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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

I don't remember exactly. I believe they got accelerated vesting with all shares converted to cash at the acquisition price. Maybe other stuff too.

>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."

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

Maybe for the c-suite

c-suite would be +20 million each, any early employee should have enough options to get a two to five million after a nice acquisition

Not with liquidation preference.

That’s unrealistic in many cases

Hah, I wish.

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.

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.

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