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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#601

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #411
phyrex wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also the conclusion that meta made after hiring remotely during Covid and observing how that went

A company that stands to lose a lot of tax rebate money by not having enough asses in their chairs concluded that having more asses in chairs is better? Somebody, pinch me!

Meta are based in Menlo Park. Many senior engineers leave when they have kids because the commute is terrible. They have every incentive in the world to make remote work.

That being said, Facebook (when I was there) was a difficult place to work remotely from as it was a super in-office culture. I was essentially remote (not in the same office as most of my team) and it was very hard, so maybe it's more cultural factors that are causing the problems for them.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#602

Post by RugnirViking »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #588
RugnirViking wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you replied to that by saying > You cannot have the same outcome I explitly talked about outcome being dramatically different. Children of wealthy people who have no motivation to contribute anything to the world, learn no skills, and are lazy, should not end up on the same level as hardworking skilled children of poor parents. They should end much lower. Barriers to this include enormous inheritances, the housing ma…

> Children of wealthy people who have no motivation to contribute anything to the world, learn no skills, and are lazy, should not end up on the same level as hardworking skilled children of poor parents. They should end much lower. Barriers to this include enormous inheritances, the housing market (prices driven up enormously by hoarding and inheritance), the cost of university education, vast disparities in the qua…

I am not arguing it is morally wrong for a wealthy child to spend their wealth. I am talking about the whole of society. It's really very annoying of you to persist in strawmanning me in literally every coment. Sure I used negative words to describe an entirely hypothetical person, but the reality is that people exist on a range of productivity.

let me switch to a tangent. You seemed to be concerned with making a wealthy society, where at least some people have wealth, right?

In order to do that we have to ensure that its worthwhile for a talented person to work hard. When someone cannot become wealthy no matter how hard they work, why would they work to make anything in this world?

and so society suffers. The way to make people work to make things, is to reward them for doing that. This is an economic reality, and is demonstrable, there are many economics papers on the relationship between income inequality, gdp growth, and income mobility. Suffice to say, no matter who you are, its in your interest for there to be more mobility, and for inequality to be in a certain range (not too equal, for incentive, and not too unequal, it causes dramatic negative outcomes like crime, unrest, addiction, violence)

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#603

Post by spunker540 »

josephg wrote: post #443
xyzelement wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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 th…

> but you have to respect the machine that this is a part of. I don't respect the machine. I think it reduces innovation across our industry. The story of google acquisitions so often go this way. They start with a lot of promises - "Your product dreams will be so much bigger at Google! All the resources you need! We believe in you!". When they start at google, everyone eventually realises they need to rebuild their…

Don’t a very large majority of companies fail? Is it sadder when they fail post-acquisition rather than pre-acquisition?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#604

Post by CivBase »

sumeno wrote: post #367
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.

Getting acquired is the end goal of a huge portion of startups and the vcs funding them. If that option goes away there will probably be a lot fewer startups, which may or may not be a good thing.

> Getting acquired is the end goal of a huge portion of startups and the vcs funding them.

I often wonder if that's a good thing.

On one hand, it provides VCs with more incentive to invest in startups, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry and allows us to more easily take risks trying new things.

On the other hand, it essentially guarantees the entire economy will eventually be consolidated into a few megacorps who might not even be good at what they do. It may be possible to compete with them, but instead startups are incentivised to join them.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#605

Post by rkalla »

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.

THIS case is exactly why all these companies do this.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#606

Post by mtnGoat »

eru wrote: post #573
mtnGoat wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical American still probably doesn’t even know that the words EU and Europe aren’t interchangeable. When I lived to Austria I was appalled at how many American friends asked me about the surfing.

To be fair, Austria had a pretty decent navy that used to give the Italians a run for their money. They probably did a bit of surfing here and there, too.

They have time sweet river surfing spots too. ;)

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#607

Post by asdfman123 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #194
asdfman123 wrote: post #33

The second passport thing is definitely true. When I'm abroad--even, recently, Buenos Aires--I have access to office space, free food, a gym, and even a music room where I can practice guitar and piano.

Another great thing is you can usually find someone who is up to have fun, even if you have no social connections in a place you're travelling to. I was visiting Barcelona a few years ago and emailed the misc- alias seeing if anyone wanted to visit Montserrat with me, and 5 of us went up there and had a great day together. Best part is, it is usually cool people who say "yes" - the abject nerds aren't going to respon…

I'm afraid of this because I am an abject nerd

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#608

Post by zirak »

dgacmu wrote: post #166
decaffjoe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common for Google offices to have gyms and pianos?!

Google Pittsburgh has (or, had, I haven't been there for four years) a Theremin. Not sure if that counts. :-)

A friend who works there reported that there's currently no theremin. It seemed to have been someone's personal theremin, and they took it with them when they left.

However, it sparked an interest in having a theremin - so perhaps it'll make a return!

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#609

Post by camila45 »

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#610

Post by autokad »

autokad wrote: post #272
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…

its a PR piece IMO. The google way is terrible for producing products people want, which is why they always have to purchase their way into new products.

@gherkinnn @zumu yeah you are right, I didn't notice at first. Its almost like the Shakespeare Marc Anthony speech on JC.
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