What I learned getting acquired by Google
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What I learned getting acquired by Google
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Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#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...) ! ;-)
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#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.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#4"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.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#5Very nice and sneaky article. It seems like a cheerleading article at first but if you read to the end you can see the cutting criticism, delivered in a way that makes perfect sense if you've lived it, but you might even miss much of if you haven't.
I was part of a similar acquisition story and feel many of the same things, but the company was eBay so all the talk about great things wasn't as applicable. Just mostly the bad things.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#6> On the other, both Chris and I left Google to found startups, and neither the Socratic team nor Google as a whole have yet produced an AI powered tutor worthy of Google's capabilities. But a few Socratic Googlers might yet make it happen, unless they've been re-org'd
Feels a bit like the post is upbeat padding to share the real experience/criticism which is this part (ie exactly what you expect for a small focused app getting acquired by a giant directionless company)
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#7"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.
That there is a denyonym for it—and an ex-denonym even—tells you enough.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#8Is 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 company, mushed the team into the rest of Google and killed the app off.
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#9Is 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…
Was it an aquihire?
Re: What I learned getting acquired by Google
#10"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 of pride or bragging. It seems like an inventory of what's unusual about Google. It also includes some somewhat cutting remarks about its dysfunctions, e.g.:
> Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.