i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died.
the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game.
i loved watching how Google would continuously pat themselves on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the company but technically weren't FTEs.
it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they somehow took over San Francisco.
Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.
Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted completely.
It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.
But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.
In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs.
We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They have to charge this by law!
To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.
It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially.
I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)
In the UK we have IR35 laws that say contractors must be distinct from employees in various ways.
The legislation is a shitshow.
It was supposed to be a way to protect people from zero-hours contracts but ended up being a way to extort more tax from businesses.
As a result, contractors face very odd rules to ensure that if HMRC (the UK tax body) comes knocking ... everything seems legit.
This means everything is policed from how you write emails to if you pay for the Christmas team meal.
This was in the days of cubes, and contractors got the ones that were two folks per cube and there were other things.
Some of us did get hired and became "real". But the concerns that led to this kind of treatment were quite real.
There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.
Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment agreement is consensual.
All social institutions eventually become that.
It's inescapable.
Since then I've been a perm at a couple of places were I had hiring responsibility and teams that included contractors and I ALWAYS made a point of treating them EXACTLY the same. I also never encountered another organisation that was as fucked in their treatment of contractors.
Now contractors have to be treated much worse because there is precedent for legal consequences if you treat them as well as your employees. It's just business, it's certainly not good for morale or productivity to create a class divide, but not creating that divide incurs serious liabilities.
I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at Google.
Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class ‘end to end’ that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting stuff. Pure joy, that one!
I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn’t counting this against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian.
I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at least two hours a day with no interruptions.
Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a contractor, go for it!
Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right?
Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.
Kind of the reason I prefer mid-market tech companies. More likely to treat "contractors" as equals. The place I'm at now they're indistinguishable internally from regular employees, they're just paid by another company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp
Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary.
So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google.
Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent.
> If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google."
Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.
Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny benefits?
If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.
This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.
No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.
I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was usually a mix of developing competency and department having budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal year.
The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a company switching treadmill.
In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.
Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting.
It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
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.
Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.
FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot.
If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.
No awkward team lunches
No useless tchotchkes
No boring all hands
No forced participation events like 'hackathons'.
I just worked. It was great
Source: former Cisco.
Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.
On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else.
Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.
Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term.
In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.
While extending it to things as small as a team lunch is going a bit far, it's understandable that they don't want to open up a slippery slope of it looking too much like an employment relationship. In many European countries that can result in false self-employment and get both the company and the contractor in legal trouble.
Blame government regulations in this case, probably? It seems implausibly evil that they would be that anal about things just to preserve the in-group club status. But, if it's about employee vs contractor distinction for regulations, it makes total sense (well, not at a global/system level, but the behavior in isolation).
Kind of seems like Google bought the company, mushed the team into the rest of Google and killed the app off.
For an example, anything/anyone that wants to access user data at Google faces an extremely high bar for access, with layers of access control, auditing, approvals, and enforcement, starting at the design phase through to implementation.
At Google that's a good thing. However it would be pretty silly at a 10 person startup.
What Google isn't great at is taking risks on new product ideas (for many good and bad reasons), and that's why they often acquire companies that do that sort of thing.
You could change none of the facts of this blog and write it as an aggressive rant about how Google murdered their startup, forced them to re-write the entire thing, stopped them shipping by being a bureaucratic nightmare, and the big take away is you can succeed at google if you "play the right game" if you know what I mean. It's ... not positive.
But if you look at the true final outcome, the post you are responding to was correct: they bought Socratic, rewrote and then relaunched it, and now Socratic is for all intents and purposes dead.
So, upon reflection, saying "there were good things and bad" feels a bit like the famous "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" joke.
I'd be pretty happy.
As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.
Not "killed off" exactly, no.
I've heard that's become better, but maybe not.
Google's search & ads billions keep raining from the sky, so killing acquired product isn't a big problem.
So if this is a PR piece, then it is not a great one.
waves to Matt Hancher
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.
So just like when changing jobs?
It's more like getting a layoff and then offered an interview for a new job.
For me, we didn't have to do the interview. But there were a lot of other strings attached, most drastic being having to move cities (or have a 2-hour-each-way commute).
The money makes it worthwhile, but it's not a happy happy joy joy moment.
I also got a peavish Google recruiter all pissed at me about the fact that we were sharing notes with each other about the offers they were sending us, which I thought was pretty funny.
on acquihires you can have a full interview
I went on this meet and greet and it was more of a googlyness type thing just to check you have a pulse, others didn’t at all, all the team was hired, my only guess it could affected leveling and price
Soooo much of the Ego of Google engineering -- at least in the past -- is built around their sense of superiority of having made it through that interview and being selected as one of the "best engineers in the world."
Gave me heightened impostor syndrome for 10 years.
I think one is better off getting the interview.
This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production
I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an urban studies masters (https://www.4cities.eu/) but it wasn't an easy decision. I hope we work together again in the future. If anyone is looking to work at an education startup check out maven.com for sure.
> 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.
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
> 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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not too unusual, other companies I've worked were very similar.
This is not true.
I will also call you out on this. The word is very strongly negative, so I think it's inappropriate to use in this context.
Because the buildings are usually located in very central city locations - I've often used the offices as a way to kill time til' check-in opens for hotels after a long-haul flight (grab food, caffeinate, have a shower, etc)
Recently I took a night train between Stockholm and Copenhagen.
Showered in the Stockholm office, walked 5 minutes to the train station, slept, woke up in Copenhagen, grabbed a hearty breakfast in the CPH office.
It's a little perk that is honestly vastly underestimated
Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.
Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior folks -- leave.
I stuck around (for another 6 years) after my 3-4 years of golden handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.
Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.
In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ... though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly without us.
2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a while.
It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.
Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.
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.
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)
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.
OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
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.
This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.
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.
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.
It's really weird watching hackers defend the idea of monopolies like Google now, at the expense of FOSS. It makes me wonder if Microsoft had been spending more money publicly buying startups back in the 90's if hackers would have defended them then.
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.
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.
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.
So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.
There is only one reason why you would sell: lots of money. You understand this going into the transaction. Once the company is acquired, it's no longer yours.
And you understand very well why you sold to Google: Because they are so big that they can give you a lot of money. Unfortunately, a large company always has a lot of bureaucracy. Surely the author knows this.
That's it. No need to criticize, you got the money, you got to the finished line.
It’s 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
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.I was part of a similar acquisition story and feel many of the same things, but the company was eBay so all the talk about great things wasn't as applicable. Just mostly the bad things.
I wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in the LLM space right now.
OpenAI and friends are able to move quickly, but (so far) they're not able to translate their LLM innovations into high-margin revenue with any significant moat.
Give it a couple years to see where all the cards settle and who's actually making money "with" LLMs.
Google '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'
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.
> 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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?
And now we have most using everything built by Google. Sad times when compared to times when everything was once individually created.
I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
That said, here is a small list of things you’ll need to get a job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies:
• Educational Background: it seems that you’re a student at https://www.dhbw.de/startseite, so you’re good.
• Develop Technical Skills: you’re already familiar with Go (https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories&language=go). Consider getting some knowledge of C++ or Python as they are common at Google. Python will help you a lot during the interviews.
• Build a Strong Portfolio: junior developers usually have much more free time to work on personal projects. I see you already have a GitHub account with a good amount of Go code, so I think you’re on the right track -- https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories
• Gain Practical Experience: consider internships, co-op programs, or contribute to open-source projects, participate in hackathons or coding competitions to demonstrate your problem-solving skills.
• Networking: attend industry events, meetups, and conferences to connect with professionals in the field. Google often looks for candidates through referrals. Join relevant online communities, forums, and social media groups to stay informed about job opportunities and industry trends.
• Prepare for Interviews: LeetCode like a madman! -- https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/
• Apply for Positions: obviously, apply for a job; connect with a recruiter.
I could go on and on with this list, but you’ll discover the other things you’ll need once you have done most of the ones above.
Good luck!
GJ!
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.
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.
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.
"Licking the cookie" has to be the single most common phrase that came up, but my general sense was that both Google and FB are full of weasels, only the latter is much more honest about it. Neither is particularly desirable.
EDIT: Feel the need to qualify, there is a lot of superb technical work there on many many teams, but it is the co-ordination of that (especially fights over gatekeeping that which goes forward) which is a total mess. The resulting strategic blunders and failure to execute create huge friction with the outside world.
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.
Couldn’t disagree more, most web presences in B2C have a chat box where you can talk to someone or something on the other end. Usually they’re horrible but when they’re good they’re fucking great.
I think the other problems you outline, plus the fact that google went through this process with gchat itself (anyone remember Allo?) are probably the main contributors. As a sibling comment notes: google’s product org is meme-level terrible from top to bottom.
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.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that this article is an example of pride or bragging. It seems like an inventory of what's unusual about Google. It also includes some somewhat cutting remarks about its dysfunctions, e.g.:
> Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.
Also, I think there's things to be proud about working at Google. In general working there does teach a diligence of quality that is often missing in SWE in other orgs, though many companies are picking up on the same practices anyways.
Personally, I found my time at Google to be useful from the POV of that, but also, yeah, just having it on my resume.
It's not really a positive one.
Source: I’ve been in IT for over a decade, across all sizes of companies.
It really has not. Unless you consider commenters on HN and r/technology the general public.
I'd say that the high-point of the nerd/tech stuff was around 2017-2018, i.e. just before the pandemic, but ever since then techies have started being seen as a nuisance (and worst) by more and more people.
