Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I learned getting acquired by Google

shreyans.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 645 posts

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#341

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

izacus wrote: post #34
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.

That's originally what I felt like reading this article, that there were good things and bad.

But if you look at the true final outcome, the post you are responding to was correct: they bought Socratic, rewrote and then relaunched it, and now Socratic is for all intents and purposes dead.

So, upon reflection, saying "there were good things and bad" feels a bit like the famous "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" joke.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#342

Post by pavel_lishin »

nitwit005 wrote: post #334
danans wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's worse than squandering money, it's squandering people's time, effort, their lives.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#343

Post by OJFord »

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…

'Caste'? I charitably assume that's not intended as it sounds, that you just meant social class, that it creates a social divide.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#344

Post by bhelkey »

OJFord wrote: post #338
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.

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…

This conversation isn't about the difference between intern and full time employee but rather the difference between contractor and full time employee.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#345

Post by atomicUpdate »

bradley13 wrote: post #260

Just to toss this out: I really wish huge companies like Google were completely prohibited from any sort of M&A activity. Buy up startups that might, someday, be competition. Absorb them and destroy their product. Sure, it's great for the people who sell their startup, but it's bad for the rest of the world, which might have benefited from the product that was assimilated into the Borg.

I never understand this sentiment. Why should the startup founders be forced to work on at their company for the "good of the world", rather than taking a payday and enjoying their own life? This seems incredibly narcissistic and unfair to them.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#346

Post by OJFord »

jalapenos wrote: post #339
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.

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

'Western Europe' or 'EU + UK' or 'G6' basically, with the additional information that the speaker's North American.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#347

Post by OJFord »

bhelkey wrote: post #344
OJFord wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This conversation isn't about the difference between intern and full time employee but rather the difference between contractor and full time employee.

It's about 'demeaning' different badges, and an intern is inherently temporary, which is the T in 'TVC'.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#348

Post by Tangurena2 »

jasode wrote: post #210
edgyquant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not legally a contractor then. As someone who has done contracting, both for software and in construction plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers around the legality of what makes or breaks a contractor… If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United States.

>That’s not legally a contractor then. [...] If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. There are 2 different uses of "contractor" : (1) contractor : official IRS tax classification of 1099 independent contractor (2) "contractor" : a W-2 employee of a "temp agency" or "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" that is sent to a client company (s…

The tax reform act of 1986 removes the safe-harbor provision for engineers and programmers. This strange sentence means that if a company hires an engineer or programmer - as an independent contractor - and the IRS later decides that this person is really an employee, then the company is liable for back taxes and probably penalties. For other professions, the "safe harbor" provision means that the company is only liable for paying the employer share of taxes going forwards - the previous stuff is handwaved away.

In effect, this scares companies so much that it is very difficult to get hired as a 1099 contractor as a programmer/engineer. The vast majority of companies will require you to be a W-2 employee of some other company (which will be the "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" or "temp agency").

One programmer was driven to fly his aircraft into an IRS building due to this issue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19crash.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#349

Post by sharadov »

ponector wrote: post #320
whydoyoucare wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

If you work in tech - earning's wise you'll still come out far ahead of Europe. Ask the Europeans working in SV.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#350

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

pseg134 wrote: post #318
ajross wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

I don't think that the parent isn't aware of that. I think the parent says that providing employee perks for your contractors _is_ violating the US labor law.
Post reply on HN