i’ve tried reaching out to various corp dev teams at FAANGS without any results. i guess it pays to know people.
What I learned getting acquired by Google
41–50 of 645 posts
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#42"When I was working at Google, we ..." Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google! Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
To the average person working at NASA feels the same. Most professional achievements are being a part of a cog and society functions by people working together as cogs to make a system function.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#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 things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
I started as someone excited to learn, make things happen, and work hard. Within a few months I realized that the team I joined was the "wrong" version and the "right" version of that team was in another department I couldn't transfer to. My manager was in denial, my team-mates were quitting rapidly, and my skip manager was incredibly toxic.
But the worst part was that doing even a simple thing was a monumental task. Something that for a startup could take an hour to pick up, turn into a PR, get review, launch and get analytics on would take 2 months at Google. You could do other stuff in parallel of course but the iteration cycles were horribly slow and the ability to get feedback almost non-existent. The team I joined had worked on their product for 6 years and only just got the most primitive feedback metrics a few months into my joining.
3 months in and I knew I had to quit. I was out of there 15 months after joining. I'm going back to the startup world on Monday and I'm actually really excited!
The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. The extra scale of Google doesn't matter to me. I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. If I get big pay I need to have earned that from excellent product development.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#44I 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…
competition isn’t a waste. for a google kind of company it’s fine.
is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely?
google happens to be big enough to have an internal market, that’s all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave? and you move on to the next project. (promo considerations aside)
different people will of course internalize it differently. some bitterly.
I'm not referring to the plethora of chat apps. Those are wasteful and demonstrative of google's failings.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#45"When I was working at Google, we ..." Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google! Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
I think it's useful for people who are founders or employees in a startup that Google (or similar BigCo) might acquire to read things like this. Also, I think there's things to be proud about working at Google. In general working there does teach a diligence of quality that is often missing in SWE in other orgs, though many companies are picking up on the same practices anyways. Personally, I found my time at Google…
People usually don’t hand the keys to their company when things are going amazing. Very first sentence:
> As we started to raise Socratic’s Series B in 2017, we quickly learned that our focus on getting usage at the expense of revenue was going to bite us
As folks here seem be eager to read between the lines how terrible it was maybe they should read between this one too
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#46I found the mention of most of Google’s code stored in a mono repo to be pretty crazy. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146
it’s not a monorepo in the git sense of monorepo. git won’t scale that way.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#47The tone of this is so different from the factual content it was really hard to read. Like a story about a machine that crushed your hand, and you wrote note to yourself that next time it would have crushed it faster had you sharpened the gears first.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#48"When I was working at Google, we ..." Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google! Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
There was a time when it was true that being a Googler meant you were pretty hot shit, but that was decades ago at this point. Not insulting any of the talented people who work there, it's just a much bigger company with 1000x more people on staff, so obviously it's not just the top, crème de la crème nerds in the world, even if many of them are there. On the other hand, I'm not sure that this article is an example o…
Ah, the classic Promotion Oriented Architecture.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#49"When I was working at Google, we ..." Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google! Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
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.
Don't agree at all. Have you worked at a startup with <10 employees? It's more like 25% cog at that level. Even at 50 employees you're at worst 50% cog.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#50I 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…
competition isn’t a waste. for a google kind of company it’s fine. is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely? google happens to be big enough to have an internal market, that’s all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave…
It is actually wasteful to build 15 note taking apps that die. Free markets limit inefficiency as individual actors can only run out of money individually unlike governments who can bankrupt everyone.
Google gets the worst of both worlds by having multiple internal projects and having management pick winners. It’s exactly the kind of waste you get from monopolies where efficiency takes a back seat to politics.