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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#11

Post by avidiax »

olivierduval wrote: post #2

> "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...) ! ;-)

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#12

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#13

Post by cmrdporcupine »

goalonetwo wrote: post #3

"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.

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#14

Post by Domenic_S »

goalonetwo wrote: post #3

"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.

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

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#15

Post by greatpostman »

marcinzm wrote: post #4
goalonetwo wrote: post #3

"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.

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.

As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the VC firm

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#17

Post by yunohn »

goalonetwo wrote: post #3

"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.

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#18

Post by nonameiguess »

olivierduval wrote: post #2

> "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...) ! ;-)

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#20

Post by JanSt »

greatpostman wrote: post #15
marcinzm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the VC firm

As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the client
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