeeded in the marketplace.
|
| IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal
| distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and
| sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more
| mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their
| families, not just trying to change the world.
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