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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#71

Post by laidoffamazon »

JCharante wrote: post #42
goalonetwo wrote: post #3

"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.

This sounds so old school - people today don’t think NASA is an impressive or prestigious job.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#72

Post by jrockway »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #12

Having been through this myself -- but as an individual-contributor rather than some kind of Thought Leader... and seen others go through it.. Sounds about typical for Google acquires. Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior folks -- leave. I stuck around (for another 6 yea…

This sounds approximately like acquisitions I've been through, except working at Google you get paid 3x as much. There are many, many huge enterprises buying startups; few have the pay scales of Google. (The general inability to act annoys me more than comp, though, which is why I left Google to go to a startup in the first place! I really miss the days of "rollout new code on green"; you could have an idea in production in less than 5 minutes. Not so in the enterprise world.)

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#73

Post by bigmanwalter »

dilyevsky wrote: post #70
decaffjoe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gyms yes, pianos - only really big/fancy ones like MV, Zurich, London, etc

Even some smaller ones too. The Google Montreal office has an excellent music room!

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#74

Post by dekhn »

eep_social wrote: post #62
dekhn wrote: post #29

I 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…

> help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more Couldn’t disagree more, most web presences in B2C have a chat box where you can talk to someone or something on the other end. Usually they’re horrible but when they’re good they’re fucking great. I think the other problems you outline, plus the fact that google went through this process with gchat itself (anyone remember Allo?) are probably the main contri…

help-over-gchat and B2C chat are two different things.

help-over-gchat was a matching system that allowed you to either ask a question about a topic, or declare that you know about a topic, and the system would match question-askers with question-answerers, all through gChat.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#75

Post by latenightcoding »

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.

TIL google has an office in Buenos Aires, wonder how that works with the current inflation, do engineers get paid in pesos? do they have to re-adjust their salaries every few weeks?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#76

Post by laidoffamazon »

avidiax wrote: post #11
olivierduval wrote: post #2

> "At Google's scale, the external world ceases to exist and is only rarely and carefully allowed to enter their walls" OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)

The insularity isn't behind that, in my opinion. It's more that almost all of Google's features are ad-funded, and the company has chosen to make lots of (apparently) free, but poorly supported and uncertain products, rather than a smaller set of well supported products. It's a tradeoff, and Google has made a good tradeoff for both themselves (who collect more data and have more ad supply) and the majority of their u…

I think the insularity is caused by that, they literally don’t build for normal humans. They think the rest of us that don’t work at Google aren’t smart enough to understand what they do.

This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#77

Post by sebastiennight »

gomox wrote: post #24
JanSt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the client

Next up: As a human in a capitalist system As a mammal on Earth As a cell-based organism on this arm of the galaxy

As a conscious mind needing carbohydrates to sustain compute

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#78

Post by caturopath »

s3r3nity wrote: post #36
dekhn wrote: post #29

I 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…

This tracks with what I've heard from other friends & colleagues; one data point could be an anecdote but seeing/hearing similar stories multiple times over the past decade+ creates a trend. Google Product Management is almost meme-level bad, and is carried + boosted by such great talent in virtually 95% of other departments at the company. As an easy litmus test, think about whether or not you could quickly name 5 G…

What are a couple somewhat-comparable companies with really good product management?

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#79

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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 meetings they couldn't go to, or seemingly arbitrary doors they couldn't open or internal sites they couldn't see. If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google."

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#80

Post by danans »

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, auditing, approvals, and enforcement, starting at the design phase through to implementation.

At Google that's a good thing. However it would be pretty silly at a 10 person startup.

What Google isn't great at is taking risks on new product ideas (for many good and bad reasons), and that's why they often acquire companies that do that sort of thing.

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