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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#311

Post by pseg134 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #256
ponector wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such companies you are not truly a contractor, but employee of the bodyshop company which lease you to the client. As the result you deal with politics in both companies: your employer and their client. And bodyshop has performance reviews as well.

Not really. A staffing co like randstadt won’t give you perf reviews etc. You just work through them for tax reason. You hardly even interact with your account manager.

That’s incredibly disingenuous, randstadt is not a body shop. You are basically lying.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#312

Post by ctvo »

It's a mixed bag of Google's internal infrastructure is amazing, but the company has culture and operational challenges. Just from the bottom half, mostly headings:

> Most problems aren’t worth Google’s time, but surprising ones are. Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.

A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product.

> Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts.

> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t.

> Top heavy orgs are hard to steer.

> Technical debt is real. So is process debt.

> Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#313

Post by collaborative »

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.

Spain and UK also run on castes. I don't know about others

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#314

Post by esafak »

hughesjj wrote: post #197
gumby wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blame the courts, basically. No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.

Yup, these companies could always just hire outright

So if they want to trim costs and not do that it would be better if they hired no-one?

It is the same with undocumented workers. Would it better if they were deported than to be denied benefits afforded to citizens?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#315

Post by lmm »

JSavageOne wrote: post #258
ethbr1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the legal equivalent of creating a shell company.

The US loves its purely procedural legal distinctions. Shell companies are often not only legal but encouraged.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#316

Post by b20000 »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #58
b20000 wrote: post #41

i’ve tried reaching out to various corp dev teams at FAANGS without any results. i guess it pays to know people.

I think your success with this entirely depends on what and why you're reaching out to them, no?

no, it depends on whether you know people on the inside

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#317

Post by shadowgovt »

pessimizer wrote: post #270
oconnor663 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink. Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new in…

This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you full time who you don't want to call an employee because it's cheaper not to. The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees. The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to o…

> The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out.

Other way around. The status quo was that you could treat a contractor like an employee in everything but pay and benefits (like healthcare), and they were still a contractor.

A court ruling decreed that was no longer the case, so now for companies to have contractors at all they must draw a bright-line demarcation in perks between FTEs and TVCs. A line that is frequently dehumanizing, because dehumanizing is visible and easy to argue in a court of law.

Anyone who predicted any other outcome was naive, and those of us who want this silly pageant to end should be agitating for a law that functionally bans contracting.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#318

Post by pseg134 »

ajross wrote: post #290
arrosenberg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community. MSFT was guilty of what they were accused of. If they don't misclassify workers, they won't lose such a suit.

> No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community. "The rest of the world is wrong, only I know the truth in this thread on a random web forum" is an unpersuasive frame to be arguing from. Corporate legal departments may be inflexible and hidebound, but they surely know this stuff better than you do. No, this is the way it works. If you do what MS di…

They will only win if you are violating labor law. Why is that so hard for you to understand. If they hadn’t violated labor law they would have appealed and won. And here you are 26 years later trying the case again on a “silly web forum”.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#319

Post by firecall »

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…

It sounds truly awful.

In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs.

We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They have to charge this by law!

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#320

Post by ponector »

whydoyoucare wrote: post #288
zopa wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like to as in what ways is Europe great? From my narrow point of view, most if not all successful startups were founded outside Europe, most countries in Western Europe tend to be monolithic cultures where outsiders are made to feel like outsiders, and many European nations are socialist utopias (which means they take away a HUGE chunk of salary as tax). (And I am asking this in a friendly tone, as a genuinely cu…

It is great for living, for raising kids. For life.

Taxes in Europe are huge, but comparable with taxes in California. Just sum all federal, state, local taxes on the salary, property taxes, sales taxes, health insurance fee, college tuition fee. Don't forget to add 25% tips to that. Count also small vacation, maternity leave and sick leave.

And then compare for example with France.

And not to mention you wouldn't find anywhere in EU thousands of homeless junkies shitting on the streets.

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