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What I learned getting acquired by Google

shreyans.org

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#201

Post by orochimaaru »

slater- wrote: post #96
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…

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…

This is a case with contractors in all big companies. You are not a company employee. The expectation is that your employer will compensate you and take you out to lunch, etc, etc.

But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#202

Post by milesward »

itronitron wrote: post #147
paddez wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

eheheh solid

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#203

Post by drewg123 »

What I learned getting acquired by Google is that if your company is below a certain size, everyone will need to do a technical interview to be hired and leveled. They tell your management to lie to you, and tell you its just a meet and greet, with questions about projects you worked on, general background stuff etc. But its actually a full on surprise technical interview. (NOTE: This was true in the early-ish 2010s, not sure if it is still the case).

Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad school. Then again, I'm honestly not sure if being relaxed and able to sleep the night before helped more than spending a few weeks doing interview prep would have helped.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#204

Post by ponector »

peddling-brink wrote: post #103
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…

This isn't just google, it's every company with contractors and employees. Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.

Every US company. European companies somehow have contractors without caste system.

Obviously there are different policies for internals and contractors, but fruits and pizza are for everyone in the office.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#205

Post by s1gnp0st »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #12

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 yea…

I left early and left a lot of money on the table. If they carved out a space for people to get weird and creative, I'd come back, but otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life in the chaotic fun of startups.

Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#206

Post by milesward »

asdfman123 wrote: post #127
dilyevsky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gyms yes, pianos - only really big/fancy ones like MV, Zurich, London, etc

In my experience nearly every Google campus has a music room, and nearly all of them have at least a weighted keyboard. In the Bay Area there are a lot of acoustic pianos available. There's even a special building that has like 12 practice rooms, each with an acoustic piano.

While an employee, I stashed 6 colored "p-bone" plastic trombones in google colors in various Google Cloud offices... (tokyo has blue, green in UK, etc)

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#207

Post by ponector »

edgyquant wrote: post #192
no_wizard wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're not an FTE. I think some folks have this illusion of software contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't. The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type work environment, and thats at the better places. I've worked at a place where cont…

That’s not legally a contractor then. As someone who has done contracting, both for software and in construction plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers around the legality of what makes or breaks a contractor… If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United States.

How would you call people who are hired by bodyshop(IT service providers like Infosys, Cognizant, Epam) and then leased to Google?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#208

Post by andrewparker »

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…

Socratic by Google still exists today and is a widely beloved app based on reviews. They had to rewrite the code and infrastructure, but "killing off the app" implies that they just shut things down. That never happened.

As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#209

Post by mistrial9 »

ajross wrote: post #118
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…

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…

no - the reason the issue went to court in the first place, was MSFT and Apple and others, not hiring (stock, health insurance) and then making contractors "prove themselves" a.k.a. extra overtime, demeaning social situations, lower perks etc

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#210

Post by jasode »

edgyquant wrote: post #192
no_wizard wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're not an FTE. I think some folks have this illusion of software contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't. The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type work environment, and thats at the better places. I've worked at a place where cont…

That’s not legally a contractor then. As someone who has done contracting, both for software and in construction plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers around the legality of what makes or breaks a contractor… If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United States.

>That’s not legally a contractor then. [...] If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee.

There are 2 different uses of "contractor":

(1) contractor : official IRS tax classification of 1099 independent contractor

(2) "contractor" : a W-2 employee of a "temp agency" or "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" that is sent to a client company (such as Google) needing contingent workers. Adecco[1] is an example of a staffing company that sends people to Google. These temp agencies with workers classified as W-2 employees act as legal cover to "avoid repeating Microsoft lawsuits". From Google's perspective, these Adecco employees are "contractors".

If the above working arrangement looks convoluted with the economic inefficiencies of paying for an extra middleman (the temp agencies), it is. But it cleverly avoids the IRS claiming, "Hey Google, your so-called contractors are misclassified and should be employees!" ... and Google can say, "They already are employees! They're Adecco employees!"

The "1099 real contractor" is not as common as "fake-contractor-but-really-somebody-elses-W2-employee" ... because the "1099 contractors" won their lawsuit against Microsoft.

[1] https://www.adeccousa.com/

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