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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#391

Post by whatshisface »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #389
JSavageOne wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean classic example are contracting out food service in the corporate cafeteria. You contract the work to some random other company who hire people to do food service or do you want Google or whoever to start hiring cooks themselves? Janitorial staff is also a classic role for this style of employment.

That's quite different - Google contracts for a service to be provided and takes no interest in managing janitors and cooks individually. The red badgers sound like they're being given individual instructions but denied employee protection.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#392

Post by lookitsnicholas »

FpUser wrote: post #83

>" Google used to have a set of internal values they called "The Three Respects": respect the user...." I see, this why whenever anybody has problems with Google they just dial a number and get immediately connected to a caring live person ready to solve whatever issues user might have.

[flagged]

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#393

Post by xyzelement »

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…

The "TVC issue" is the flip side of Google etc culture and perks. When a company takes great care of its people, contractors seem unfortunate in contrast (since they are someone else's employees, there's no expectation of long-term investment from either side, etc.)

On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else.

Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#394

Post by jedberg »

tynorf wrote: post #378
jedberg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because later in the article he mentions the difference between Google and Amazon, and this is a huge one. At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without approval.

> At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without approval. This is not true.

Guess it depends where you work, because it was certainly true for me.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#395

Post by xyzelement »

lmm wrote: post #374
tgma wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were an adult when you took the job, weren't you? Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment agreement is consensual.

Working alongside someone with significantly better employment conditions than you is disproportionately unpleasant, to the point that working under objectively worse conditions feels better.

I don't think that's a universal thing. I would rather make 10X working for someone who makes 10X (eg, very common situation in finance) vs making 1X sitting next to someone who also makes 1X (eg, DMV)

I get what you are talking about, but it's your choice to obsess more about what the other guy's getting rather than what you are.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#396

Post by xyzelement »

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.

// Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just squandering money.

I don't see it that way at all. Everything we do with business carries risk. It's really all experimental. Nothing is a sure thing. When you acquire something, you obviously incur the risk of that thing not scaling as well as you think, or over-estimate the fit into your org. You obviously want to make good decisions when you can, but there's a limit to how perfect you can be.

People are familiar with the VC model of betting on a small percentage of runaway hits. This might be similar.

So you can look at each acquisition in isolation and say "dumb" but you have to respect the machine that this is a part of.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#397

Post by rasz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #342
nitwit005 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rewrite was like a training camp, you learn the company way of doing things on something low stakes.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#398

Post by fijiaarone »

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…

Microsoft wasn’t offering unrestricted perks to contractors, they were treating them like second class employees, paying them less, not giving them benefits or allowing time off, dictating additional rules, excluding them, and avoiding existing labor, discrimination, and tax laws — exactly the same thing they (and every other big corporation) are still doing now — with a codified fiction in place that didn’t exist previously.

Microsoft didn’t lose the lawsuit, they won a settlement — and their lawyers and lobbyists made sure it would never happen again.

Most corporations have preferred vendors and the 50% plus savings in salary and benefits has a large kickback that finds its way back to the employer.

The real issue that was skirted around in the lawsuit was that Microsoft actually owned the vendors that supplied them with contractors.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#399

Post by crdrost »

danans wrote: post #353
nitwit005 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The abandoning part is the problem, not the buying and rewriting.

Yes but that is a cultural thing. And this is a big theme at Google, and I can say from my limited personal experience working there that it probably stems from the perf process.

Look at it this way: Let Π be $PERFCOIN, the currency that is evaluated at performance review time.

- Buying the company, got some folks some Π

- Rewriting the code, got some (other) folks some Π

- Maintaining the code, was not a reliable way to gain Π

- Listening to users, interacting with and surveying them, and implementing what they wanted, was not a reliable way to gain Π.

I worked on an internal tool at Google so I didn't have to deal with the huge warnings about accessing user information,[1] yet topic (4), there was just no great way to contact your users, no great way to shadow them as they were using the product, there was a way for them to request features but obviously that would be dominated by 5-10 voices trying to use the product in ways it was never meant to be used...

Point (3) I eventually figured out how to do at Google before I left, first off you have to call it “tech debt” and THEN you need to create metrics for your tech debt and THEN you need to set an ambitious goal for “reducing tech debt metrics by 80%” and THAT is worth some Π to some of the managers reviewing your perf.[2]

1. Well, I actually did, because I needed a signoff from a privacy team to confirm that our use didn't violate Google privacy standards, which the senior members on my team understandably didn't even want to do, “can't benefit us, can only hurt us if they say we do need to protect Googlers’ privacy from other Googlers”—thankfully the voice of reason mostly prevailed, with a long tail of making sure that we used opaque UUID identifiers to refer to our projects, and not, say, GCP project IDs...

2. Worth saying, they transitioned not just to a less frequent less painful perf review process at the end of last year, but it was also a more authoritarian one, Instead of your perf being evaluated by a faceless committee of your manager’s peers, it is now assessed by your manager directly. This is a huge win for transparency and resolving the problem where (3) and (4) don't give Π , because pleasing the faceless committee involves standards that are completely unknown to you, but making your manager happy is what people do at any normal job. So this was widely internally criticized, but to my view it's actually potentially able to resolve the systemic problem, not immediately, but as culture drifts to be slightly more normal.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#400

Post by jterrys »

rightbyte wrote: post #220
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.

Which is because it is extremely rude, like meanest of meanest, to not share food with each other. Like, of all mean but not illegal things you can do to contractors, not sharing food is probably what people consider the worst. Small every day things are way more provocative than abstract things like retirement funds or whatever. Been there. Done that. The FTEs got strawberries. I didn't. I don't think I have been th…

I experienced something similar at a previous job. It was funny. I was working in a satellite office for an org based in a different country, and once in a while (minimum once a year) we'd be sent to HQ for a few weeks. Wrapping up projects, team coordination, whatever. So of course we'd eat together.

The team got a new manager when I joined, and he was told that our treatment was equal despite satellite office status because we were on the same teams coordinating on the same projects, but in different timezones.

Anyway, even though I was technically a FTE at the company, I didn't have the necessary prerequisites to pay for cafeteria food at FTE discounts. I was forced to pay contractor prices. A full extra $5 per meal. My manager was initially confused, then upset. Then we tried to talk with the cafeteria contracting company. They told him it was out of their control. So, we began investigating...eventually uncovering some internal "separate but equal" undocumented employment scheme were compensation, benefits, whatnot, unraveled into a weird caste discrimination system. The people that were pulling their weight were paid pennies while senior team members who were awaiting retirement just raked in the big bucks with benefits on contracts no longer offered, or offered through some backdoor deals before the company really expanded.

In the end, the lunch situation was solved by just stating that I was a FTE because I had the same color badge. It turns out the cashiers didn't even scan badges or anything, just asked you if you were internal and to show your badge.

But out of all the bullshit we uncovered, the food situation really broke his spirit the most.

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