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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#141

Post by ajross »

gumby wrote: post #136
ajross wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 empl…

> Blame the courts, basically. No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#142

Post by butlike »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #32
zhivota wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#143

Post by moomin »

hipadev23 wrote: post #90
next_xibalba wrote: post #88

> 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.

Google hasn’t innovated on anything in over a decade. Just continuing to ride that search monopoly. Entire company of rest and vesters.

Except, as pointed out, a lot of the tech was literally developed at Google. It’s like Xerox Labs all over again.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#144

Post by ChuckMcM »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #79

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 meetin…

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#145

Post by okdood64 »

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.

> 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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#146

Post by Nekhrimah »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #79

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 meetin…

>TVC

Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#147

Post by itronitron »

paddez wrote: post #99
decaffjoe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common for Google offices to have gyms and pianos?!

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…

I assume the data centers get to have heated pools

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#148

Post by somethoughts »

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#149

Post by mikeyouse »

orangecat wrote: post #121
slater- wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

a company that behaves this way should be run out of town It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#150

Post by okdood64 »

hbn wrote: post #138
okdood64 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.

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 ge…

> 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.

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