37 ms·

What I learned getting acquired by Google

1045 points by shreyans 3y ago

AngelRamirez 3y ago
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camila45 3y ago
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camila45 3y ago
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camila45 3y ago
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olivierduval 3y ago
> "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...) ! ;-)
- avidiax 3y ago
  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.
  - esafak 3y ago
    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.
    - ska 3y ago
      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.
    - sublimefire 3y ago
      I have a different experience in Microsoft where engineers would communicate with their customers if there are issues. There is always a first line of support but otherwise it will be escalated by the support staff and the engineer will jump in. Google is a bit weird because they do not target enterprises that much, their revenue is from ads sold to ordinary people.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    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.
  - freefaler 3y ago
    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.
  - hbn 3y ago
    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.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  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.
  - mattigames 3y ago
    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.
    - svieira 3y ago
      > 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.
      - mattigames 3y ago
        The time to argue is long gone, if you are past highschool and still believe in ghosts you call "Gods" I don't want anything to do with you, that exception you make in your head from some basic rational thinking makes me suspect that you have many one similar exceptions that I am better away from.
  - rand846633 3y ago
    Or maybe god just is really good at making use of caching and has cloudflare tuned in properly?
goalonetwo 3y ago
"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.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  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.
  - greatpostman 3y ago
    As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the VC firm
    - JanSt 3y ago
      As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the client
      - gomox 3y ago
        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
        sebastiennight 3y ago
        As a conscious mind needing carbohydrates to sustain compute
  - kbknapp 3y ago
    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.
zhivota 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
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- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  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.
  - butlike 3y ago
    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?
dwroberts 3y ago
> 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)
- leoh 3y ago
  Right. If Google had taken SWE/SREs, say, and had them rewrite Socratic to fit Google infra while it had allowed Socratic engineers to think about incremental product enhancements that leveraged Google’s capabilities (as opposed to putting them full time on the rewrite), a far more optimal outcome that probably wouldn’t have led to them leaving. One takeaway is that if you get acquired by Google, you should try to advocate for such an arrangement. Having worked for a firm that was acquired, it was incredible and devastating imo how much talent was squandered by these endless rewrites. Each IC’s decision to do that, to be fair — the money or something else wins for them. But just a bummer to see.
moritonal 3y ago
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.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Was it an aquihire?
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    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.
    - bennyg 3y ago
      I think the parent you’re replying to knows that, they were asking if this was an example of that.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    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)_/¯
  - gizmo 3y ago
    A 10 person startup without a business model? And all the tech got thrown out. Clearly an acquihire.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
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 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.
- jrockway 3y ago
  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.)
- s1gnp0st 3y ago
  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.
gniv 3y ago
Well-written article with some interesting insights. In particular the part about process debt.
xnorswap 3y ago
This picture from the post is worth a thousand words: https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jpg https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jp...
- deleted 3y ago
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dekhn 3y ago
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.
- s3r3nity 3y ago
  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.
  - caturopath 3y ago
    What are a couple somewhat-comparable companies with really good product management?
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  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.
asdfman123 3y ago
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.
- leidenfrost 3y ago
  That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    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.
    - parthdesai 3y ago
      Not a googler, but their office in Toronto is in pretty meh area tbh
      - otalp 3y ago
        Do they have a dev office in Toronto? Thought it was in waterloo
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        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.
sumuyuda 3y ago
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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  it’s not a monorepo in the git sense of monorepo. git won’t scale that way.
- dboreham 3y ago
  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.
- vkou 3y ago
  There's no other way to run a firm this size without half of it being mired in dependency hell.
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  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.
  - duped 3y ago
    I've worked with some Xooglers who were incapable of working on smaller repos without google's internal tools for this kind of thing. And I mean literally incapable of writing meaningful code or pushing to main. Total anecdote and not worth much, but I've seen it enough times to make note of it.
doublerabbit 3y ago
> 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.
b20000 3y ago
i’ve tried reaching out to various corp dev teams at FAANGS without any results. i guess it pays to know people.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  I think your success with this entirely depends on what and why you're reaching out to them, no?
  - b20000 3y ago
    no, it depends on whether you know people on the inside
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
> 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.
- sarora27 3y ago
  > I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset. Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. > I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. > I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. > If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. Big respect for you. I quit programming as a whole because I felt I would never find people with your mindset in this field. The thought depressed me enough to choose another career.
pkilgore 3y ago
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.
- rand846633 3y ago
  This made me laugh so hard! I really want to know what lead up to this comment and was some llm involved?
  - hitekker 3y ago
    In my experience, LLM's are bad at generating concise & witty jokes. They can randomly generate but that requires the the prompter to be a funny person to begin with.
    - raincole 3y ago
      He was being sarcastic because the article isn't similar to comparable to "a machine crushed my hand" at all.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  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.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    Not who you replied to but often even if significant parts of your job is shitty, if the fundamentals (incl having a good boss who bats for you) are in place, you'd speak favorably/with fond nostalgia. This didn't sound anything like that.
- dekhn 3y ago
  when building industrial tools, one builds them to do their job as painlessly as possible, so I could totally see writing a note to self that the gears should be sharpened. Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
zerr 3y ago
They do anthropomorphize - Flutter and Golang mascots.
- pram 3y ago
  The Gopher is solely because of Rob Pike and his wife I assume.
  - cdibona 3y ago
    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.
raybb 3y ago
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/ 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.
xnacly 3y ago
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
- okdood64 3y ago
  Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.
  - hbn 3y ago
    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.
    - okdood64 3y ago
      > 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.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
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."
- gnfargbl 3y ago
  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.
  - quux 3y ago
    I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC tenure.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    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.
FpUser 3y ago
>" 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.
- lookitsnicholas 3y ago
  [flagged]
tech234a 3y ago
“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 https://socratic.org/principles
next_xibalba 3y ago
> 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.
- hipadev23 3y ago
  Google hasn’t innovated on anything in over a decade. Just continuing to ride that search monopoly. Entire company of rest and vesters.
  - moomin 3y ago
    Except, as pointed out, a lot of the tech was literally developed at Google. It’s like Xerox Labs all over again.
  - next_xibalba 3y ago
    They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.
    - goalonetwo 3y ago
      "researched" it, yes. But they are completely unable to operationalize it.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        I used Google Bard today. Is that somehow not operationalized?
        pseg134 3y ago
        Ahh so you were our user today. How was the experience?
munk-a 3y ago
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.
- jedberg 3y ago
  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.
- ekanes 3y ago
  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.
croisillon 3y ago
a new post for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ ;)
jccalhoun 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
joecool1029 3y ago
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'
inamberclad 3y ago
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.
somethoughts 3y ago
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.
- bradstewart 3y ago
  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.
  - somethoughts 3y ago
    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.
EspressoGPT 3y ago
> 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 https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/jlcw0w
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
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.
orsenthil 3y ago
> 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.
jjwiseman 3y ago
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.
drewg123 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
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- modeless 3y ago
  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.
  - drewg123 3y ago
    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.
  - choppaface 3y ago
    For those they don’t hire, do they give a severance or other package for comp?
    - modeless 3y ago
      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.
- 3y ago
ren_engineer 3y ago
>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
- voiceblue 3y ago
  I work at Google and just today I had a conversation with a director that made me realize even he cannot force anything that doesn’t make “promo” happen: the culture is rotten to the core in terms of incentives. If you want to get anything done fast “at” Google, you pretty much have to quit and do it and then get re-acquired.
  - philsnow 3y ago
    aka, The Cisco Way
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Hat tip there. I only learned about their "spin-in" (not "spin-out") start-up culture recently. If anything, it seems like management genius to realise they will miss many of the best ideas if they lock their best talent into mediocre roles.
didip 3y ago
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.
- leoh 3y ago
  It’s because unless you’re pretty savvy and skeptical (albeit in a sophisticated way), your counterparts at Google are going to feed you all kinds of incredible, fanciful ideas about how things are going to be that don’t typically come to fruition. It’s hard to develop savviness and a sophisticated sort of skepticism (ie a kind that doesn’t merely border on cynicism). So it’s disappointing when one’s optimism is exploited. Which, Google, having gone through this sort of thing so many times — “knows” they are exploiting. I say “knows” because Google M&A know this stuff in spades. Whether it’s reported up is another matter; as to say “the company we acquired is unhappy” is to bring blame upon M&A folks who are just doing their jobs. Also see Judas Goat — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat
bradley13 3y ago
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.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > which might have benefited from the product that was assimilated into the Borg. I think a partial solution to this is to ensure a minimum level of support for say 10 years. A planned and community-agreed roadmap, bug and security fixes. Google could afford it without any practical cost. Founders get the money. Consumers get a product for a decade.
- leros 3y ago
  It's really sad seeing startups get purchased just for a core piece of tech or for one of their teams. And 90% of the time, it never goes anywhere anyway so it just ends up destroying the startup for no reason. On the other hand, as a big company, it's really nice letting the plethora of startups try various approaches and then buying one that is working, rather than making an attempt or two in house. You usually end up with better solutions for cheaper that way.
- esafak 3y ago
  This is a bad idea if applied too broadly. Founders often build companies with the intention of selling them to bigger companies. Products that are intended to replace or complement one of the acquirer's products.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    If most of them die or are shut down by the acquirer, why should society at large care?
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
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einpoklum 3y ago
Please don't get acquired by Google. We need to bring people _out_ of their ecosystem, not into it.
fuzztester 3y ago
>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/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
ctvo 3y ago
It's a mixed bag of Google's internal infrastructure is amazing, but the company has culture and operational challenges. Just from the bottom half, mostly headings: > Most problems aren’t worth Google’s time, but surprising ones are. Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals. A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product. > Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts. > Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t. > Top heavy orgs are hard to steer. > Technical debt is real. So is process debt. > Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.
wantsanagent 3y ago
Socratic isn't available on Android? I can't install it because it was 'made for an older version of Android?' GJ!
aprdm 3y ago
> What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work. This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against, but not for something.
jhallenworld 3y ago
A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed: Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy.. It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure. IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses). At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace. IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world. I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.
ccb92 3y ago
Had a wonderful conversation with the author just a few days ago (link here: https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC), I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
ccb92 3y ago
Just interviewed author a few days ago: https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
philsnow 3y ago
> you might still wake up to find that while you were working on your project, two distant teams were also working on the same idea, and the time has come to fight it out because only one can proceed Or you might not, in the case of Waze and Maps. I don't want to know what sort of politics were involved in the decision to keep both products rolling in parallel for 10 years.
Lamad1234 3y ago
This kinda feels nostalgic!! At least, the goog doesn't seem to respect its users anymore!!
cdchn 3y ago
Too bad their "Ceebo" icon is a broken link, I'd be interested to see what it looked like given all the purported fuss that Google made about it.
stan_kirdey 3y ago
Claude2 summary: Google has amazing resources and access, but does things "the Google way" - they rebuilt the Socratic product from scratch using Google's own stacks and to their standards. Simple things done repeatedly can feel magical at Google's scale - like recalculating signals across the entire internet to improve Search. But much improvement comes from manual analysis and labeling data. Surprising problems get tackled if the right teams are interested - like developing a math image recognition API from scratch in 6 months. But most products face many hurdles to launch. There is an ever-shifting web of goals and efforts. Politics and frequent re-orgs can derail projects. Smart people argue rather than align. Technical debt is real, but so is process debt. Layers of reviews and requirements accumulate over time. Top-heavy teams with lots of senior people can cause gridlock. More doers than thinkers are needed. To drive something big, you must relentlessly sell the vision and get the right leaders on board. Many acquisitions fail. The Socratic founders left, and some goals weren't achieved, but parts of the product grew significantly. Overall, amazing things are possible at Google if you navigate politics, rally the right support, and play the long game. But it's challenging due to complex processes, shifting priorities, and ingrained ways of doing things.
diminikolaou 3y ago
Thank you for this write up - very insightful.
camillomiller 3y ago
> Working at Google is like having a second passport. Go to any major city in the world and your badge2 unlocks a beautiful office with great food, desks, and a high speed link to every person in Google’s 200,000+ person network. How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?
devdiary 3y ago
The acquisition seems to be old, Y2019. I am not sure if you wrote this blog just now or had written earlier and published now. How have your perspective changed about the decision to get acquired since 2019, if it did?
tianzhou 3y ago
“all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something“ -- Spot on
- weirdindiankid 3y ago
  This was reminiscent of that Oscar Wilde quote, “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
softwarebeware 3y ago
Funny how Brooks’ Law is still something people are learning: “ And counter-intuitively, adding more people to an early-stage project doesn't make it go faster.”
camila45 3y ago
Getting in touch with this hacker was the best decision I took. He helped me get into my spoouse phone and I got what I needed from him and found out he was not faithful at all. Thank you remotespywise for letting me see this. Get in touch with him for other hacking/recovery services. remotespywise @gmail com
muluneh 3y ago
Hi
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1045 points by shreyans 3y ago

AngelRamirez 3y ago

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camila45 3y ago

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olivierduval 3y ago

> "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...) ! ;-)

avidiax 3y ago
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.
- esafak 3y ago
  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.
  - ska 3y ago
    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.
  - sublimefire 3y ago
    I have a different experience in Microsoft where engineers would communicate with their customers if there are issues. There is always a first line of support but otherwise it will be escalated by the support staff and the engineer will jump in. Google is a bit weird because they do not target enterprises that much, their revenue is from ads sold to ordinary people.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  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.
- freefaler 3y ago
  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.
- hbn 3y ago
  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.
nonameiguess 3y ago
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.
- mattigames 3y ago
  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.
  - svieira 3y ago
    > 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.
    - mattigames 3y ago
      The time to argue is long gone, if you are past highschool and still believe in ghosts you call "Gods" I don't want anything to do with you, that exception you make in your head from some basic rational thinking makes me suspect that you have many one similar exceptions that I am better away from.
- rand846633 3y ago
  Or maybe god just is really good at making use of caching and has cloudflare tuned in properly?

goalonetwo 3y ago

"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.

marcinzm 3y ago
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.
- greatpostman 3y ago
  As a founder, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the VC firm
  - JanSt 3y ago
    As a bootstrapper, you have to live it to realize you are in some sense still an employee of the client
    - gomox 3y ago
      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
      - sebastiennight 3y ago
        As a conscious mind needing carbohydrates to sustain compute
- kbknapp 3y ago
  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.

zhivota 3y ago

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.

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ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
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.
- butlike 3y ago
  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?

dwroberts 3y ago

> 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)

leoh 3y ago
Right. If Google had taken SWE/SREs, say, and had them rewrite Socratic to fit Google infra while it had allowed Socratic engineers to think about incremental product enhancements that leveraged Google’s capabilities (as opposed to putting them full time on the rewrite), a far more optimal outcome that probably wouldn’t have led to them leaving. One takeaway is that if you get acquired by Google, you should try to advocate for such an arrangement. Having worked for a firm that was acquired, it was incredible and devastating imo how much talent was squandered by these endless rewrites. Each IC’s decision to do that, to be fair — the money or something else wins for them. But just a bummer to see.

moritonal 3y ago

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.

JohnFen 3y ago
Was it an aquihire?
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  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.
  - bennyg 3y ago
    I think the parent you’re replying to knows that, they were asking if this was an example of that.
- freedomben 3y ago
  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)_/¯
- gizmo 3y ago
  A 10 person startup without a business model? And all the tech got thrown out. Clearly an acquihire.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

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 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.

jrockway 3y ago
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.)
s1gnp0st 3y ago
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.

gniv 3y ago

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

xnorswap 3y ago

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

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dekhn 3y ago

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.

s3r3nity 3y ago
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.
- caturopath 3y ago
  What are a couple somewhat-comparable companies with really good product management?
jiveturkey 3y ago
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.

asdfman123 3y ago

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.

leidenfrost 3y ago
That's the office near the port, right? Beautiful neighborhood and the commercial part is very tourist friendly.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  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.
  - parthdesai 3y ago
    Not a googler, but their office in Toronto is in pretty meh area tbh
    - otalp 3y ago
      Do they have a dev office in Toronto? Thought it was in waterloo
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        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.

sumuyuda 3y ago

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

jiveturkey 3y ago
it’s not a monorepo in the git sense of monorepo. git won’t scale that way.
dboreham 3y ago
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.
vkou 3y ago
There's no other way to run a firm this size without half of it being mired in dependency hell.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
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.
- duped 3y ago
  I've worked with some Xooglers who were incapable of working on smaller repos without google's internal tools for this kind of thing. And I mean literally incapable of writing meaningful code or pushing to main. Total anecdote and not worth much, but I've seen it enough times to make note of it.

doublerabbit 3y ago

> 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.

b20000 3y ago

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

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
I think your success with this entirely depends on what and why you're reaching out to them, no?
- b20000 3y ago
  no, it depends on whether you know people on the inside

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

> 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.

sarora27 3y ago
> I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset. Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. > I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. > I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. > If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. Big respect for you. I quit programming as a whole because I felt I would never find people with your mindset in this field. The thought depressed me enough to choose another career.

pkilgore 3y ago

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.

rand846633 3y ago
This made me laugh so hard! I really want to know what lead up to this comment and was some llm involved?
- hitekker 3y ago
  In my experience, LLM's are bad at generating concise & witty jokes. They can randomly generate but that requires the the prompter to be a funny person to begin with.
  - raincole 3y ago
    He was being sarcastic because the article isn't similar to comparable to "a machine crushed my hand" at all.
kccqzy 3y ago
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.
- user_7832 3y ago
  Not who you replied to but often even if significant parts of your job is shitty, if the fundamentals (incl having a good boss who bats for you) are in place, you'd speak favorably/with fond nostalgia. This didn't sound anything like that.
dekhn 3y ago
when building industrial tools, one builds them to do their job as painlessly as possible, so I could totally see writing a note to self that the gears should be sharpened. Do not look into laser with remaining eye.

zerr 3y ago

They do anthropomorphize - Flutter and Golang mascots.

pram 3y ago
The Gopher is solely because of Rob Pike and his wife I assume.
- cdibona 3y ago
  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.

raybb 3y ago

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/ 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.

xnacly 3y ago

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

okdood64 3y ago
Brand yourself as a software engineer instead of fullstack developer, network to find a referral, LeetCode hard.
- hbn 3y ago
  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.
  - okdood64 3y ago
    > 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.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

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."

gnfargbl 3y ago
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.
- quux 3y ago
  I think this is why Google had (has?) a 2 year limit on TVC tenure.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  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.

FpUser 3y ago

>" 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.

lookitsnicholas 3y ago
[flagged]

tech234a 3y ago

“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 https://socratic.org/principles

next_xibalba 3y ago

> 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.

hipadev23 3y ago
Google hasn’t innovated on anything in over a decade. Just continuing to ride that search monopoly. Entire company of rest and vesters.
- moomin 3y ago
  Except, as pointed out, a lot of the tech was literally developed at Google. It’s like Xerox Labs all over again.
- next_xibalba 3y ago
  They literally invented transformers, one of the key innovations that enabled this LLM boom.
  - goalonetwo 3y ago
    "researched" it, yes. But they are completely unable to operationalize it.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I used Google Bard today. Is that somehow not operationalized?
      - pseg134 3y ago
        Ahh so you were our user today. How was the experience?

munk-a 3y ago

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.

jedberg 3y ago
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.
ekanes 3y ago
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.

croisillon 3y ago

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

jccalhoun 3y ago

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.

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joecool1029 3y ago

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'

inamberclad 3y ago

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.

somethoughts 3y ago

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.

bradstewart 3y ago
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.
- somethoughts 3y ago
  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.

EspressoGPT 3y ago

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

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

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.

orsenthil 3y ago

> 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.

jjwiseman 3y ago

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.

drewg123 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
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modeless 3y ago
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.
- drewg123 3y ago
  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.
- choppaface 3y ago
  For those they don’t hire, do they give a severance or other package for comp?
  - modeless 3y ago
    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.
3y ago

ren_engineer 3y ago

>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

voiceblue 3y ago
I work at Google and just today I had a conversation with a director that made me realize even he cannot force anything that doesn’t make “promo” happen: the culture is rotten to the core in terms of incentives. If you want to get anything done fast “at” Google, you pretty much have to quit and do it and then get re-acquired.
- philsnow 3y ago
  aka, The Cisco Way
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Hat tip there. I only learned about their "spin-in" (not "spin-out") start-up culture recently. If anything, it seems like management genius to realise they will miss many of the best ideas if they lock their best talent into mediocre roles.

didip 3y ago

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.

leoh 3y ago
It’s because unless you’re pretty savvy and skeptical (albeit in a sophisticated way), your counterparts at Google are going to feed you all kinds of incredible, fanciful ideas about how things are going to be that don’t typically come to fruition. It’s hard to develop savviness and a sophisticated sort of skepticism (ie a kind that doesn’t merely border on cynicism). So it’s disappointing when one’s optimism is exploited. Which, Google, having gone through this sort of thing so many times — “knows” they are exploiting. I say “knows” because Google M&A know this stuff in spades. Whether it’s reported up is another matter; as to say “the company we acquired is unhappy” is to bring blame upon M&A folks who are just doing their jobs. Also see Judas Goat — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat

bradley13 3y ago

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.

user_7832 3y ago
> which might have benefited from the product that was assimilated into the Borg. I think a partial solution to this is to ensure a minimum level of support for say 10 years. A planned and community-agreed roadmap, bug and security fixes. Google could afford it without any practical cost. Founders get the money. Consumers get a product for a decade.
leros 3y ago
It's really sad seeing startups get purchased just for a core piece of tech or for one of their teams. And 90% of the time, it never goes anywhere anyway so it just ends up destroying the startup for no reason. On the other hand, as a big company, it's really nice letting the plethora of startups try various approaches and then buying one that is working, rather than making an attempt or two in house. You usually end up with better solutions for cheaper that way.
esafak 3y ago
This is a bad idea if applied too broadly. Founders often build companies with the intention of selling them to bigger companies. Products that are intended to replace or complement one of the acquirer's products.
- manicennui 3y ago
  If most of them die or are shut down by the acquirer, why should society at large care?
3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
[dead]

einpoklum 3y ago

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

fuzztester 3y ago

>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/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

ctvo 3y ago

It's a mixed bag of Google's internal infrastructure is amazing, but the company has culture and operational challenges. Just from the bottom half, mostly headings: > Most problems aren’t worth Google’s time, but surprising ones are. Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals. A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product. > Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts. > Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t. > Top heavy orgs are hard to steer. > Technical debt is real. So is process debt. > Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.

wantsanagent 3y ago

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

aprdm 3y ago

> What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work. This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against, but not for something.

jhallenworld 3y ago

A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed: Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy.. It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure. IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses). At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace. IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world. I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.

ccb92 3y ago

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

ccb92 3y ago

Just interviewed author a few days ago: https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.

philsnow 3y ago

> you might still wake up to find that while you were working on your project, two distant teams were also working on the same idea, and the time has come to fight it out because only one can proceed Or you might not, in the case of Waze and Maps. I don't want to know what sort of politics were involved in the decision to keep both products rolling in parallel for 10 years.

Lamad1234 3y ago

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

cdchn 3y ago

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

stan_kirdey 3y ago

Claude2 summary: Google has amazing resources and access, but does things "the Google way" - they rebuilt the Socratic product from scratch using Google's own stacks and to their standards. Simple things done repeatedly can feel magical at Google's scale - like recalculating signals across the entire internet to improve Search. But much improvement comes from manual analysis and labeling data. Surprising problems get tackled if the right teams are interested - like developing a math image recognition API from scratch in 6 months. But most products face many hurdles to launch. There is an ever-shifting web of goals and efforts. Politics and frequent re-orgs can derail projects. Smart people argue rather than align. Technical debt is real, but so is process debt. Layers of reviews and requirements accumulate over time. Top-heavy teams with lots of senior people can cause gridlock. More doers than thinkers are needed. To drive something big, you must relentlessly sell the vision and get the right leaders on board. Many acquisitions fail. The Socratic founders left, and some goals weren't achieved, but parts of the product grew significantly. Overall, amazing things are possible at Google if you navigate politics, rally the right support, and play the long game. But it's challenging due to complex processes, shifting priorities, and ingrained ways of doing things.

diminikolaou 3y ago

Thank you for this write up - very insightful.

camillomiller 3y ago

> Working at Google is like having a second passport. Go to any major city in the world and your badge2 unlocks a beautiful office with great food, desks, and a high speed link to every person in Google’s 200,000+ person network. How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?

devdiary 3y ago

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

tianzhou 3y ago

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

weirdindiankid 3y ago
This was reminiscent of that Oscar Wilde quote, “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

softwarebeware 3y ago

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

camila45 3y ago

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muluneh 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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