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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#81

Post by fidotron »

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…

I think the outside world massively underestimates the viciousness of politics in the upper echelons of Google, and how it has been that way for a very long time. (It predates Sundar ascending to CEO). I have never worked for Google, but closely enough with teams and execs in those upper regions to know how the sausage is made and it forever soured me on possibly working there (and I believe that is entirely mutual). The post acquisitions which are not quite merged into the mothership teams tend to be on the receiving end of much of the worst, and it leads to the result where the survivors are the most obnoxious.

"Licking the cookie" has to be the single most common phrase that came up, but my general sense was that both Google and FB are full of weasels, only the latter is much more honest about it. Neither is particularly desirable.

EDIT: Feel the need to qualify, there is a lot of superb technical work there on many many teams, but it is the co-ordination of that (especially fights over gatekeeping that which goes forward) which is a total mess. The resulting strategic blunders and failure to execute create huge friction with the outside world.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#82

Post by monksy »

dboreham wrote: post #61
asdfman123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Another perk is that Google always seems to lease the best/coolest office real estate anywhere. Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.

> best/coolest office real estate anywhere Hence the focus on RTO.

Sigh

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#83

Post by FpUser »

>" 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.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#84

Post by zefron1209 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #23
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…

> 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 waves to Matt Hancher

[dead]

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#85

Post by okdood64 »

xnacly wrote: post #67

How would one go about working at google as a junior fullstack developer? I wanted to work remote or onsite in germany but there seem to be no open positions

Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#86

Post by freefaler »

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…

They're just the user, not the customer. For the real customers (big ad spenders) they do provide support, account managers and SLA agreements. In their world a couple of dollars for your cloud storage isn't enough to pay for support and reading your email, browsing history and your site usage is a way to earn back the money they've put into creating and sustaining the "free" service.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#87

Post by tech234a »

“careers across the Socratic team have bloomed” nice reference to Bloom, which is what I assume to be the codename for the Socratic rewrite :)

The most valuable part of Socratic to me as a user was not as much the fancy technology, but rather the explainers, which provided useful information on a variety of topics in an nice, brief manner that made them easy to understand. However, I never understood why more weren’t written and they were never made available outside the app, such as inside Search. However, the explainers might be available under a Creative Commons license [1].

[1]: https://socratic.org/principles

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#88

Post by next_xibalba »

> 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 wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in the LLM space right now.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#89

Post by munk-a »

I'm still not convinced that the best strategy isn't just to take the acquisition money and bail. Any sort of large corporate acquisition is going to lead directly into a few years of spending an outsized amount of time just converting code, tools, security rules, and processes into the parent company's preferences.

Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google

#90

Post by hipadev23 »

next_xibalba wrote: post #88

> 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 wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in the LLM space right now.

Google hasn’t innovated on anything in over a decade. Just continuing to ride that search monopoly. Entire company of rest and vesters.
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