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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#21

Post by esafak »

avidiax wrote: post #11
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 u…

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#22

Post by kbknapp »

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.

I've worked in large companies (thousands of employees) and startups (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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#23

Post by mistrial9 »

moritonal wrote: post #8

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 com…

> 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

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#24

Post by gomox »

JanSt wrote: post #20
greatpostman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#25

Post by lostlogin »

avgcorrection wrote: post #7
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.

That there is a denyonym for it—and an ex-denonym even—tells you enough.

Do you mean demonym? Sorry I’m pre coffee and don’t know the word/words.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#26

Post by izacus »

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.

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#28

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#29

Post by dekhn »

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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#30

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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