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What I learned getting acquired by Google

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.

Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee

Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're not an FTE.

I think some folks have this illusion of software contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't. The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type work environment, and thats at the better places.

I've worked at a place where contractors were treated like they weren't human, basically. Worst equipment, forced to work in an old warehouse that barely passed code to be considered retrofitted for an office, people routine got sick out there because they were exposed to the elements. Not to mention, during fire season (this was California) they were in a building that didn't have a good enough air filtration system, so they were forced to sit in smoke all day, more or less

I quit that place pretty quickly, but it was nothing short of terrible

As a contractor, you are an FTE... just for a different (almost always much worse) company.

And that arrangement exists solely so that the company whose work you're actually doing can fire you more easily or avoid legal liability.

I'm surprised this even legally flies. Seems like the legal equivalent of creating a shell company.

I wish we could somehow get this comment more visibility. Especially the 1st sentence.

People that complain about the plights of contractors need to understand the above.

That’s not legally a contractor then. As someone who has done contracting, both for software and in construction plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers around the legality of what makes or breaks a contractor…

If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United States.

How would you call people who are hired by bodyshop(IT service providers like Infosys, Cognizant, Epam) and then leased to Google?

>That’s not legally a contractor then. [...] If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee.

There are 2 different uses of "contractor":

(1) contractor : officiall IRS tax classification of 1099 independent contractor

(2) "contractor" : a W-2 employee of a "temp agency" or "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" that is sent to a client company (such as Google) needing contingent workers. Adecco[1] is an example of a staffing company that sends people to Google. These temp agencies with workers classified as W-2 employees act as legal cover to "avoid repeating Microsoft lawsuits". From Google's perspective, these Adecco employees are "contractors".

If the above working arrangement looks convoluted with the economic inefficiencies of paying for an extra middleman (the temp agencies), it is. But it cleverly avoids the IRS claiming, "Hey Google, your so-called contractors are misclassified and should be employees!" ... and Google can say, "They already are employees! They're Adecco employees!"

The "1099 real contractor" is not as common as "fake-contractor-but-really-somebody-elses-W2-employee" ... because the "1099 contractors" won their lawsuit against Microsoft.

[1] https://www.adeccousa.com/

I think the GP's point was that's how it should be. If a company is going to -- for "legal reasons" -- not treat contractors the same way they treat employees, then they should be doing so not only in bad, exclusionary ways, but also in good ways, with the expected perks of being a contractor that FTEs don't get: freedom to set their own hours, work where they want, and subcontract out their work.

But no, companies like Google want to have their cake and eat it too: they want a class of workers where they can require of them more or less the exact same things that they require of their employees (and much more easily fire them), but can give them a lot less, and treat them like a second class.

That's entirely Google's choice. It does not have to be that way. But they've decided to create this two-class system for their own benefit, not for anyone else's.

Also consider that these people are probably often not contractors in the legal sense. They're likely W-2 employees of some sort of staffing agency, who are then placed at Google. Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.

> Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.

The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the same as an FTE.

Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee

Depends on the agreement. First off, probably 99% of these contractors work for a contracting company, so as a contractor you have no say: You are an employee of (another) company and they'll set the rules.

If you're truly independent, then sure - try to make whatever agreement you want with Google.

Every US company. European companies somehow have contractors without caste system.

Obviously there are different policies for internals and contractors, but fruits and pizza are for everyone in the office.

At least with regard to 1099 vs W-2, a huge amount of this is due to IRS rules.

No, that's a rationalization. It is because psychopaths are running the place. I have never heard of an employer paying benefit tax on pizzas, and if they did, surely they can bill the consulting firm in some circle if that is the case.

I had the same two-caste system enforced in European office of US company. Legally it was a local company with parent in US. But anyway, "food is only for employees". Funny enough, even student who was there for 20 hours per week and did anything but work was allowed to eat.

This is a cultural thing.

This is in Europe: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/contractors-accuse-eur...

A very similar-sounding caste-system. Europe’s great and all but it isn’t Utopia.

[delayed]

Which is because it is extremely rude, like meanest of meanest, to not share food with each other. Like, of all mean but not illegal things you can do to contractors, not sharing food is probably what people consider the worst. Small every day things are way more provocative than abstract things like retirement funds or whatever.

Been there. Done that. The FTEs got strawberries. I didn't. I don't think I have been that pissed off in my life. If someone had wrecked my car on purpose I'd be less pissed.

Yea I've experienced this in capital one. Some smaller non tech companies are chill, where there is really no difference in how they treat contractors and employees.

I worked at a big insurance company for a while. Contractors could have their birthday celebrated, but cake was not permitted.

That's brutal.

In my company I almost fired someone from HR for constantly forgetting how these contractor people are part of the team, invited to every event etc

I had the same experience as a contractor for IBM.

Real IBMers got all kinds of stuff. We had to pay full price for the GR meal.

It's not the same.

The Microsoft problem was *independent* contractors. I.E. treating people as self-employed.

Normal contractors are employees of a temp firm. None of these issues apply there.

Footnote: I started my career as an IC, before I had family or kids. It was great. 32 hour work weeks and time (and the legal right) to do startups on the side. Ton of flexibility relative to a real job.

Yup, when I read the blog post, my immediate thought was, "Hey, this sounds just like Microsoft when I was there." There it was blue badge vs. non-blue badge.

All the other stuff, too –– wanting to innovate but finding everything so slow, lots of process, feeling very pampered, etc.

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

It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.

It's not illegal - they'd just have to provide them employee-like benefits which would be expensive. So it's just costly to treat contractors too well.

I think the way it works is that if they provide some benefits, then they would have to make them into FTE and give them all the benefits.

Exactly. And that's perfectly legal to do.

But remember that is because these companies were exploiting the use of contractors to deny them employee protections.

True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway. But these "red" people are employees in all but name, so that the companies can save money and other protections. A small slip up by Google (Apple/FB/MS/tons of others) and these folks get the protection they deserve.

Exactly. The mistake was thinking that the responsibility stemmed from the employeeing entity.

It shouldn't.

It's clearly more linked to the type and structure of work performed.

Yeah being an actual contractor/consultant should feel GOOD. You should not be married to a single company for too long. You should have a sense of freedom.

There should be a simple test that if a person is working at only one client for too long (3 mo?) then they are to be converted to an employee. There's no reason for these middleman employers to exist except to make people disposable to companies. If that's the case, then they should be cycled in and out with a higher frequency. Nobody should remain a "red badge" at Google for any significant length of time.

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.

No doubt there are some HR/legal folks wanting to avoid the liability of 'training' someone on something that goes badly. The workaround to that is to have the training in an auditorium and not keep attendance on who is in the room.

or mandate the contracting entity do the training. I've seen that in places that tried to be equitable about the relationship with their contractors.

Typically the business gets billed for the privilege though

Why would they train you? It’s the responsibility of your parent company and for all they know you’ve already been thoroughly trained for active shootings in numerous other companies you’ve worked at.

You are not their problem.

As a hospital contractor, are you different than, say, the HVAC contractor that comes in to work on mechanical equipment?

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.

One required by federal policy.

Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees.

It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.

If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink.

Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new insults might be complicated. But if the goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do X", I'd call that questionable policy design.

Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to say that this regulatory situation with contractors wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged" out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside the point.

This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you full time who you don't want to call an employee because it's cheaper not to.

The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees.

The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer.

This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.

What they should be bound to is making "temporary-but-not-really" staff, just staff. But for that, strong unions are necessary, and US unions have been very week for decades (especially w.r.t. rate of unionization and centralization of power away from rank-and-file workers).

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.

In such companies you are not truly a contractor, but employee of the bodyshop company which lease you to the client. As the result you deal with politics in both companies: your employer and their client. And bodyshop has performance reviews as well.

Not really. A staffing co like randstadt won’t give you perf reviews etc. You just work through them for tax reason. You hardly even interact with your account manager.

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.

If what OP said is true, Google goes at least both ways, then.

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.

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

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!)

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?

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.

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

No, it's got nothing to do with workplace protection or wages. The original suit was actually about participation in the stock purchase program (which in the mid-90's was extremely lucrative at MSFT!), something that no contractor would normally expect to get. But because the contractors got free food at the cafe (or whatever), they did. Or rather they got a settlement making up for the stock the courts said they should have been able to get.

Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all your other benefits not related to their job."

And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's universally enforced at every US employer large enough to have a legal department.

The game is that the contractors are supposedly not working for the company that they're actually working for. Anything that might break that illusion puts the company at risk of needing to treat them as the actual employees that they are.

yes, it has everything to do with workplace protection and wages

Yup, these companies could always just hire outright

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?

Again, to repeat: the desire in the suit (to prevent employers from inappropriately using temporary labor) was valid. The EFFECT of the suit is exactly the opposite: it's forced employers to performatively discriminate against temps in every way they can find as a way to prevent the kind of finding that hurt MSFT.

Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor labor laws, but this decision broke things.

No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community. MSFT was guilty of what they were accused of. If they don't misclassify workers, they won't lose such a suit.

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.

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

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.

TVC

Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.

Textured vegetable contractor

Temporary Vendor Contractor

Temps, Vendors and Contractors.

Temps, Vendors, and Contractors

Temps, Vendors, Contractors

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

Whatever fraction it is at Google, I'm willing to bet Cisco's is significantly larger, especially on "core-business" teams whose work is mentioned in analyst calls

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? :)

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.

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 BATNA.

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.

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

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.

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.

Corporate feudalism

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 common for Google offices to have gyms and pianos?!

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.

While an employee, I stashed 6 colored "p-bone" plastic trombones in google colors in various Google Cloud offices... (tokyo has blue, green in UK, etc)

Yeah i was thinking of full size acoustic ones since electronic keyboards are pretty common everywhere

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

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

I assume the data centers get to have heated pools

Even the toilet water is heated

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/google-sewer-water/

eheheh solid

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

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

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.

Not a googler, but their office in Toronto is in pretty meh area tbh

Do they have a dev office in Toronto? Thought it was in waterloo

In the past it was sales&marketing only with smattering of a few "guest desks" for visiting engineers. And the site leads at Waterloo (at least) lobbied hard to prevent Toronto from ever really having engineering for real. Probably out of worry about centre of gravity being sucked away, etc.

IMHO it limited Google's hiring ability in Ontario. And it made me (and others) have to sell my house in Toronto and move when my employer was acquired. I tried the van/bus commute for 6 months and it was too hard.

Then the Geoffrey Hinton folks moved in there I believe. And I think some AI R&D was happening there?

And then COVID happened, and everyone was WFH but when you did go into the office and book a desk, it became possible to go into the Toronto office instead.

I left after that so can't say how it is now. Google goes through waves of "defrags" where small groups and teams in peripheral offices are... purged and merged because there's a feeling that "strength in numbers" for a particular project pays off. I wouldn't be surprised to see what happen post-layoffs.

The Toronto office, when I visited it, was small. Food was good though.

best/coolest office real estate anywhere

Hence the focus on RTO.

Sigh

In reality they were out of room at many of their offices pre-COVID, and they hired like crazy during COVID, and had no room for everyone to RTO.

Before I quit you had to book a desk if you wanted to come into the office, hybrid. I pushed to get myself my own assigned desk because I despised the stock monitors, etc.

At that point (fall 2021) hardly anybody was coming in, so it was a ghost town. But they would not have been able to fit everyone in if they'd demanded people come back.

Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.

Tell me more about this.

My friend/coworker made the observation: Elysium. (the movie)

Always felt kind of gross to me.

Meta also has exceptional offices.

Both are amazing.

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

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.

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 at Google but this has nothing to do with Google. I Had the same thing happen to me for different companies.

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 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.

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.

"When I was working at Google, we ..."

Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google!

Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.

99.999999% of software engineering is being a cog in a machine. Startups included. Even your own startup if you have VC money and clients. Google is a nicer cleaner machine than most other machines.

As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the VC firm

As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the client

Next up:

As a human in a capitalist system

As a mammal on Earth

As a cell-based organism on this arm of the galaxy

As a conscious mind needing carbohydrates to sustain compute

I've worked in large companies (thousands of employees) and startups (<20) and I actually felt more like a cog in the machine at the startup size companies.

I was literally just a means to an end to churn out code on a product. I could have been (and eventually was) replaced at any moment with another generic cog willing to churn out the same code without much of a thought.

After working at Google and Startups, I totally agree. You are much more of a cog at a startup due to the desperate need to grind out the next A/B test or customer requirement.

People WAY over glamorize startups.

Don't agree at all. Have you worked at a startup with <10 employees? It's more like 25% cog at that level. Even at 50 employees you're at worst 50% cog.

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.

This sounds so old school - people today don’t think NASA is an impressive or prestigious job.

Where else does your stuff go to space and make headlines regularly?

SpaceX, BlueOrigin fits the bill

I think you're very disconnected from the average american if you believe that.

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.

Ah, the classic Promotion Oriented Architecture.

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.

People usually don’t hand the keys to their company when things are going amazing. Very first sentence:

As we started to raise Socratic’s Series B in 2017, we quickly learned that our focus on getting usage at the expense of revenue was going to bite us

As folks here seem be eager to read between the lines how terrible it was maybe they should read between this one too

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

Do you mean demonym? Sorry I’m pre coffee and don’t know the word/words.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Was it an aquihire?

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

How can you tell them difference between that and early removal of a competitor?

You often can't, which is why they can get away with these anti-competitive practices

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?

Varies heavily depending on background labor market. In 2021: $1M+ per solid engineer. These days it's closer to $0 as they're not aggressively hiring and plenty of talent floating around.

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.

I think the parent you’re replying to knows that, they were asking if this was an example of that.

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)_/¯

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

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.

Maybe it's ok for writing to not be so editorialized as what you're used to? To me this read like a trip report from which the reader can draw their own conclusions without the author telling them what to think.

I wish more things I read on the internet were written in that style. I don't need to be told what conclusions to draw, I can figure it out myself.

Agreed, very earnest style.

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)_/¯

Do we ignore the most obvious upside, that this guy (and possibly/probably everyone in that startup) got paid a shit ton of money as a result of Google buying the company?

Nuance is an underappreciated form.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts unless I can get engineers/developers and end users together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations can even conceive of how that might work once they are big enough.

Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.

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.

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.

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.

after digging a tiny bit

What makes you so sure that "the company" doesn't exist? Sounds like you've discovered something almost axiomatic to have that level of certainty since there isn't a state-of-Deleware for the perfect being.

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

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?

What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.

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

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

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

Google didn't invent shit, the following people did. None are still with Google.

* Ashish Vaswani - Founder, Stealth Startup

* Noam Shazeer - Founder, Character.AI

* Niki Parmar - Founder, Stealth Startup

* Jakob Uszkoreit - Founder, Inceptive

* Llion Jones - Founder, Sakana AI

* Aidan Gomez - Founder, cohere

* Lukasz Kaiser - OpenAI

* Illia Polosukhin - Founder, NEAR

Then by your logic no company ever invents anything.

You’re inferring things I didn’t say. Google’s inaction on the invention and letting that entire team leave the company is proof they’re inept.

"researched" it, yes. But they are completely unable to operationalize it.

I used Google Bard today.

Is that somehow not operationalized?

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

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.

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

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

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.

I don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow are really implementing proper engineering practices.

I think most people say this in jest; regardless, writing low-effort code that would be "helped" by this practice is just a small part of the job anyways.

As a backend dev, I probably know which teams are calling me but not necessarily why, and I rarely have occasion to try to read their code. I can’t call myself full stack because I haven’t seriously touched frontend for a while and it changes rapidly.

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

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!

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

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/

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.

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.

Good point.

In my eyes it’s a PMF problem and an issue with their product team that Google couldn’t pivot. I know in 2023 a major CRM vendor has been rolling out the same idea as part of their SaaS. They’re trying to match individual customer service reps with depth of expertise across a broad product range. Not sure how much success they’re having but the idea is solid and requires an interesting combinatorial solver to figure out “good” matches within various constraints beyond expertise like individual workload, time zones, etc. with the goal to drive down case resolution time. Google is terrible at product and terrible at taking the long view, despite having known for decades that they’re going to struggle with innovators dilemma.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Large animals require large amount of food. It's why there's countless fish but only one humpback whale.

The question for Google is: how much are they willing to bet they're the whale and not just a fish that's too big?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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?

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

“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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

" 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.

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

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.