5 ms·

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

rsp1984 9y ago
- When they acquired my little project (back in 2008) my co-founder and I were told point blank that if we didn't sell to them at a price of their choosing they would just outright copy our product and steal our ideas and do it themselves and we'd get nothing. I don't even think they meant it as much as it was a divide-and-conquer negotiation tactic (which unfortunately worked since my co-founder started to panic after that point and turn against me in the following discussions). We eventually sold (at a low price, given the circumstances) but it kind of set the tone for what would follow. Great way to completely sink an acquisition right from the beginning btw. - Soon after I started I gave a little demo of what I'd been working on before the acquisition as a side/thesis project. A team related to the one I was working in really liked it and wanted to have it and start a project with it. I was quite honored -- until I found out that the expectation was that I provide everything (code and other resources) for free, since they'd already acquired "my talent", and that would extend even to unrelated stuff that I did before the acquisition (that was literally their argument). It took me two years of explaining and negotiation until they finally paid a modest price for it. - That not being enough I soon found out that extracting IP from fresh graduates / PhDs is actually quite common at Google. I know many examples where graduates / PhDs were asked to put in code and documentation of their prior/thesis work free of charge. Frankly I think that a lot of fresh graduates don't even realize at that point that they are being screwed out of something that is rightfully theirs (or the universitiy's -- depending on how their contracts were set up). - The worst came out of people when the perf cycle came up. I've seen it over and over that engineers claimed they "put feature X into Y" when in reality feature X was implemented by another engineer and all they did was contribute some wiring code. Worst of all those kind of tricks not only didn't get caught, but the engineers in question often got rewarded for it. - And of course the time Google started copying books and put them online for free without asking authors for permission or when they started leeching content off of websites and putting it next to their own ads (see [1]) that's not quite the display of the finest of manners either. The kicker is that while all these things happened day in day out like it was no big deal most people in the company seemed to be convinced that Google operated on higher ethical standards than other companies. Permanently feeding your employees with "don't be evil" or "do the Googley thing" phrases must have made them think that that was actually the case I guess. Needless to say I quit on the first day that my "golden handcuffs" came off and never looked back. [1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
- andreyf 9y ago
  "Do we want to build this or buy this" is a pretty typical decision at all large companies, no? Wouldn't it be supremely strange if Google acquired something without at least considering building it internally?
  - rsp1984 9y ago
    There's a difference between internally weighing build-vs-buy and openly threatening a pair of hackers in a negotiation with a blatant rip-off.
    - andreyf 9y ago
      Fair point: I taught my daughter never to threaten at about 6 years old. The way I see it, even at Google, small M&A deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds who have a lot more "egoistic hot shot" than "civilized decorum" about them. It seems possible they were bluffing — getting organizational buy-in and staffing a small project at Google has relatively enormous overhead. So for tiny projects (<$1M), buying is nearly always cheaper. Best response, I imagine, would be "ok, why don't you guys figure out how much that'll cost you and we'll circle back to talk numbers again. looking forward to it!"
      - eternalban 9y ago
        > The way I see it ... deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds ... On what facts do you base this perception? If it is Uber we say "culture is set from top". This doesn't apply to Google?

rsp1984 9y ago

- When they acquired my little project (back in 2008) my co-founder and I were told point blank that if we didn't sell to them at a price of their choosing they would just outright copy our product and steal our ideas and do it themselves and we'd get nothing. I don't even think they meant it as much as it was a divide-and-conquer negotiation tactic (which unfortunately worked since my co-founder started to panic after that point and turn against me in the following discussions). We eventually sold (at a low price, given the circumstances) but it kind of set the tone for what would follow. Great way to completely sink an acquisition right from the beginning btw. - Soon after I started I gave a little demo of what I'd been working on before the acquisition as a side/thesis project. A team related to the one I was working in really liked it and wanted to have it and start a project with it. I was quite honored -- until I found out that the expectation was that I provide everything (code and other resources) for free, since they'd already acquired "my talent", and that would extend even to unrelated stuff that I did before the acquisition (that was literally their argument). It took me two years of explaining and negotiation until they finally paid a modest price for it. - That not being enough I soon found out that extracting IP from fresh graduates / PhDs is actually quite common at Google. I know many examples where graduates / PhDs were asked to put in code and documentation of their prior/thesis work free of charge. Frankly I think that a lot of fresh graduates don't even realize at that point that they are being screwed out of something that is rightfully theirs (or the universitiy's -- depending on how their contracts were set up). - The worst came out of people when the perf cycle came up. I've seen it over and over that engineers claimed they "put feature X into Y" when in reality feature X was implemented by another engineer and all they did was contribute some wiring code. Worst of all those kind of tricks not only didn't get caught, but the engineers in question often got rewarded for it. - And of course the time Google started copying books and put them online for free without asking authors for permission or when they started leeching content off of websites and putting it next to their own ads (see [1]) that's not quite the display of the finest of manners either. The kicker is that while all these things happened day in day out like it was no big deal most people in the company seemed to be convinced that Google operated on higher ethical standards than other companies. Permanently feeding your employees with "don't be evil" or "do the Googley thing" phrases must have made them think that that was actually the case I guess. Needless to say I quit on the first day that my "golden handcuffs" came off and never looked back. [1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

andreyf 9y ago
"Do we want to build this or buy this" is a pretty typical decision at all large companies, no? Wouldn't it be supremely strange if Google acquired something without at least considering building it internally?
- rsp1984 9y ago
  There's a difference between internally weighing build-vs-buy and openly threatening a pair of hackers in a negotiation with a blatant rip-off.
  - andreyf 9y ago
    Fair point: I taught my daughter never to threaten at about 6 years old. The way I see it, even at Google, small M&A deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds who have a lot more "egoistic hot shot" than "civilized decorum" about them. It seems possible they were bluffing — getting organizational buy-in and staffing a small project at Google has relatively enormous overhead. So for tiny projects (<$1M), buying is nearly always cheaper. Best response, I imagine, would be "ok, why don't you guys figure out how much that'll cost you and we'll circle back to talk numbers again. looking forward to it!"
    - eternalban 9y ago
      > The way I see it ... deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds ... On what facts do you base this perception? If it is Uber we say "culture is set from top". This doesn't apply to Google?