What I learned getting acquired by Google | Hacker News Reader

What I learned getting acquired by Google

shreyans.org

1,045 pointsshreyans611 comments

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."

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 would continuously pat themselves on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the company but technically weren't FTEs.

it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they somehow took over San Francisco.

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.

>it's a caste system

One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.

> 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.

Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted completely.

a company that behaves this way should be run out of town

It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.

Can we please just starting using the term House Elf for this sort of thing? It would be awesome shorthand.

This is a case with contractors in all big companies. You are not a company employee. The expectation is that your employer will compensate you and take you out to lunch, etc, etc.

But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.

I worked as a contractor for a decade before, I didn't find it demeaning when employees didn't invite me to team lunches or special meetings. Just charge more for your services. Do you care when you get paid $200 per hr, if you are not invited to employee only meetings/lunches? Definitely not. The issue is about the right pay, not so much about demeaning/or that 'caste system' everyone invokes whenever someone sees unfairness.

Not at Google but I was a contractor at a hospital. All the employees got active shooter training. I guess the contractors were meant to be fodder.

It sounds truly awful.

In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs.

We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They have to charge this by law!

I'm sorry to hear about that. I always went out of my way to make the contractors feel seen and important. I'd find their manager from the contracting company and write glowing reviews. I'd talk with them, treat them as equals, give them extra swag I got as an employee.

To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.

IBM basically invented this particular kind of caste shaming in a business organization. Hardly their worst crime, and they're still allowed to operate.

I worked at a small company in London and got treated the same way: feeling left out, excluded.

It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially.

I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)

Referring to it as a caste system is pretty offensive tbh. It's a distinction between different types of highly paid tech worker ... not a system of oppression.

In the UK we have IR35 laws that say contractors must be distinct from employees in various ways.

The legislation is a shitshow.

It was supposed to be a way to protect people from zero-hours contracts but ended up being a way to extort more tax from businesses.

As a result, contractors face very odd rules to ensure that if HMRC (the UK tax body) comes knocking ... everything seems legit.

This means everything is policed from how you write emails to if you pay for the Christmas team meal.

I had the same issue when I was a contractor at Allstate in the investment department. They were frightened by the Quaker Oats decision where they paid folks as contractors who "forgot" to do their own tax withholding.

This was in the days of cubes, and contractors got the ones that were two folks per cube and there were other things.

Some of us did get hired and became "real". But the concerns that led to this kind of treatment were quite real.

I've worked as an employee and as a contractor in Silicon Valley (never at Google). While it was nice to be treated like an employee by some companies, my attitude was that it's just understood that as a contractor I'm not as much a member of the team as the employees are, and I'm the first to be let go if the money gets tight. Those were the tradeoffs of the flexibility I got. If contractors are the same as employees, why even have a distinction?

The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t hire for that position. Or that position would be as competitive as any other job at Google and probably would not be the same people that are currently red badges.

There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.

You were an adult when you took the job, weren't you?

Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment agreement is consensual.

'Caste'? I charitably assume that's not intended as it sounds, that you just meant social class, that it creates a social divide.

> it's a caste system

All social institutions eventually become that.

It's inescapable.

LAWYERS and insane politicians are the reason why it is this way. Google is just working around all the BS which unfortunately leads to these bizarre behaviors.

I worked for one of the largest banks in Australia as a contractor. When I first joined, "we don't discriminate based on the employment type". The perm staff were wonderful in that regard. Then a new COO joined. He was a fucking sociopath. First we started getting locked out of various internal sites, needing to "reapply" for security reasons. Then they introduced the email badging that appended a big "(EXTERNAL!)" to your name in the address book. Then, if anyone attached anything to an email that included even one contractor as an addressee, they'd see a big WARNING! reminding them that they were potentially leaking the keys to the kingdom to us untrustworthy SOBs. Then in November a big rumour started going around that contractors were going to be "surprised" with a forced 6-week holiday (normal shutdown for contractors was 2 weeks over the break). I politely called out the COO directly on the internal Yammer, asking him to please put an end to the rumour mill and just confirm or deny whether it was true. I said the company would be within its rights to make that call but reminded him that "contractors are people too" and given the time of year, might want to know if their services weren't needed in January. I got a bunch of support from employees (and the managers I worked for) - perm and contractor alike. Many perms were embarassed and apologetic for this outcasting of contractors (way to increase morale Mr.COO). Anyway, within 24 hours, I was pulled out of a meeting and escorted out of the building. The entire Yammer forum was nuked from orbit (I still have a couple of screenshots) and I ended up in their non-existent "black book". I know this latter point because in the intervening years I would occasionally get pinged by recruiters for roles at that bank. I'd laugh and told them I was probably still in the black book and to contact so-and-so to confirm whether I'd be welcomed back. They were always surprised when they did so and were bluntly told that I was not welcome.

Since then I've been a perm at a couple of places were I had hiring responsibility and teams that included contractors and I ALWAYS made a point of treating them EXACTLY the same. I also never encountered another organisation that was as fucked in their treatment of contractors.

Blame the IRS and Microsoft. [https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...]

This is a direct consequence of the infamous Microsoft case. Contractors used to be treated much better, similar to employees. Then some Microsoft contractors sued for shares worth a considerable amount. Their argument was that they were "treated like employees", and therefore deserve the same things as employees. They won the lawsuit.

Now contractors have to be treated much worse because there is precedent for legal consequences if you treat them as well as your employees. It's just business, it's certainly not good for morale or productivity to create a class divide, but not creating that divide incurs serious liabilities.

My experience as a red badge person was very good. While it is true that I was unable to bring my wife to lunch and I didn’t get free massages, everything else was great.

I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at Google.

Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class ‘end to end’ that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting stuff. Pure joy, that one!

I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn’t counting this against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian.

I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at least two hours a day with no interruptions.

Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a contractor, go for it!

Ah yes, the TVCs. Nothing said "We're evil" more than the subclass of contractors. It is almost a trope in Sci-Fi literature that our characters in this Utopia world discover there are people who are essential to the utopia and yet aren't "part" of the utopia.

Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right?

Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.

Serious Morloch/Eloi vibes.

Kind of the reason I prefer mid-market tech companies. More likely to treat "contractors" as equals. The place I'm at now they're indistinguishable internally from regular employees, they're just paid by another company.

For those unaware, these rules are pervasive in the US corporate world, and stem directly from Vizcaino v. Microsoft in 1996. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp

Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary.

So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google.

Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent.

> 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."

Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.

> Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent.

Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny benefits?

Do you really think that Google should not be blamed that in cutting costs they don't want to provide same benefits for people they lease?

If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.

This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.

> Blame the courts, basically.

No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.

I do think the net result of this wad bad.

I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was usually a mix of developing competency and department having budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal year.

The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a company switching treadmill.

no - the reason the issue went to court in the first place, was MSFT and Apple and others, not hiring (stock, health insurance) and then making contractors "prove themselves" a.k.a. extra overtime, demeaning social situations, lower perks etc

That's how it works with contractors in most large organisations. The other side of the coin is that they're usually rewarded better than employees are, on the basis that they can be fired at any time with no notice.

In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.

I've never seen a contractor have better salary/pay unless they're a fully independent subject matter expert and have no interest in being employed. I've hired a quite a few contractors and there is usually two cases, I need workers, or expertise that is highly limited.

Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting.

It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.

The staffing agencies benefits are always subpar and more expensive.

And you’re right about the difference between “staff augmentation” contractors pay and SMEs. I just went into detail in a sibling reply.

But to add on, the company I ended up being a tech lead at with a full time position. I came in at $65/hour. I only took the job because I saw a chance to eventually wiggle my way into a tech lead role and I wanted to be on the ground floor of a green field project. I ended up working so much overtime - and getting paid for it - I made out pretty well compared to the local market. I got on my wife’s health insurance.

I also mentioned that now that I am a SME on a niche but growing AWS service [1], I am able to charge $135 an hour for a side project and that’s a discount.

[1] I beta tested the APIs while working at AWS and I was a major contributor on a popular open source official “AWS Solution” that’s built on top of it.

Not necessarily. I was a tech lead where I could only hire contractors. The run of the mill CRUD staff augmentation contractors were making about $65 and the contracting company was billing $100 a hour for them with no health care benefits, no PTO, no 401K match.

On the other hand, the “cloud consultants”, who were just old school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200 an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners.

Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour and even that was low. I did it because I found the project interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend.

FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.

I’m don’t think it’s true at companies like Google that contractors get paid better. My impression was they get a similar salary but no equity and worse benefits. I’m assuming we’re talking about the TVCs who basically act like ordinary contributors on a team. Not some specialist consultant, I don’t know about them.

I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC tenure.

Most large orgs don't have the perks of Goog, Meta. Amazon and Cisco don't have free food, massages, etc. so it doesn't matter contractor vs. fulltime.

It very much matters - paid time off, benefits, employer paid FICA taxes (if you are 1099). All that is just money and if you are an SME you can negotiate for a high enough hourly rate to make up the difference.

But if you are just doing staff augmentation, probably not.

I will take my 66% better salary any day, than becoming an FTE.

I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do?

Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.

FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot.

If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.

I would say the exact same thing as the author, and I was a regular-E-badger.

I went from full time employee to contractor at the same company once and it was honestly a huge relief.

No awkward team lunches

No useless tchotchkes

No boring all hands

No forced participation events like 'hackathons'.

I just worked. It was great

It was Microsoft, wasn't it? :)

Microsoft never had forced participation in hackathons. It was generally encouraged but at most maybe 25% of FT engineers participated.

While FB had the same badge color for TVCs and FTEs, everything else was exactly the same. I later saw the red/white badge dichotomy at Google and thought that the explicitness of it was a bit better.

In my time at Cisco, I was impressed with how well they integrated contractors. Wasn’t like this at all.

Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets

According to some reports, only half of the people in Google are full time employee. Isn't it a large contingent of second-class workers?

Cisco didn't need contractors they just shifted their workforce offshore wholesale.

Source: former Cisco.

>TVC

Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.

Textured vegetable contractor

Some of my favorite contractors :)

The vegan effort option.

Temps, Vendors, and Contractors

Temporary Vendor Contractor

Temps, Vendors and Contractors.

Temps, Vendors, Contractors

The "TVC issue" is the flip side of Google etc culture and perks. When a company takes great care of its people, contractors seem unfortunate in contrast (since they are someone else's employees, there's no expectation of long-term investment from either side, etc.)

On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else.

Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.

> And report them if they ever claim to work for Google.

Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term.

In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.

> 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."

While extending it to things as small as a team lunch is going a bit far, it's understandable that they don't want to open up a slippery slope of it looking too much like an employment relationship. In many European countries that can result in false self-employment and get both the company and the contractor in legal trouble.

> that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee

Blame government regulations in this case, probably? It seems implausibly evil that they would be that anal about things just to preserve the in-group club status. But, if it's about employee vs contractor distinction for regulations, it makes total sense (well, not at a global/system level, but the behavior in isolation).

Corporate feudalism

Same at MSFT (I know because I was on both sides).

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 company, mushed the team into the rest of Google and killed the app off.

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.

Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just squandering money. You can't change that reality by praising Google's way of doing things.

I mean... it's both? It reads like real life - good things and bad. Which is why the insight is interesting.

To me it reads more like someone with a positive disposition (or someone who has founded a start up and doesn't want to burn bridges) laying out the problems without saying they are problems. I mean come on - the upsides: we "merged cultures", "our app lives on", "careers have bloomed" versus downsides "we quit", and "we don't think we actually delivered what we wanted to". But it's ok because after everyone who cared about the product quit, maybe someone else will might make it happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You could change none of the facts of this blog and write it as an aggressive rant about how Google murdered their startup, forced them to re-write the entire thing, stopped them shipping by being a bureaucratic nightmare, and the big take away is you can succeed at google if you "play the right game" if you know what I mean. It's ... not positive.

That's originally what I felt like reading this article, that there were good things and bad.

But if you look at the true final outcome, the post you are responding to was correct: they bought Socratic, rewrote and then relaunched it, and now Socratic is for all intents and purposes dead.

So, upon reflection, saying "there were good things and bad" feels a bit like the famous "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" joke.

Nuance is an underappreciated form.

The founders got money, a line in their résumé (sold a startup to Google), and the experience of working at Google. They didn't stay very long.

I'd be pretty happy.

Socratic by Google still exists today and is a widely beloved app based on reviews. They had to rewrite the code and infrastructure, but "killing off the app" implies that they just shut things down. That never happened.

As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.

> This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android.

Not "killed off" exactly, no.

When I was at Google 2006-2009, that was how all acquisitions except YouTube were handled.

I've heard that's become better, but maybe not.

Google's search & ads billions keep raining from the sky, so killing acquired product isn't a big problem.

I was at Google from 2015-2023 and not really. Even large acquisitions like Apigee, Looker and Fitbit were multi-year "integrations" fraught with all sorts of pain & suffering. Smaller acquisitions like Stratozone, Orbitera, AppSheet, etc all follow the Socratic path: acquire, rewrite, halfassedly integrate, create confusion and anxiety.

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.

After reading this, I was left with the impression Google is full of under-utilized talent, has poor product vision and has systems in place that discourage innovation and risk taking.

So if this is a PR piece, then it is not a great one.

It is snark behind a thin veil of praise. The only way I can read it. It might by my confirmation bias talking.

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

Was it an aquihire?

I know almost nothing (I read the article but that's all) but my gut tells me it could have been a "scoop this potential competitor up early" as there was so much overlap between Socratic and what Google research is doing. Could also have been a "we need a product to justify this research work, and Socratic is a good one." Or it could just straight be an acquihire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A 10 person startup without a business model? And all the tech got thrown out. Clearly an acquihire.

Normally I'd consider it an acquihire when a company acquires a startup / smaller company and immediately announces the discontinuation of the product. Less so if there's an attempt to continue developing the product, even if it eventually gets shut down.

That's an interesting word. I assume it's when a large company buys your startup just to have access to the talent, without much regard for the startup's product? What sorts of offers do they make to the founders?

An acquisition of a failed startup where the purchasing company is "buying" the team of people rather than the product they built.

Aquire a company not for the product, but to hire specific people working there. Like experts in a field. For instance if you have a competing product and want to build something using expertise or if you think the technology can be applied elsewhere.

It sounds like some of the signals Socratic was detecting got rolled into Google's knowledge graph

> 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

What I learned getting acquired by Google is that if your company is below a certain size, everyone will need to do a technical interview to be hired and leveled. They tell your management to lie to you, and tell you its just a meet and greet, with questions about projects you worked on, general background stuff etc. But its actually a full on surprise technical interview. (NOTE: This was true in the early-ish 2010s, not sure if it is still the case).

Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad school. Then again, I'm honestly not sure if being relaxed and able to sleep the night before helped more than spending a few weeks doing interview prep would have helped.

Nobody lied when we were acquired in 2016. Everyone was told ahead of time that they would be interviewed and not everyone would be hired.

I hope things have changed, but then again, it could have been your management's decision. A friend from grad school came in on another acquisition as CTO of the company being acquired. He told me that he ignored M&A's suggestion to lie about the interview process to his team.

For those they don’t hire, do they give a severance or other package for comp?

>Imagine walking into a technical interview 20+ years out of grad school.

So just like when changing jobs?

I could have worded it better.. I should probably have said: "Imagine walking into a surprise technical interview 20+ years out of grad school."

Well, except that they just exterminated your former employer and all your stock options and compensation bonuses are tied to passing that gauntlet?

It's more like getting a layoff and then offered an interview for a new job.

For me, we didn't have to do the interview. But there were a lot of other strings attached, most drastic being having to move cities (or have a 2-hour-each-way commute).

The money makes it worthwhile, but it's not a happy happy joy joy moment.

I also got a peavish Google recruiter all pissed at me about the fact that we were sharing notes with each other about the offers they were sending us, which I thought was pretty funny.

Yeah plus a few millions in the bank because of the acquisition.

Wow crazy, so basically it's an underhanded layoff.

it doesn’t depend on the size of the company, but the kind of acquisition and the terms of the acquisition

on acquihires you can have a full interview

I went on this meet and greet and it was more of a googlyness type thing just to check you have a pulse, others didn’t at all, all the team was hired, my only guess it could affected leveling and price

The company I worked for was acquired with no interviews for approx 100 people. Lots of people were surprised about that when we tell them.

The company I worked for was the same, But it's a curse though. Always got the feeling of being looked down on for not running that gauntlet. If you're being assimilated into the Mountain View Googleplex -- fine, it's so massive nobody will care or notice. But being borged into a small site everyone will know and there were snotty people who openly grumbled about it.

Soooo much of the Ego of Google engineering -- at least in the past -- is built around their sense of superiority of having made it through that interview and being selected as one of the "best engineers in the world."

Gave me heightened impostor syndrome for 10 years.

I think one is better off getting the interview.

>Amazing things are possible at Google, if the right people care about them. A VP that gets it, a research team with a related charter, or compatibility with an org’s goals. Navigating this mess of interests is half of a PM’s job. And then you need the blessing of approvers like privacy, trust and safety, and infra capacity. It takes dozens of conversations to know if an idea is viable, and hundreds more to make it a reality.

This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production

I work at Google and just today I had a conversation with a director that made me realize even he cannot force anything that doesn’t make “promo” happen: the culture is rotten to the core in terms of incentives. If you want to get anything done fast “at” Google, you pretty much have to quit and do it and then get re-acquired.

aka, The Cisco Way

Hat tip there. I only learned about their "spin-in" (not "spin-out") start-up culture recently. If anything, it seems like management genius to realise they will miss many of the best ideas if they lock their best talent into mediocre roles.

I had the pleasure of working with Shreyans as a SE at Maven last year and it's funny to see how this blog post explains some of the experience working together. There was a strong aversion to meetings and process and big emphasis on empowering the employees to make judgement calls and just reach out for comment if they're unsure. Those things just made sense to me so I didn't question it but coming so recently from Google might have made those aversions stronger. At the end of the day, I enjoyed that way of working (which is probably much harder to do with bigger teams) and I hope to bring it to the next place I go.

I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an urban studies masters (https://www.4cities.eu/) but it wasn't an easy decision. I hope we work together again in the future. If anyone is looking to work at an education startup check out maven.com for sure.

> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t. While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work.

> 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 started as someone excited to learn, make things happen, and work hard. Within a few months I realized that the team I joined was the "wrong" version and the "right" version of that team was in another department I couldn't transfer to. My manager was in denial, my team-mates were quitting rapidly, and my skip manager was incredibly toxic.

But the worst part was that doing even a simple thing was a monumental task. Something that for a startup could take an hour to pick up, turn into a PR, get review, launch and get analytics on would take 2 months at Google. You could do other stuff in parallel of course but the iteration cycles were horribly slow and the ability to get feedback almost non-existent. The team I joined had worked on their product for 6 years and only just got the most primitive feedback metrics a few months into my joining.

3 months in and I knew I had to quit. I was out of there 15 months after joining. I'm going back to the startup world on Monday and I'm actually really excited!

The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. The extra scale of Google doesn't matter to me. I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. If I get big pay I need to have earned that from excellent product development.

> I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible.

This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset.

Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity

> The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me.

> I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed.

> I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible.

> If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0.

Big respect for you. I quit programming as a whole because I felt I would never find people with your mindset in this field. The thought depressed me enough to choose another career.

Where did you work?

Never actually worked. When I was a teenager I went to a trade school to try it out and see what it was like to work professionally as a programmer. Ended up choosing something else and keeping software development as a hobby. It's been nice, perhaps not as profitable but nice.

The tone of this is so different from the factual content it was really hard to read. Like a story about a machine that crushed your hand, and you wrote note to yourself that next time it would have crushed it faster had you sharpened the gears first.

Where did all your negativity come from? "A machine that crushed your hand?" The author clearly learned a lot, had fun, and also recognized the issues at Google and quit on their own accord. Sounds like any other job to me.

Not who you replied to but often even if significant parts of your job is shitty, if the fundamentals (incl having a good boss who bats for you) are in place, you'd speak favorably/with fond nostalgia. This didn't sound anything like that.

when building industrial tools, one builds them to do their job as painlessly as possible, so I could totally see writing a note to self that the gears should be sharpened.

Do not look into laser with remaining eye.

This made me laugh so hard! I really want to know what lead up to this comment and was some llm involved?

In my experience, LLM's are bad at generating concise & witty jokes. They can randomly generate but that requires the the prompter to be a funny person to begin with.

He was being sarcastic because the article isn't similar to comparable to "a machine crushed my hand" at all.

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.

It's funny because later in the article he mentions the difference between Google and Amazon, and this is a huge one. At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without approval.

When I went to other sites I just had to file a ticket and that was it. If something were to be approved, it was automatic, unless it was a restricted office/building. Maybe it depends on the job role.

Not too unusual, other companies I've worked were very similar.

I think there's a pretty big difference between filing a ticket to open the building next door and having free workspaces around the world you don't have to do paperwork to use.

> At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without approval.

This is not true.

This is absolutely true and has been for years. You’re granted access to the minimum number of buildings required for your job function, and can file a ticket for temporary access grants to other buildings based on need.

Guess it depends where you work, because it was certainly true for me.

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 respond to that kind of email.

I suppose being complicit in the largest government sponsored spying program on the planet has its perks.

yawn

That's because the abject nerds are busy creating value for the company while the "cool people" plan their holiday during work time.

Nope, not even close to true in my experience. Almost all of the high performers I know have a huge social network they can tap into and you can't finger them as SWEs from a mile away.

> the abject nerds

I will also call you out on this. The word is very strongly negative, so I think it's inappropriate to use in this context.

Well, that's how I feel about some of my coworkers. I know it is a strong word, and I think it is appropriate. For the most part, they're not bad people, but they just have an extremely limited outlook on life(from my perspective).

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

It's almost literally a sidekick passport. If you fly into a city with a major Google office and you say you are there for work and you work at Google, the customs agent might ask to see your badge.

I know you guys are being told you are special but this has nothing to do with Google. I Had the same thing happen to me for different companies.

Being told I'm special is an important part of my annual compensation.

It has nothing to do with it being a passport, when you tell a custom agent you come for work and you work for company X they can ask for some proof. Nothing more to it.

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?

About 50% of my comp as a Canadian was in the form of RSUs which were in USD, so there's that. But of course, the amount you're given is indexed (in the past quite generously, but less so over time) against local compensation rates.

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

A few of the offices even have a pool (Google Dublin, and soon Google London)

Because the buildings are usually located in very central city locations - I've often used the offices as a way to kill time til' check-in opens for hotels after a long-haul flight (grab food, caffeinate, have a shower, etc)

Recently I took a night train between Stockholm and Copenhagen.

Showered in the Stockholm office, walked 5 minutes to the train station, slept, woke up in Copenhagen, grabbed a hearty breakfast in the CPH office.

It's a little perk that is honestly vastly underestimated

On the topic of the perk of just showing up to an office and being able to get in, I completely agree that it's underestimated. I visited the Zurich office once and my flight got in at some terrible hour after a bad Frankfurt connection (aren't they all though?). I couldn't get in to my corp housing, but I just rolled up to the office with my suitcase and walked around giving myself the tour while the buildings were ghost towns. I think I dozed off in some room that had an aquarium.

Likewise, one time I was on vacation in Hong Kong and just waltzed into the office and hung around for a little while. I actually ran into a friend of mine in the office who I had no idea lived in Hong Kong or worked for Google at the time.

YouTube's San Bruno office (well, the Gap building at 901 Cherry) has a gym and pool. It's also bright, airy, and did I mention bright? So much natural lighting, it would be a shame if you had a super glossy monitor and no way to block glare 4 hours out of the day.

I got a tour one time of some of the less-visible infrastructure of the building. There is a huge concrete slab under the building that acts as a heat bank, and somewhere there are windcatchers (I don't see them in aerial photographs) which funnel air over the concrete before it goes into the interior. This keeps the inside cool in hot weather and warm in cool weather, without an active air conditioning system.

There are pictures and diagrams of some of the above features here https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects/901-cherry-offices/ .

It's also nestled in the 280/380 interchange, so my commute very often took me up and back down on 280, which is probably my favorite stretch of road in the world. I grew up in the south bay, a stone's throw from 280, and driving up and down 280 has always been relaxing for me, even when there's (somehow) traffic.

In retrospect, I didn't fully appreciate that office. Thanks for the 5-minute reminisce.

I assume the data centers get to have heated pools

That's interesting to hear that it is so relaxed in Europe. I work in EU at a multinational with offices all around the world, and within Europe, we are not legally allowed to enter the offices in other countries. The reason is simply that if there is a labor/work inspection (sorry, don't know the exact English expression) they can get a fine if I do not have a work order for a project abroad.

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

In my experience nearly every Google campus has a music room, and nearly all of them have at least a weighted keyboard.

In the Bay Area there are a lot of acoustic pianos available. There's even a special building that has like 12 practice rooms, each with an acoustic piano.

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

Google Pittsburgh has a music room. We're definitely a smaller office.

The HQ has a halfpipe (https://ocramps.com/blogs/builds-installations/google-headqu...)

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

In school, I did a research project on grand pianos in the lobbies of tech companies. Google was one of the few whose public relations refused to comment, but a helpful engineer I pulled out of the phone tree did ask around the MV office with my set of questions.

Often just an electric keyboard but yeah

That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.

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.

I worked from the Buenos Aires office, as part of my week long trip there. I was new so I didn’t have a million PTO days. The office space was beautiful, centrally located, with incredible food, and genial colleagues. We watched a World Cup match together. Same deal in Istanbul.

Doesn't work in China (I've heard).

Should be fine (although your ability to access work materials might be limited). Visiting the Shanghai office is a decent alternative to the tower's paid observation deck (similar situation at the Taipei 101 office)

Definitely did work. At least the Shanghai office before the pandemic.

Worked for me. Maybe someone filled a ticket to make it happen, I sure didn't have to do anything.

I've heard blockages in the Beijing Wudaokou office, but that was before I started working at Google (I left China in 2016 and started at google in 2020, so maybe a big gap). Maybe it changed? (or my info was wrong)

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 years) after my 3-4 years of golden handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.

Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.

In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ... though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly without us.

2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a while.

It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.

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.)

I left early and left a lot of money on the table. If they carved out a space for people to get weird and creative, I'd come back, but otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life in the chaotic fun of startups.

Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.

A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed:

Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy..

It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.

IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses).

At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace.

IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world.

I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.

> 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)

Right. If Google had taken SWE/SREs, say, and had them rewrite Socratic to fit Google infra while it had allowed Socratic engineers to think about incremental product enhancements that leveraged Google’s capabilities (as opposed to putting them full time on the rewrite), a far more optimal outcome that probably wouldn’t have led to them leaving.

One takeaway is that if you get acquired by Google, you should try to advocate for such an arrangement. Having worked for a firm that was acquired, it was incredible and devastating imo how much talent was squandered by these endless rewrites. Each IC’s decision to do that, to be fair — the money or something else wins for them. But just a bummer to see.

> "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 users (who get a wide variety of "free" services), but it has downsides, of course.

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.

Maybe it /was/ a good tradeoff for users but the past few years I think people have become very disillusioned with Google. If anyone still gets excited about a new Google service being announced it's either because they're new to the Google ecosystem and haven't yet experienced year-after-year of having products and services you rely on repeatedly cancelled out from under you and replaced with something noticeably worse, or they're a masochist.

But other big companies are the same. Engineers just don't communicate with users; that's reserved for product managers. The most you will get is a bug report.

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.

I used to think about this when I was a kid. If 5 billion people pray to God at the same time and ask for mutually exclusive things, how can he possibly answer or even listen to them all? And it's now up to 8 billion and the problem isn't getting any easier.

I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but their users have not yet accepted that.

Or maybe there just shouldn't exist a company so large if it's clear that it won't be able to listen to its users?

Im pretty sure that if there were only one single human in the world the success ratio of the communication with God would be just as bleak, and the situation there is more like a company that after digging a tiny bit you discover only exists on paper.

Or maybe god just is really good at making use of caching and has cloudflare tuned in properly?

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.

Maybe we'll have fewer it's Uber-but-for-washing-your-underwear companies then. And maybe only really good ideas will actually get to the level of obtaining VC funding for development. That's not a bad thing. VCs for the last 15 years were throwing ideas at a wall, when one stuck, 10 other VC componies copied the idea....

> 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.

This is a bad idea if applied too broadly. Founders often build companies with the intention of selling them to bigger companies. Products that are intended to replace or complement one of the acquirer's products.

If most of them die or are shut down by the acquirer, why should society at large care?

I agree. Monopolies are great for the monopoly, but inevitably cause less competition, and thus less innovation.

It's really weird watching hackers defend the idea of monopolies like Google now, at the expense of FOSS. It makes me wonder if Microsoft had been spending more money publicly buying startups back in the 90's if hackers would have defended them then.

It's really sad seeing startups get purchased just for a core piece of tech or for one of their teams. And 90% of the time, it never goes anywhere anyway so it just ends up destroying the startup for no reason.

On the other hand, as a big company, it's really nice letting the plethora of startups try various approaches and then buying one that is working, rather than making an attempt or two in house. You usually end up with better solutions for cheaper that way.

> which might have benefited from the product that was assimilated into the Borg.

I think a partial solution to this is to ensure a minimum level of support for say 10 years. A planned and community-agreed roadmap, bug and security fixes. Google could afford it without any practical cost. Founders get the money. Consumers get a product for a decade.

I never understand this sentiment. Why should the startup founders be forced to work on at their company for the "good of the world", rather than taking a payday and enjoying their own life? This seems incredibly narcissistic and unfair to them.

From the Google side I wonder if the underlying logic of these types of acquisitions is actually more originating on the Google M&A department side.

There's probably some infrastructure needed to maintain a corporate Google M&A team which is probably is essential at the size of Google, but I can imagine there is a bit of downtime in between large deals that are actually exponentially value accretive (i.e. Youtube, Nest, etc.).

If the downtime between rational M&A is too long, you probably start having staff attrition, in fighting/restlessness, lack of practice - not to mention a need to justify the existence of the department via OKRs to the rest of the company. Hence the need for some smaller, slightly less rational M&A deals to get done in order to keep the team in a ready state.

No knowledge of Google specifically, but that M&A team is often part of strategy unit that's constantly looking at potential acquisitions to fill gaps in product offerings, valuing internal business units for possible sale, etc.

So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.

I'm curious about how compensation works for such internal M&A teams.

Definitely I don't have any real insight into IBanking but as I understand there's usually IBanking M&A division whose activity (and corresponding compensation) generally revolves around two activities - generating pitch books to generate transactions and then generating transactions. I imagine for IBankers there's only incentives to generate transactions regardless of whether they are good or bad for the two parties actually involved in the M&A transaction. I'm not aware there's any activity/compensation tied to the long term (i.e. 10 year ROI) success of deals.

It'd be smart if internal M&A divisions were held to higher standards - not only being measured on number of pitch books generated and transactions closed but also additional OKRs/compensation regarding the long term success of previous transactions for the company.

I don't understand authors who criticized the acquirer post acquisition.

There is only one reason why you would sell: lots of money. You understand this going into the transaction. Once the company is acquired, it's no longer yours.

And you understand very well why you sold to Google: Because they are so big that they can give you a lot of money. Unfortunately, a large company always has a lot of bureaucracy. Surely the author knows this.

That's it. No need to criticize, you got the money, you got to the finished line.

It’s because unless you’re pretty savvy and skeptical (albeit in a sophisticated way), your counterparts at Google are going to feed you all kinds of incredible, fanciful ideas about how things are going to be that don’t typically come to fruition.

It’s hard to develop savviness and a sophisticated sort of skepticism (ie a kind that doesn’t merely border on cynicism). So it’s disappointing when one’s optimism is exploited.

Which, Google, having gone through this sort of thing so many times — “knows” they are exploiting.

I say “knows” because Google M&A know this stuff in spades. Whether it’s reported up is another matter; as to say “the company we acquired is unhappy” is to bring blame upon M&A folks who are just doing their jobs.

Also see Judas Goat — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat

If you have enough money, you can do everything that doesn't scale; manually review every change, rewrite entire codebases, require 12 conversations to try one new idea, kill icons that don't look bland enough. Terrible ideas normally, but who cares if you're making money? These are the signs of a rent-seeking incumbent. It's not a monopoly, because other companies are doing the same thing, but the customers don't have much choice but to use them. A wonderful place to be business-wise, terrible to actually work for them or be their customer.

I find this part inspiring, regarding how to "respect the opportunity":

  Practically, what this means is to first do the work that is given to
  you. But once that's under control, to reach out into the vast Google
  network, to learn what's being planned and invented, to coalesce a
  clear image of the future, to give it shape through docs and demos, to
  find the leaders whose goals align with this image, and to sell the
  idea as persistently as you can.

Very 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.

I agree. It really shows that at a large scale it is no longer possible to deliver new value. Google has reached that level. It can only go downhill from here. Albeit very slowly.

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

Eh, as outsiders we're all quick to judge.

OpenAI and friends are able to move quickly, but (so far) they're not able to translate their LLM innovations into high-margin revenue with any significant moat.

Give it a couple years to see where all the cards settle and who's actually making money "with" LLMs.

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

Except, as pointed out, a lot of the tech was literally developed at Google. It’s like Xerox Labs all over again.

They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.

Crew 'we're building a ship to go somewhere but we need money lol'

Google 'we'll buy your ship and crew'

Crew 'cool what do we have to do'

Google 'Well we need you up to code for sailing on our ocean, so you need to rebuild a lot of your ship to look like our other ships'

Crew 'ok we're done, now what'

Google 'drift between our many beautiful ports'

Crew 'whats the end goal'

Google 'we'll forget about you, stop maintaining your ship, and you'll drift aimlessly on our ocean for some years until one of the directors scuttles your ship on a whim'

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.

Usually you don't get the acquisition money right away, you get it over a few years. They know you would just bolt if they gave it up front.

Fair, but often there's a retention package that can be a large part of the acquisition offer total that could be hard to resist.

> What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.

This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against, but not for something.

It's a mixed bag of Google's internal infrastructure is amazing, but the company has culture and operational challenges. Just from the bottom half, mostly headings:

> Most problems aren’t worth Google’s time, but surprising ones are. 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.

A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product.

> Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts.

> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t.

> Top heavy orgs are hard to steer.

> Technical debt is real. So is process debt.

> Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.

“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

I found the mention of most of Google’s code stored in a mono repo to be pretty crazy.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146

It worked far better than you'd think. The ability to atomically change massive chunks of Google's code across projects was amazing. At some companies I worked at, if you wanted to make a breaking change in a common library, like say rename a method, it'd be a serious issue. You'd need to release a new version of your library, then you'd start migrating teams using that library one by one or cajoling them into it, and then, years later, you might be able to delete the old version. And you'd have to maintain it the whole time. At Google, you could just rename the method in the library and in every client of that library in the same single commit. It was magical! Almost all development at Google was done at HEAD in a single branch, and it was a beautiful thing. It's probably also why Bazel and Google's open source stuff are not great at versioning and backwards compatibility; it's not something they worry about internally.

I've worked with some Xooglers who were incapable of working on smaller repos without google's internal tools for this kind of thing. And I mean literally incapable of writing meaningful code or pushing to main.

Total anecdote and not worth much, but I've seen it enough times to make note of it.

There's no other way to run a firm this size without half of it being mired in dependency hell.

This is not the monorepo you are thinking of. And yes I've seen $M in developer time burned by people who didn't understand that.

it’s not a monorepo in the git sense of monorepo. git won’t scale that way.

> you might still wake up to find that while you were working on your project, two distant teams were also working on the same idea, and the time has come to fight it out because only one can proceed

Or you might not, in the case of Waze and Maps. I don't want to know what sort of politics were involved in the decision to keep both products rolling in parallel for 10 years.

Ah, and this app isn't available on my up to date Pixel 7 Pro. Google software not being released for Google software, running on Google hardware, is no shortage of ironic to me.

Well-written article with some interesting insights. In particular the part about process debt.

Wow. I just realized for years that I had been mistaking Socratic with Socrative. When Socratic got acquired I thought it was Socrative they bought. This explains why google never integrated Socrative stuff into Slides. Reading is hard.

Claude2 summary: Google has amazing resources and access, but does things "the Google way" - they rebuilt the Socratic product from scratch using Google's own stacks and to their standards.

Simple things done repeatedly can feel magical at Google's scale - like recalculating signals across the entire internet to improve Search. But much improvement comes from manual analysis and labeling data.

Surprising problems get tackled if the right teams are interested - like developing a math image recognition API from scratch in 6 months. But most products face many hurdles to launch.

There is an ever-shifting web of goals and efforts. Politics and frequent re-orgs can derail projects. Smart people argue rather than align.

Technical debt is real, but so is process debt. Layers of reviews and requirements accumulate over time. Top-heavy teams with lots of senior people can cause gridlock. More doers than thinkers are needed.

To drive something big, you must relentlessly sell the vision and get the right leaders on board.

Many acquisitions fail. The Socratic founders left, and some goals weren't achieved, but parts of the product grew significantly.

Overall, amazing things are possible at Google if you navigate politics, rally the right support, and play the long game. But it's challenging due to complex processes, shifting priorities, and ingrained ways of doing things.

Had a wonderful conversation with the author just a few days ago (link here: https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC), I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.

> But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.

I had to briefly stop reading this. I realize how _someone_'s promotion goal plays a part in a huge team making significant effort on solving a problem or building one of their chat apps.

> Look at Google’s collection of app icons and you’ll see four colors and simple shapes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/jlcw0w

They do anthropomorphize - Flutter and Golang mascots.

The Gopher is solely because of Rob Pike and his wife I assume.

Yup, we wanted Renee to make the mascot for Go.I personally really loved Glenda (the plan 9 bunny) and was enthusiastic. It turned out pretty cute! We even ended up ordering a few containers full from squishables in that first year of go being released outside google.

The acquisition seems to be old, Y2019. I am not sure if you wrote this blog just now or had written earlier and published now. How have your perspective changed about the decision to get acquired since 2019, if it did?

>And counter-intuitively, adding more people to an early-stage project doesn't make it go faster.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

> Working at Google is like having a second passport. Go to any major city in the world and your badge2 unlocks a beautiful office with great food, desks, and a high speed link to every person in Google’s 200,000+ person network.

How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?

> Google does things the Google way. Just about every piece of software and infrastructure used at Google was built at Google

And now we have most using everything built by Google. Sad times when compared to times when everything was once individually created.

Just interviewed author a few days ago: https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC

I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.

Funny how Brooks’ Law is still something people are learning: “ And counter-intuitively, adding more people to an early-stage project doesn't make it go faster.”

Too bad their "Ceebo" icon is a broken link, I'd be interested to see what it looked like given all the purported fuss that Google made about it.

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

Definitely DO NOT work remotely as a junior developer. Achieving the appropriate career progression requires meaningful interactions with your more experienced colleagues, which may be limited in a remote work environment.

That said, here is a small list of things you’ll need to get a job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies:

• Educational Background: it seems that you’re a student at https://www.dhbw.de/startseite, so you’re good.

• Develop Technical Skills: you’re already familiar with Go (https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories&language=go). Consider getting some knowledge of C++ or Python as they are common at Google. Python will help you a lot during the interviews.

• Build a Strong Portfolio: junior developers usually have much more free time to work on personal projects. I see you already have a GitHub account with a good amount of Go code, so I think you’re on the right track -- https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories

• Gain Practical Experience: consider internships, co-op programs, or contribute to open-source projects, participate in hackathons or coding competitions to demonstrate your problem-solving skills.

• Networking: attend industry events, meetups, and conferences to connect with professionals in the field. Google often looks for candidates through referrals. Join relevant online communities, forums, and social media groups to stay informed about job opportunities and industry trends.

• Prepare for Interviews: LeetCode like a madman! -- https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/

• Apply for Positions: obviously, apply for a job; connect with a recruiter.

I could go on and on with this list, but you’ll discover the other things you’ll need once you have done most of the ones above.

Good luck!

> which may be limited in a remote work environment.

That "may" is carrying a lot of weight there. Almost makes it sound like a fact, while in fact being merely an unsupported opinion.

First and foremost, remove that red "Google is actively hurting the open web with its browser chromium" banner from your personal website[1].

[1] https://xnacly.me/

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

This is maybe getting offtopic but I still have no idea why the term "full stack developer" exists or why it's so widespread. Sure, if you specialize in JavaScript and you mainly work writing web UI libraries, you might mainly consider yourself a "frontend developer." Same thing for working on server frameworks that would, I guess, make you a "backend developer"? (I'd think in that case you'd probably just be into general programming, and not call yourself that)

Does a person that wires up a backend to do some business logic, hit some APIs, etc. and then send it to a frontend to be displayed really need a name like "full stack"? It almost implies your doing both of the jobs of a frontend and backend developer, but if you go by the example work I mentioned previously, you're not doing that. That's what I do for my job and it feels like I'm doing the Sesame Street of programming jobs compared to other areas of the industry.

I don't like how the term "software engineer" is overused either. Maybe just cause most of what comes out of the software industry really shouldn't be compared to what comes out of industries that build bridges and large machinery. I don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow are really implementing proper engineering practices.

Does google hire Data Engineers ? What is the title for data engineer

Google isn't hiring much right now, so the options are pretty limited. I expect it will loosen, but have no inside info.

Socratic isn't available on Android? I can't install it because it was 'made for an older version of Android?'

GJ!

Please don't get acquired by Google. We need to bring people _out_ of their ecosystem, not into it.

“all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something“ -- Spot on

This was reminiscent of that Oscar Wilde quote, “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

Getting in touch with this hacker was the best decision I took. He helped me get into my spoouse phone and I got what I needed from him and found out he was not faithful at all. Thank you remotespywise for letting me see this. Get in touch with him for other hacking/recovery services. remotespywise @gmail com

>" 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.

Thank you for this write up - very insightful.

a new post for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ ;)

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 (and from what I can tell, the help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more). So they pivoted and made user profiles- that is, for every user at google, they inspected all the history of that user, and made a simple model that represented them. at the same time, several other groups were competing to the same thing- and a more powerful team licked the cookie and took ownership of user models at google (often, the leadership would set up various teams in competition and then "pick a winner").

After a few years, all the acquihires left google in disgust, because google had basically taken their product, killed it, forced them to pivot, and then killed their pivot.

What a shame and waste of resources.

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 Google products still around that the company released in the past 20 years that _weren't_ seeded from acquisitions.

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

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.

Can you share more details or anecdotes of politics there?

competition isn’t a waste. for a google kind of company it’s fine.

is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely?

google happens to be big enough to have an internal market, that’s all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave? and you move on to the next project. (promo considerations aside)

different people will of course internalize it differently. some bitterly.

I'm not referring to the plethora of chat apps. Those are wasteful and demonstrative of google's failings.

It is actually wasteful to build 15 note taking apps that die. Free markets limit inefficiency as individual actors can only run out of money individually unlike governments who can bankrupt everyone.

Google gets the worst of both worlds by having multiple internal projects and having management pick winners. It’s exactly the kind of waste you get from monopolies where efficiency takes a back seat to politics.

> 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 contributors. As a sibling comment notes: google’s product org is meme-level terrible from top to bottom.

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.

This picture from the post is worth a thousand words: https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jp...

"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.

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.

I think it's useful for people who are founders or employees in a startup that Google (or similar BigCo) might acquire to read things like this.

Also, I think there's things to be proud about working at Google. In general working there does teach a diligence of quality that is often missing in SWE in other orgs, though many companies are picking up on the same practices anyways.

Personally, I found my time at Google to be useful from the POV of that, but also, yeah, just having it on my resume.

Maybe you should read the article before bloviating about things (seriously, what's with this ranting and raving that doesn't even have the article it's supposedly answering in context?).

It's not really a positive one.

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.

You always effectively a cog in the wheel. You’re never actually making a meaningful difference. There’s only a handful of universally “impactful” causes, the rest are just things that are part of the intricate world we’ve created. A job is almost always just a job, whatever the industry.

Source: I’ve been in IT for over a decade, across all sizes of companies.

> general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride

It really has not. Unless you consider commenters on HN and r/technology the general public.

Things are slowly but surely changing, and this goes for the tech world/culture as a whole, i.e. how we're seen by the "outside" world.

I'd say that the high-point of the nerd/tech stuff was around 2017-2018, i.e. just before the pandemic, but ever since then techies have started being seen as a nuisance (and worst) by more and more people.

You may have missed the point of the article, which was explaining just how dystopian a place it is to try and get things done

That there is a denyonym for it—and an ex-denonym even—tells you enough.

This kinda feels nostalgic!! At least, the goog doesn't seem to respect its users anymore!!

i’ve tried reaching out to various corp dev teams at FAANGS without any results. i guess it pays to know people.

I think your success with this entirely depends on what and why you're reaching out to them, no?

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