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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#241

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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…

I'm sorry to hear about that. I always went out of my way to make the contractors feel seen and important. I'd find their manager from the contracting company and write glowing reviews. I'd talk with them, treat them as equals, give them extra swag I got as an employee.

To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#242

Post by hipadev23 »

next_xibalba wrote: post #226
hipadev23 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.

Google didn't invent shit, the following people did. None are still with Google.

* Ashish Vaswani - Founder, Stealth Startup

* Noam Shazeer - Founder, Character.AI

* Niki Parmar - Founder, Stealth Startup

* Jakob Uszkoreit - Founder, Inceptive

* Llion Jones - Founder, Sakana AI

* Aidan Gomez - Founder, cohere

* Lukasz Kaiser - OpenAI

* Illia Polosukhin - Founder, NEAR

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#243

Post by goalonetwo »

next_xibalba wrote: post #226
hipadev23 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.

"researched" it, yes. But they are completely unable to operationalize it.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#244

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#245

Post by kccqzy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #139
asdfman123 wrote: post #33

The second passport thing is definitely true. When I'm abroad--even, recently, Buenos Aires--I have access to office space, free food, a gym, and even a music room where I can practice guitar and piano.

Doesn't work in China (I've heard).

Definitely did work. At least the Shanghai office before the pandemic.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#246

Post by [deleted] »

resolutebat wrote: post #131
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…

> 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. Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted complete…

[deleted]

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#247

Post by _a_a_a_ »

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…

I worked at a small company in London and got treated the same way: feeling left out, excluded.

It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially.

I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#248

Post by kccqzy »

pkilgore wrote: post #47

The tone of this is so different from the factual content it was really hard to read. Like a story about a machine that crushed your hand, and you wrote note to yourself that next time it would have crushed it faster had you sharpened the gears first.

Where did all your negativity come from? "A machine that crushed your hand?" The author clearly learned a lot, had fun, and also recognized the issues at Google and quit on their own accord. Sounds like any other job to me.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#250

Post by ren_engineer »

>Amazing things are possible at Google, if the right people care about them. A VP that gets it, a research team with a related charter, or compatibility with an org’s goals. Navigating this mess of interests is half of a PM’s job. And then you need the blessing of approvers like privacy, trust and safety, and infra capacity. It takes dozens of conversations to know if an idea is viable, and hundreds more to make it a reality.

This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production

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