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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#271

Post by zopa »

ponector wrote: post #204
peddling-brink wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is in Europe: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/contractors-accuse-eur...

A very similar-sounding caste-system. Europe’s great and all but it isn’t Utopia.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#272

Post by autokad »

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…

its a PR piece IMO. The google way is terrible for producing products people want, which is why they always have to purchase their way into new products.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#273

Post by tgma »

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…

I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do?

Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.

FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot.

If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#274

Post by bentt »

gumby wrote: post #133
orangecat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a company that behaves this way should be run out of town It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.

But remember that is because these companies were exploiting the use of contractors to deny them employee protections. True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway. But these "red" people are employees in all but name, so that the companies can save money and other protections. A small slip up by Google (Apple/FB/MS/tons of others) and these folks get the protection they dese…

Yeah being an actual contractor/consultant should feel GOOD. You should not be married to a single company for too long. You should have a sense of freedom.

There should be a simple test that if a person is working at only one client for too long (3 mo?) then they are to be converted to an employee. There's no reason for these middleman employers to exist except to make people disposable to companies. If that's the case, then they should be cycled in and out with a higher frequency. Nobody should remain a "red badge" at Google for any significant length of time.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#275

Post by erik_seaberg »

hbn wrote: post #138
okdood64 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.

This is maybe getting offtopic but I still have no idea why the term "full stack developer" exists or why it's so widespread. Sure, if you specialize in JavaScript and you mainly work writing web UI libraries, you might mainly consider yourself a "frontend developer." Same thing for working on server frameworks that would, I guess, make you a "backend developer"? (I'd think in that case you'd probably just be into ge…

As a backend dev, I probably know which teams are calling me but not necessarily why, and I rarely have occasion to try to read their code. I can’t call myself full stack because I haven’t seriously touched frontend for a while and it changes rapidly.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#276

Post by hipadev23 »

crazygringo wrote: post #264
hipadev23 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then by your logic no company ever invents anything.

You’re inferring things I didn’t say. Google’s inaction on the invention and letting that entire team leave the company is proof they’re inept.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#277

Post by criddell »

fredsmith219 wrote: post #104
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…

Not at Google but I was a contractor at a hospital. All the employees got active shooter training. I guess the contractors were meant to be fodder.

As a hospital contractor, are you different than, say, the HVAC contractor that comes in to work on mechanical equipment?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#278

Post by ssharp »

kelnos wrote: post #251
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…

I think the GP's point was that's how it should be. If a company is going to -- for "legal reasons" -- not treat contractors the same way they treat employees, then they should be doing so not only in bad, exclusionary ways, but also in good ways, with the expected perks of being a contractor that FTEs don't get: freedom to set their own hours, work where they want, and subcontract out their work. But no, companies l…

>> Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.

The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the same as an FTE.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#279

Post by cj »

JohnFen wrote: post #9
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…

Was it an aquihire?

An acquisition of a failed startup where the purchasing company is "buying" the team of people rather than the product they built.
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