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Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

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Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#151

Post by JabavuAdams »

unreal37 wrote: post #140
jaysonelliot wrote: post #132

I'm having an incredibly hard time mustering up sympathy or concern for someone who feels they were "scammed" into interviewing for a job that could come with a $2 million signing bonus. Even if it were the "golden handcuffs" situation someone posited in this thread, where the money would come over three or four years, it's a situation most people would be pleased as Punch to find themselves in. Naturally, everyone t…

I think you read a lot of things into this article that aren't there. This isn't about some entitlement to more money. The article is about deceptive recruiting practices at Google. Phone calls and emails filled with lies. Why would Google even need to lie about a potential acquisition (and name drop the founder) when they aren't even looking for one? The OP just wants the Google person to say, "Hi, I'm from Google H…

Sure, sure, but who cares? If you're going to be in business you kind of need to have a thicker skin than this. No one is making him take any offer. No real offer was even extended.

So what if it's deceptive? Either tell them that you don't want to be distracted by interview-prep, or just take the free trip to Google HQ and reject any offer that you don't agree with.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#152

Post by JabavuAdams »

potatolicious wrote: post #29
robmcm wrote: post #24

I take it the application is RoomScan ( https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/roomscan-app-that-draws-floo... ). It's bugging me that I can't understand how it works, at least not in a way that would produce accurate results in most environments (i.e. No GPS). http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/roomscan-app-iphone-floor-... Anyone have any ideas?

The accelerometer and gyroscope. The double integral of acceleration is displacement. On iPhones/iOS it's extremely accurate to the point where you can integrate displacement from it and not be far off from the real result - over short timespans/distances anyways. One of the lesser-appreciated qualities of Apple hardware (more accurately, hardware and drivers) is the quality and accuracy of their sensors.

I last tried this about 4 years ago, using only linear accelerometer data. Been meaning to try it again, for some Structure from X ideas.

EDIT> ... forgot the point ... years ago it wasn't good enough -- noticeable drift in a matter of seconds.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#153

Post by dsugarman »

abalone wrote: post #91
MCRed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no $2M. They never made a $2M offer. This wasn't even the people in Google that do acquisitions. This was a hiring manager and a HR recruiter tag teaming the guy and pretending like it was about acquisition in order to get him to take their call at a time when he was overloaded with interest from other parties.

$2M was mentioned as the max offer for these types of deals (read: acquihire). They didn't have to get to the point of making an offer; he rejected that maximum. And $2M is definitely an acquisition.

mentioning $2M as a cap for acquihires was not an offer for an acquihire and was definitely not an acquihire offer for $2M. if you come back and say $2M seems nice, you just fell for a nasty trick.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#154

Post by nostrademons »

declan wrote: post #104
cromwellian wrote: post #74

I think there's an either-or fallacy here, it could have been an attempt at an acqui-hire, but when the people talking to him tried to push it through, other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package. Consider, a single-engineer company with an interesting app and talented engineer, just how much do you expect to be acquired for? Recognize that a $1M-2M offer is about what…

Well put. Also as suggested nearby, the author of the linked article, Max Christian, fumbled the exchange and instead of a million-dollar exit ended up with... what? Instead of the claim of "I can easily get to twice £X million" -- in revenue? profit? valuation? -- it looks like the author's RoomScan app is near-moribund. RoomScan Pro, which sells for $4.99, hasn't been updated in over half a year and is listed as "o…

The right answer would've been to respond to the original message with "If you're serious, make an offer. Otherwise, I intend to continue building this business independently."

Once you get sucked into the conversation you've lost. This is business, not social chit-chat. Know what you're hoping to get out of the conversation and direct it toward getting that; if they won't oblige, end the conversation and don't waste time on it.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#155

Post by fixermark »

robmcm wrote: post #24

I take it the application is RoomScan ( https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/roomscan-app-that-draws-floo... ). It's bugging me that I can't understand how it works, at least not in a way that would produce accurate results in most environments (i.e. No GPS). http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/roomscan-app-iphone-floor-... Anyone have any ideas?

No Android version; bummer.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#156

Post by ryanSrich »

cromwellian wrote: post #74

I think there's an either-or fallacy here, it could have been an attempt at an acqui-hire, but when the people talking to him tried to push it through, other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package. Consider, a single-engineer company with an interesting app and talented engineer, just how much do you expect to be acquired for? Recognize that a $1M-2M offer is about what…

> other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package.

Then why be shady? Why not just say this? Seems very odd to beat around the bush.

"Hey, man. Your app is great and we really like but upon further review we feel like it still needs work. We'd love for you to come work for us and help integrate into product yyy"

^ That seems a hell of a lot more likely to get a bite than basically faking an acquisition.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#157

Post by cromwellian »

vidarh wrote: post #135
cromwellian wrote: post #74

I think there's an either-or fallacy here, it could have been an attempt at an acqui-hire, but when the people talking to him tried to push it through, other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package. Consider, a single-engineer company with an interesting app and talented engineer, just how much do you expect to be acquired for? Recognize that a $1M-2M offer is about what…

$2M for an acquisition on top of an employment offer vs. $1M-$2M in salary and RSU's are vastly different in value. The acquisition pathway with your numbers would be 2-3 times the value before you discount the present value of the salary and RSU's because of the additional risks associated (even assuming the acquisition amount would be similarly restricted and spread out over time). It seems like you assume that an…

Yes, they're not exactly equivalent, on the other hand, you won't necessarily end up with the same salary and RSUs through an acquisition either. They're not going to acquire you for $2M plus give you an additional $200k vesting RSUs per year.

Point being, there's nothing scammy about a deal being negotiated down, or falling through, and ending up as an employment offer instead of an acquisition, especially if they're only interested in the person, not the company, an acquisition is really just the 'shut down' cost of your business.

Deals fall through all the time and valuations can get reduced once due diligence is done. A business which looks great from the outside can look much less interesting later. And of course, during talks, the other side -- who are usually interested in investing in people -- could become less impressed with you.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#158

Post by JabavuAdams »

lukeschlather wrote: post #71
robmcm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was suggesting GPS wouldn't work with most rooms having ceilings. Wifi positioning I would imagine is highly inaccurate, which leaves the gyroscope. Judging by some screenshots and appstore comments I assume its only roughly accurate, and requires you to move your phone slowly between walls in straight lines (not via your pocket or around furniture for example). I think I would have immediately dismissed an idea li…

GPS is based on triangulating (well, trilateralating) between 3-6 fixed points in space located thousands of kilometers away. Wifi positioning is based on triangulating (trilateralating) between 3-40 fixed points within 100 meters. Assuming you can get access to the raw data, Wifi should be extremely accurate for calculating the distance between two points in space separated by less than 30 meters. (And probably pret…

What about multipath? I measure a 1/2 decrease in signal strength, is it because I got 1/sqrt(2) times farther away, or because someone opened the fridge door next to the router?

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#159

Post by SEMW »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #120
voodoomagicman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried this as well - it was definitely not as simple as taking the double integral. In my experience moving and the stopping the phone would always end up with the two accelerations not exactly canceling out so that the calculated position would drift away from the true position at a constant rate. Even applying a floor to velocity to eliminate the drift, the distances calculated for simple linear motions were…

Maybe add beeps and use them like a sonar to refine distance measurement?

5m room size / speed of sound in air = around 15ms. Unless the amount of variation in latency in the phone's speaker + microphones is much less than that -- which I suspect it isn't -- that wouldn't be particularly accurate either. (Even that aside, it's going to be rather non-trivial to get anything useful at all with a non-directional speaker in an enclosed room with several other walls, ceiling, floor, and other objects).

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#160

Post by gohrt »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #114
ahelwer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right I'll bite. How, exactly, does an engineer make $250-500k a year at Google as an engineer? What examples are there of this happening?

Write code, write tests, write docs. Ship product.

Even faster way:

Write code, Ship product, get promoted, tranfer.

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