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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#31

Post by ska »

esafak wrote: post #21
avidiax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts unless I can get engineers/developers and end users together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations can even conceive of how that might work once they are big enough.

Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#32

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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…

I agree. It really shows that at a large scale it is no longer possible to deliver new value. Google has reached that level. It can only go downhill from here. Albeit very slowly.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#34

Post by izacus »

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…

I mean... it's both? It reads like real life - good things and bad. Which is why the insight is interesting.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#36

Post by s3r3nity »

dekhn wrote: post #29

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 (a…

This tracks with what I've heard from other friends & colleagues; one data point could be an anecdote but seeing/hearing similar stories multiple times over the past decade+ creates a trend.

Google Product Management is almost meme-level bad, and is carried + boosted by such great talent in virtually 95% of other departments at the company.

As an easy litmus test, think about whether or not you could quickly name 5 Google products still around that the company released in the past 20 years that _weren't_ seeded from acquisitions.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#37

Post by leidenfrost »

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.

That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#38

Post by tsunamifury »

kbknapp wrote: post #22
marcinzm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After working at Google and Startups, I totally agree. You are much more of a cog at a startup due to the desperate need to grind out the next A/B test or customer requirement.

People WAY over glamorize startups.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#40

Post by asdfman123 »

leidenfrost wrote: post #37
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.

That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.

Yep. Another perk is that Google always seems to lease the best/coolest office real estate anywhere.

Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.

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