221–230 of 645 posts
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In my time at Cisco, I was impressed with how well they integrated contractors. Wasn’t like this at all.
Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets
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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.
I found the mention of most of Google’s code stored in a mono repo to be pretty crazy. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146
They do anthropomorphize - Flutter and Golang mascots.
The Gopher is solely because of Rob Pike and his wife I assume.
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,…
Nobody lied when we were acquired in 2016. Everyone was told ahead of time that they would be interviewed and not everyone would be hired.
> 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.
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…
If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.
This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.
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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.
At least with regard to 1099 vs W-2, a huge amount of this is due to IRS rules.
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, Ne…
No knowledge of Google specifically, but that M&A team is often part of strategy unit that's constantly looking at potential acquisitions to fill gaps in product offerings, valuing internal business units for possible sale, etc. So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.
Definitely I don't have any real insight into IBanking but as I understand there's usually IBanking M&A division whose activity (and corresponding compensation) generally revolves around two activities - generating pitch books to generate transactions and then generating transactions. I imagine for IBankers there's only incentives to generate transactions regardless of whether they are good or bad for the two parties actually involved in the M&A transaction. I'm not aware there's any activity/compensation tied to the long term (i.e. 10 year ROI) success of deals.
It'd be smart if internal M&A divisions were held to higher standards - not only being measured on number of pitch books generated and transactions closed but also additional OKRs/compensation regarding the long term success of previous transactions for the company.
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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…
As a contractor, you are an FTE... just for a different (almost always much worse) company. And that arrangement exists solely so that the company whose work you're actually doing can fire you more easily or avoid legal liability.
People that complain about the plights of contractors need to understand the above.