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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#331

Post by sarora27 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #43

> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t. While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work. > 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…

> I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible.

This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset.

Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#332

Post by pseg134 »

crazygringo wrote: post #267
goalonetwo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used Google Bard today. Is that somehow not operationalized?

Ahh so you were our user today. How was the experience?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#333

Post by aprdm »

> What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.

This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against, but not for something.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#334

Post by nitwit005 »

danans wrote: post #80
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…

Code and infrastructure must evolve, and Google excels at building secure, scalable, performant, maintainable systems that squeeze every last bit of signal from noise. Startups don't have the resources to do that, and Google can't launch a product built in the startup way. For an example, anything/anyone that wants to access user data at Google faces an extremely high bar for access, with layers of access control, au…

Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just squandering money. You can't change that reality by praising Google's way of doing things.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#335

Post by dmitrygr »

guessmyname wrote: post #122
xnacly wrote: post #67

How would one go about working at google as a junior fullstack developer? I wanted to work remote or onsite in germany but there seem to be no open positions

Definitely DO NOT work remotely as a junior developer. Achieving the appropriate career progression requires meaningful interactions with your more experienced colleagues, which may be limited in a remote work environment. That said, here is a small list of things you’ll need to get a job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies: • Educational Background: it seems that you’re a student at https://www.dhbw.de/…

> which may be limited in a remote work environment.

That "may" is carrying a lot of weight there. Almost makes it sound like a fact, while in fact being merely an unsupported opinion.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#336

Post by jhallenworld »

A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed:

Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy..

It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.

IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses).

At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace.

IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world.

I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#337

Post by raincom »

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 as a contractor for a decade before, I didn't find it demeaning when employees didn't invite me to team lunches or special meetings. Just charge more for your services. Do you care when you get paid $200 per hr, if you are not invited to employee only meetings/lunches? Definitely not. The issue is about the right pay, not so much about demeaning/or that 'caste system' everyone invokes whenever someone sees unfairness.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#338

Post by OJFord »

peddling-brink wrote: post #103
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…

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.

Ok, but at Arm my red (intern) badge was no more 'demeaning' than my blue (permanent) badge. Not least because they only left my pocket when I needed to open a door...

(Colours from memory, I think that's right, they were certainly different anyway.)

Point is you can certainly learn not to treat contractors like employees, have badged access, etc., without having such hostility attached to it.

Edit: no! Red actually was a 'badge of shame', that was 'I forgot my badge today and had to get a spare from reception'. Anyway, it's beside the point exactly what was what. Different badges and access/treatment don't have to bleed into social treatment, they don't even have to be that visible.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#339

Post by jalapenos »

zopa wrote: post #271
ponector wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When people here say "Europe is great", which part are they referring to?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#340

Post by TheRealPomax »

peddling-brink wrote: post #103
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…

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.

There's "contractors" and then there's "branded as outsider". The red hot iron kind of branding, not the marketing kind. Red badging is what you do when you view people as numbers in a spreadsheet instead of people.
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