Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

No, he said that he believed his company had a high likelihood of becoming worth that amount, and that he did not expect their acqui-hire numbers to go that high. Also note the part where they argued with him about whether or not he had actually received a reasonably part of the X million, which indicates to me that they did not expect they'd have to pay all that much at all.

He said that against a backdrop of having done a sale at half the value he listed in the past in the same niche with a much smaller potential market. He might very well be wrong, but he gave a reasoning that is not all that unreasonable. If he didn't believe in the potential value, he presumably wouldn't be working on it.

What he complained about was the deceptive initial implication that he was talking to someone wanting to acquire the product, rather than an acqui-hire. Had the e-mail been from someone identifying themselves as a recruiter, wanting to hire him, and indicating that there would be room for talking acquisition to compensate him for giving up the business, it would have been a very different situation and presumably he'd have said no at the outset.

The section you quoted is where he points out to the recruiter that if it is an acqui-hire, presumably they do not have the budget for the kind of amounts that would make the job worth it for him to give up his company over.

There was no "generous rock-star offer". There was a deceptive approach where $2m was indicated as the maximum that might be offered for an acqui-hire, with no indication of what kind of salary he might get offered. Having dealt with Google recruiters in the past, I know how cagey they can be about salary and total offer value, and frankly in the cases I managed to get a range out of them, they were not worth continuing conversations with. There's no indication of a "generous rock-star offer" in the article.

It may not have been interesting to you, but the audience here includes a lot of people working on startups for whom this kind of situation might be relevant. Maybe not Google. Maybe the cap isn't 2mill. But I've been in similar situations before, and it sucks. It's ok to get angry at deceptive approaches even if you make good money.

(For my part I'm not surprised to see yet another story like this about Google - I have nothing but bad experiences with Google recruiters whenever they've approached me; each time I get less inclined to ever want to consider working there)

It really depends. I have an older dedicated GPS receiver that absolutely no way will receive a signal indoors. My iPhones all do a pretty good job. (FYI, you can only get signal strength on an Android phone; Apple's CoreLocation API doesn't provide that or some of the other detailed satellite data.)

You first need to identify if you are in this position, which the "experienced" author previously had some experience of.

Personally I'd use social engineering to get the information I would need to prove this and dig our all the information I needed about Googler #1 and #2. First you need the real contact details. More appropriately you need to make sure that the numbers quoted in the emails aren't throwaways.

Ideally you need access to a corporate phone directory, which these days are harder to come by as a physical book. Years ago you could easily approach the right person (smokers outside are good because it is easy to start a conversation with a smoker especially if you smoke as well) and offer them a couple of hundred dollars for the internal corporate directory phone book). Cleaners are also a good target as they have access to lots of areas.

You'd be surprised how many people will give that book over for a small amount of cash.

As a secondary bonus, once you are finished with the phone book you can sell it on to a headhunter. They pay big money for such a useful item.

These days that kind of stuff is harder but not impossible. Social networking has made it easier to get information about people and what they do, who their friends are and where they hang out. People are lazy about their privacy and that is useful if you are trying to dig up information on someone, especially easy if they have an uncommon name.

Fight dirty tricks with dirty tricks is my opinion.

Just a side not, whether you're targeting people with projects or not. The opening phrase recruiters use of "are you looking for a job" or "are you interested in a position" especially when they say they've done background work is all wrong. If I says yes to either of those I've lost the power position. Recruiters should come with reasons why you should join that position, why you should leave etc.

Normally very very restricted and these days probably requiring security clearance certainly Team leaders on some projects (and not secret squirrel ones) in BT where vetted to TS (Developed Vetting) Level.

Back when I worked in the early days of email (pre internet) on dialcom systems. I had level 6 (SYSAD) on all of Telecom Golds prime's plus Level 7 on the Billing systems and even the BT Security had mandated removal of some of the interesting commands

There where probably 15 or so people in the country that had that level of access