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Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

rsp1984

My impression from working at Google was that lack of respect for property is unfortunately part of Google's culture. I've met this mindset on many occasions, so this whole lawsuit, as well as the fact that Levandowski was allowed to rise high at the company, doesn't surprise me a bit. It's just that in this case it was one of their own engineers using it against them, for a change.

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I'm at Google too, and for what it's worth, I haven't seen that mindset at all. It sounds like you were on a team with some shitty people or something.

> lack of respect for property is unfortunately part of Google's culture

I've been at Google for more than 7 years and I would not characterize the attitude of any of my colleagues (junior or senior) in this way. If anything, it's the total opposite.

And when you say "property", you mean "intellectual property", right? Those are some pretty different things, you know ;-)

Code, content, project assets, documentation, etc...

Yes. All very different from "car, house, boat".

The meaning of the word "property" extends beyond "car, house, boat".

Sure, but certainly not to code, content, project assets, and documentation.

RMS explains the difference and the intention behind the confusion well: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

I would love to hear more about this, including any specific examples if you can give them.

- When they acquired my little project (back in 2008) my co-founder and I were told point blank that if we didn't sell to them at a price of their choosing they would just outright copy our product and steal our ideas and do it themselves and we'd get nothing. I don't even think they meant it as much as it was a divide-and-conquer negotiation tactic (which unfortunately worked since my co-founder started to panic after that point and turn against me in the following discussions). We eventually sold (at a low price, given the circumstances) but it kind of set the tone for what would follow. Great way to completely sink an acquisition right from the beginning btw.

- Soon after I started I gave a little demo of what I'd been working on before the acquisition as a side/thesis project. A team related to the one I was working in really liked it and wanted to have it and start a project with it. I was quite honored -- until I found out that the expectation was that I provide everything (code and other resources) for free, since they'd already acquired "my talent", and that would extend even to unrelated stuff that I did before the acquisition (that was literally their argument). It took me two years of explaining and negotiation until they finally paid a modest price for it.

- That not being enough I soon found out that extracting IP from fresh graduates / PhDs is actually quite common at Google. I know many examples where graduates / PhDs were asked to put in code and documentation of their prior/thesis work free of charge. Frankly I think that a lot of fresh graduates don't even realize at that point that they are being screwed out of something that is rightfully theirs (or the universitiy's -- depending on how their contracts were set up).

- The worst came out of people when the perf cycle came up. I've seen it over and over that engineers claimed they "put feature X into Y" when in reality feature X was implemented by another engineer and all they did was contribute some wiring code. Worst of all those kind of tricks not only didn't get caught, but the engineers in question often got rewarded for it.

- And of course the time Google started copying books and put them online for free without asking authors for permission or when they started leeching content off of websites and putting it next to their own ads (see [1]) that's not quite the display of the finest of manners either.

The kicker is that while all these things happened day in day out like it was no big deal most people in the company seemed to be convinced that Google operated on higher ethical standards than other companies. Permanently feeding your employees with "don't be evil" or "do the Googley thing" phrases must have made them think that that was actually the case I guess.

Needless to say I quit on the first day that my "golden handcuffs" came off and never looked back.

[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

"Do we want to build this or buy this" is a pretty typical decision at all large companies, no? Wouldn't it be supremely strange if Google acquired something without at least considering building it internally?

There's a difference between internally weighing build-vs-buy and openly threatening a pair of hackers in a negotiation with a blatant rip-off.

Fair point: I taught my daughter never to threaten at about 6 years old.

The way I see it, even at Google, small M&A deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds who have a lot more "egoistic hot shot" than "civilized decorum" about them. It seems possible they were bluffing — getting organizational buy-in and staffing a small project at Google has relatively enormous overhead. So for tiny projects (<$1M), buying is nearly always cheaper.

Best response, I imagine, would be "ok, why don't you guys figure out how much that'll cost you and we'll circle back to talk numbers again. looking forward to it!"

> The way I see it ... deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds ...

On what facts do you base this perception? If it is Uber we say "culture is set from top". This doesn't apply to Google?

Well this is clear rubbish...

Well, the FOSS movement believes all software belongs to the world, doesn't it?

No, just free software.

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