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."
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.
Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee
Not in practice, because they use a hiring entity to dictate the terms. You're expected to show up on a schedule, do the work etc. much like a FTE, but you're not an FTE.
I think some folks have this illusion of software contractors that this is somehow common, it really isn't. The norm is you-are-almost-but-not-quite an employee type work environment, and thats at the better places.
I've worked at a place where contractors were treated like they weren't human, basically. Worst equipment, forced to work in an old warehouse that barely passed code to be considered retrofitted for an office, people routine got sick out there because they were exposed to the elements. Not to mention, during fire season (this was California) they were in a building that didn't have a good enough air filtration system, so they were forced to sit in smoke all day, more or less
I quit that place pretty quickly, but it was nothing short of terrible
I think the GP's point was that's how it should be. If a company is going to -- for "legal reasons" -- not treat contractors the same way they treat employees, then they should be doing so not only in bad, exclusionary ways, but also in good ways, with the expected perks of being a contractor that FTEs don't get: freedom to set their own hours, work where they want, and subcontract out their work.
But no, companies like Google want to have their cake and eat it too: they want a class of workers where they can require of them more or less the exact same things that they require of their employees (and much more easily fire them), but can give them a lot less, and treat them like a second class.
That's entirely Google's choice. It does not have to be that way. But they've decided to create this two-class system for their own benefit, not for anyone else's.
Also consider that these people are probably often not contractors in the legal sense. They're likely W-2 employees of some sort of staffing agency, who are then placed at Google. Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.
>> Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.
The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the same as an FTE.
I used to work for a temp agency (clerical, not in tech) and I remember once seeing what my agency was getting paid for me on an hourly basis. Iirc, it was something like 3-4x what I was getting paid hourly. It was kind of sickening tbh. Plus many agencies forbid temps from being hired away without paying an outrageously hire fee to do so.
It felt like being an indentured servant in many ways. The only upside was that if you hated the place you worked, you could always ask to be reassigned someplace else. But that's the only major plus I can think of.
The most profitable consulting-type businesses have profit margins >=50%, before distributing profits to equity holders. But either way I'm not sure about your implicit assumption here that the profits should be comparable to the pay of the employees.
Hey, you began your comparison with the most profitable consulting firms…
2 things -
1) Accenture has an EBIT of 20%.
2) The tippy top of the consulting pyramid plays on branding in a way that the average firm does not.
The VAST majority of service driven firms will not become McKinsey etc. making this a poor comparison
Finally - I doubt that the top firms have those margins, I would most definitely like to be corrected though. If you could clarify or share your source, I’d appreciate it.
Note I mention profit before distributing to equity holders. The highest prestige and therefore most profitable consulting companies are all partnerships.
Some highly profitable consulting companies that are partnerships have very high margins, if you don't include the profit sharing component of the pay of equity partners (but do include bonus and fixed salary). The primary public source I can point to is that many top law firms publish their margins to be >=50%.
As for McKinsey, according to Google, McKinsey has 10k consultants and 2700 partners. There are 30k employees, so I give you that the overhead rate is higher than law firms. But
given how different pay is between partners and non-partners, and there is still a relatively large portion of partners compared to other employees, the margins, if calculated this way, is probably still pretty high.
Now is this the right way of considering profit margin? There are some good reasons to disagree with it. But in the same way people can like or dislike EBITDA. At least, it's like nobody discounts Larry and Sergey's cut from Google's profit.
In this context, I would argue it is indeed a good way, especially for the purposes of discussing the discrepancy between grunt pay and hourly charge. It tells us that a very large part of that discrepancy goes to equity partners (who aren't those doing the execution work), rather than "overhead" as it's being argued. This is very different from big-corp type public companies where, even though executive pay is a lot, the bulk of the pay goes to shareholders ans a large number of rank and file and moderately paid middle-managers, which I suspect to be closer to accenture's profile.
The idea of equity in a consulting-type business is pretty strange, on the face of it.
Leaving aside the partnership fair/unfair model, equity = access to capital.
But consulting-type businesses are essentially headcount machines, because the product is 1 person's time.
So why do you need access to capital?
Granted, it makes expansion easier (hire ahead of work), but as far as profit distributions go, what are equity holders providing in exchange for their slice of the profits?
Primarily, you want an apples to apples comparison. A law firm is a service provider, however not a consultancy. The service the two types of firms provide are not directly comparable.
Furthermore, a law firm is a place where your assertion - “ discrepancy goes to equity partners (who aren't those doing the execution work)…”
Senior partners are pretty critical in bringing and keeping clients.
In my previous service company, we aimed for 10%, which was considered the norm. However, we were particularly bad at achieving this, with only 8-9%, though we did have a good atmosphere and happy employees
Getting to profit through pure people power is hard. Every next person you add doesnt double your output. It’s maybe increases it by some %. (This includes overhead costs)
FWIW, this isn't the case at Google (or many other large technology companies). Google dictates the staffing agency markup (which is very limited) and audits for compliance.
This, among many other processes, has significant negative impacts on the quality of the agency that will work with Google on this sort of work - but it does help with cost control.
(Source: I ran one of these agencies, and Google was a past client.)
> They're likely W-2 employees of some sort of staffing agency, who are then placed at Google.
This is precisely what Samsung does in Austin at its fab, via Randstad. I was a supervisor, and had about 50:50 FTE and Contractor. They were treated exactly the same, including getting pizza parties and the like. The main – and largest – difference was FTE benefits were awesome, and Contractors got the bare minimum required by law (Texas, so basically nothing).
I often complained about this to management, to no avail. My main argument was that we were training people to quit and go work for Intel or GloFo as FTEs. Didn’t seem to matter.
I hate this model so much. Just pay people if you want FTEs.
It is a shell company, except that it is not Google (or its equivalent) who is creating it. It is the Infosys and Cognizants (or other bodyshopping firms) of the world who create this structure to satisfy the demand created by the Googles.
I mean classic example are contracting out food service in the corporate cafeteria. You contract the work to some random other company who hire people to do food service or do you want Google or whoever to start hiring cooks themselves? Janitorial staff is also a classic role for this style of employment.
That's quite different - Google contracts for a service to be provided and takes no interest in managing janitors and cooks individually. The red badgers sound like they're being given individual instructions but denied employee protection.
Two different kind of outsourcing contracts. And red badgers, unless they are freelancers, have employee protection. Just not from Google, or any other company using subcontracting agencies for that matter.
but looking at it from a top down perspective, it does seem like google treats these contractors no better than the janitors and cooks. So i dont think you can say it's different merely because the nature of the work is not the same.
The difference between a legitimate third party service and these ought-to-be-illegal body shop arrangements is whether Google is paying for a specific service—e.g. clean offices—or people that they boss around.
Google managed to hire their first chef in 1999 and manage them directly, I'm sure they can manage a global team of cooks better than anyone else if they wanted to, because of their specific needs and so many global offices to spread the gains through. It's all just a decision they took.
Google has infinite money and doesn't have to care about things like that. They can waste money on food just like they waste it hiring 10000 engineers who don't do any work.
What surprises me the most is how a corporation like Google is incapable of meeting temporary staffing needs internally, by shifting people already on their payroll around projects. It's as if they are just admitting that they are shit at managing projects and workloads and scoping work to the point that they need external help to plug these gaping holes in their load management.
How many people do they need to pay to manage this contractor circus? How much effort do they waste sourcing contractors, tracking work assigned to them, treat contractors differently even interns of security processes, and dealing with higher attrition levels? So much waste.
That’s not legally a contractor then. As someone who has done contracting, both for software and in construction plus has hired them and had to be advised by lawyers around the legality of what makes or breaks a contractor…
If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee. This is the law in 100% of the United States.
>That’s not legally a contractor then. [...] If you are setting their hours, bossing them around and/or providing equipment they are not a contractor they are an employee.
There are 2 different uses of "contractor":
(1) contractor : official IRS tax classification of 1099 independent contractor
(2) "contractor" : a W-2 employee of a "temp agency" or "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" that is sent to a client company (such as Google) needing contingent workers. Adecco[1] is an example of a staffing company that sends people to Google. These temp agencies with workers classified as W-2 employees act as legal cover to "avoid repeating Microsoft lawsuits". From Google's perspective, these Adecco employees are "contractors".
If the above working arrangement looks convoluted with the economic inefficiencies of paying for an extra middleman (the temp agencies), it is. But it cleverly avoids the IRS claiming, "Hey Google, your so-called contractors are misclassified and should be employees!" ... and Google can say, "They already are employees! They're Adecco employees!"
The "1099 real contractor" is not as common as "fake-contractor-but-really-somebody-elses-W2-employee" ... because the "1099 contractors" won their lawsuit against Microsoft.
The tax reform act of 1986 removes the safe-harbor provision for engineers and programmers. This strange sentence means that if a company hires an engineer or programmer - as an independent contractor - and the IRS later decides that this person is really an employee, then the company is liable for back taxes and probably penalties. For other professions, the "safe harbor" provision means that the company is only liable for paying the employer share of taxes going forwards - the previous stuff is handwaved away.
In effect, this scares companies so much that it is very difficult to get hired as a 1099 contractor as a programmer/engineer. The vast majority of companies will require you to be a W-2 employee of some other company (which will be the "staffing agency" or "bodyshop" or "temp agency").
One programmer was driven to fly his aircraft into an IRS building due to this issue.
I'm a mostly fake contractor. I miss the good old days when I could fake contractor directly to companies. Now I have to go through a middle-man that takes a cut. I still make triple what I was making before, but it bothers me that the middle man is likely taking 30-50% off the top.
These laws do not protect workers, they protect entrenched wealthy body shops.
IIRC they can, but only if the other company is also paying some proportion of the costs relative to how many of their employees are present, or something like that. It's been a little while but the rules are in some training presentation or other.
And the ruling makes it
clear that it’s based on the actual on the ground reality, which is why vendors get pulled in the same way.
If the main company is the one giving the vendors employees their direction, managing them, setting hours explicitly, they get included in all hands, etc. then the main company is also on the hook for being their actual employer as far as benefits, taxes, etc. go.
So there needs to be a clear delineation at all times, or bad things happen to the primary company regarding costs.
> Ok but then contractors have the freedom to work whatever hours they want, not show up to the office, and subcontract out their work - right? If so that might be more appealing than being an employee
Depends on the agreement. First off, probably 99% of these contractors work for a contracting company, so as a contractor you have no say: You are an employee of (another) company and they'll set the rules.
If you're truly independent, then sure - try to make whatever agreement you want with Google.
Which is because it is extremely rude, like meanest of meanest, to not share food with each other. Like, of all mean but not illegal things you can do to contractors, not sharing food is probably what people consider the worst. Small every day things are way more provocative than abstract things like retirement funds or whatever.
Been there. Done that. The FTEs got strawberries. I didn't. I don't think I have been that pissed off in my life. If someone had wrecked my car on purpose I'd be less pissed.
I experienced something similar at a previous job. It was funny. I was working in a satellite office for an org based in a different country, and once in a while (minimum once a year) we'd be sent to HQ for a few weeks. Wrapping up projects, team coordination, whatever. So of course we'd eat together.
The team got a new manager when I joined, and he was told that our treatment was equal despite satellite office status because we were on the same teams coordinating on the same projects, but in different timezones.
Anyway, even though I was technically a FTE at the company, I didn't have the necessary prerequisites to pay for cafeteria food at FTE discounts. I was forced to pay contractor prices. A full extra $5 per meal. My manager was initially confused, then upset. Then we tried to talk with the cafeteria contracting company. They told him it was out of their control. So, we began investigating...eventually uncovering some internal "separate but equal" undocumented employment scheme were compensation, benefits, whatnot, unraveled into a weird caste discrimination system. The people that were pulling their weight were paid pennies while senior team members who were awaiting retirement just raked in the big bucks with benefits on contracts no longer offered, or offered through some backdoor deals before the company really expanded.
In the end, the lunch situation was solved by just stating that I was a FTE because I had the same color badge. It turns out the cashiers didn't even
scan badges or anything, just asked you if you were internal and to show your badge.
But out of all the bullshit we uncovered, the food situation really broke his spirit the most.
I don't get it. Why would you be pissed if those were the rules of the company you were contracting to? As a contractor you get paid more than the regular employees because you take on a greater risk (such as being fired at any moment without any explanation) and you do whatever you're told. If you don't like it you can always look for another client. My point being you can't have your cake and eat it too. Does it suck sometimes? Yes. But such is contractor life.
Hospitality is a fundamental virtue. Skimping out on food is maybe the fundamental transgression of norms. The anger is subconscious and maybe primal.
I was a "contractor" from an in practice body shop consult agency, not an actual contractor. I did every day office work for three years, being part of a normal work group going to every day meetings etc.
But I don't think that matters. If you have an actual consultant in the office, being there once a month, you give him strawberries too, if you hand out strawberries.
Also, the pay was somewhat lower. I was fresh out of uni so I didn't know better.
Notably, only bosses two layers up thought it was a good idea to skimp on the strawberries etc. The bosses that had to deal with the ensuing bad mood ensured there was no such distinction between FTEs and "contractors".
I think we're talking about different things: contractors are paid more than regular employees doing the same thing. And they don't have any benefits the actual employees have.
> Also, the pay was somewhat lower. I was fresh out of uni so I didn't know better.
What you describe is outsourcing, not contracting.
The body shop and their client call it contracting. If one will follow the mantra of "words mean whatever people use them as" then this is contracting.
> Why would you be pissed if those were the rules of the company you were contracting to?
Not being on the Google health or retirement plan is one thing. That's something you can do maths to, see if your alternative arrangements make sense.
But witholding food is something that feels anti-human. Like it hits some primal parts of me. Eating a meal with people you work alongside is, depending on your interpretation, between a few hundred thousand and a few hundred million years old as a social act.
I doubt there are true contractors. Giants would not bother to do contractor paperwork with individuals. Most common is when "contractors" are employees of other bodyshop company and are paid as their regular employees, just leased to the client.
And if the we are talking about US - then their salary is much lower, simply because they cannot go anywhere else due to visa constraints.
Different treatment is a thing. But I couldn't imagine someone is ESA will say fruits and pizza are for employees only. Please leave the room while your coworkers eat.
You are missing the point that legal vs. socially acceptable are two different but very real factors that people care about.
You can’t legal away basic courtesy and explain away people’s anger at being treated like a lower social class.
Imagine if first class seats on a commercial flight were interspersed among regular class seats. First class passengers get more room, better food, more respect from attendants … right in front of people who don’t get those.
If the first class passengers get faster access to something basic like water, some people will go ballistic.
Sure people paid more for the nicer seats, but do you think that legal fact dispenses with the unhealthy social situation and bad feelings that would create?
ESA is one of the world’s leading space exploration organizations and one of the few that is international in scope, representing 22 member states. Contrary to a common misconception, ESA is not part of the European Union and not bound by European law. In fact, ESA is not bound by any real-world law, either local or national—it’s governed only by its 130-page Convention and a set of internal regulations.
This international status grants the ESA and its staff privileges that are far superior to those afforded to its bigger sister and role model, NASA, notably the ability to maintain any internal documents as confidential.
ESA were basically granted immunity, almost like a UN agency, and of course they are abusing it.
They also pay lower taxes than everyone else and so on. The best thing about ESA is that it sucks and doesn't actually accomplish much, so hopefully they stop this scam.
Again my complaint is not the end result isn't "impressive" in isolation it's that it's not impressive for the amount of time and money dumped into it compared to any other space program on earth. I said "for the money we pump into it".
Based on the data shared you're right and my assertions are wrong or at least overblown. To be honest I was thinking mostly compared to the Indian space program and their recent successes and I see that the data confirms that they have pumped less money and have (imo) done way more. But overall I'm wrong in the way I was positioning this, thanks for sharing, I did some more research on account of your comments.
No problem. After all, those programs are as much about maintaining knowledge, industry and capabilities in country as they are about specific missions.
To be fair, Austria had a pretty decent navy that used to give the Italians a run for their money. They probably did a bit of surfing here and there, too.
Eh, Scotland is in a similar position with a common-civil hybrid. The Channel Islands use a local customary Normon-derived legal system. And that's only in one European country!
UN geoscheme lists it as such if you want something concrete. (Though it also puts the UK in Northern Europe, and leaves out Italy & Spain & Portugal (Southern), which I didn't mean either.)
It's a funny term. In UK use it means something like 'mainland Europe but not Russia or some former Soviet states'. It's about the bits you think of and travel to, I suppose. Although that makes it sound obvious, which it isn't, because nobody means India when they say Asia, but it's at least as much in the public psyche as anywhere else in continental Asia.
I'd like to as in what ways is Europe great? From my narrow point of view, most if not all successful startups were founded outside Europe, most countries in Western Europe tend to be monolithic cultures where outsiders are made to feel like outsiders, and many European nations are socialist utopias (which means they take away a HUGE chunk of salary as tax).
(And I am asking this in a friendly tone, as a genuinely curious question, and not a combative one. These nuances get lost, so putting them down in words). Thanks.
It is great for living, for raising kids. For life.
Taxes in Europe are huge, but comparable with taxes in California. Just sum all federal, state, local taxes on the salary, property taxes, sales taxes, health insurance fee, college tuition fee. Don't forget to add 25% tips to that. Count also small vacation, maternity leave and sick leave.
And then compare for example with France.
And not to mention you wouldn't find anywhere in EU thousands of homeless junkies shitting on the streets.
I'm sorry, I don't think you have sufficient perspective on what middle class life is like in France to make this comment with any justification. French taxation is incredibly complex and heavy on the middle class. It is financially unfeasible for most middle class households to pass down their homes to their children due to the estate tax kicking on assets over 100,000 eur. There are many unhoused people spread across rural city centers and the outer banlieues of Paris. College is vastly more restricted in France and unavailable to the majority of the population. Social mobility is significantly constrained. Life grinds to a halt with some regularity due to general strikes. I am immensely grateful to have American citizenship and not have to raise my family in France.
It is financially unfeasible for most middle class households to pass down their homes to their children due to the estate tax kicking on assets over 100,000 eur.
That seems OK to me. Why should children who are lucky to be born into a stable middle class family have a large financial advantage over other children? To be clear, passing down an entire home tax free in a highly developed nation is a huge financial advantage. Literally: 1,000+ EURs per month, for life would be saved. Why do so many people on HN think this should be normal to allow? In my eyes, this is the path to Old World aristocracy. The purpose of inheritance taxes is to reduce this advantage.
I can guess what the reply/replies will be: "Oh, but housing is more expensive now. There is no choice but to use inheritance to give my children a head start." It would be better to ask why housing has gotten so out of control, not using inheritance to side step the issue.
You know, it's interesting. 100,000 eur really isn't a lot of money. I wager decent houses probably go double or triple that. Still, an entire life savings would most likely go into paying for that. Decades of labor in a country with small salaries and large taxes. 100k is nothing. Comparatively, to the rich that dominate the socio-economic and political landscape, it's probably a fun weekend vacation somewhere. I think that's what you dread: The rich that can afford to live lavishly. But you're harking over the barely haves, the not rich.
It's interesting.
A country with dwindling birthrates far below replacement levels perplexed by the fact that its people are refusing to father the next generation when they can't even provide a home for them. (It wouldn't even be tax free, by the way. Because the original proprietors bought and paid taxes on the house. What you're suggesting is double taxation :))
But it's okay. France has solved that problem: Make it illegal to take statistics on ethnic origins, let the poors of the world come flood your land, let them work for lower wages, and then act surprised when their culture is fundamentally incompatible with yours. Your streets are now unfamiliar. Unsafe. Dirty. They don't share your values of cleanliness and respect. Your freedom of expression. Don't worry. Their children won't be able to inherit their homes either. That's fine with them though: because they'll send their money back to their homelands where they can build villas with it, (or comfortably live in a ghetto squalor in Paris because it's still better than the conditions back home.)
> Why should children who are lucky to be born into a stable middle class family have a large financial advantage over other children
The reason why we have inheritances is people in power convinced each other that regular people will work harder throughout all their lives if they know they can give their children a better life. Meaning the economy is way better with some inheritance present than without inheritance.
Love is a powerful thing and while most people would agree with you that in theory they'd like all children to have the same opportunities, once their babies are born they will fight forever to give them the best conditions they can.
I agree with inheritance taxes, probably not 100%, but wanted to explain the perspective of people that want full untaxed inheritances.
> That seems OK to me. Why should children who are lucky to be born into a stable middle class family have a large financial advantage over other children?
Are you for real? Because it is not my or my children's fault other children don't have anything to inherit. This is how life works. You do whatever you can to get ahead of other through any means necessary to have a better future. You should not exepect the same outcome for people from different walks of life.
And just because not everyone can afford a house it is not my problem either.
> In my eyes, this is the path to Old World aristocracy. The purpose of inheritance taxes is to reduce this advantage.
So the world would be better if everyone was poor, right? The purpose of inheritance taxes is for the government to steal from your hard earned assets. Just because you're jealous of someone who inherits a big house or whatever will not make the world a better place.
> This is how life works. You do whatever you can to get ahead of other
Except its not how life works. Because we decided to make a law against it. You're trying to argue that the law is bad by... saying that it's not a natural law of the universe (no law is, murder is neutral on a cosmic scale)
> So the world would be better if everyone was poor, right
if you're arguing in this sort of bad faith its pointless discussing anything. Social mobility is demonstrably different across different nations, and policies do exist that actually affected social mobility. Social mobility correlates strongly with GDP. If you want a wealthy society, make it so hardworking people born into poor families can outcompete wealthy failsons
you replied to that by saying > You cannot have the same outcome
I explitly talked about outcome being dramatically different. Children of wealthy people who have no motivation to contribute anything to the world, learn no skills, and are lazy, should not end up on the same level as hardworking skilled children of poor parents. They should end much lower. Barriers to this include enormous inheritances, the housing market (prices driven up enormously by hoarding and inheritance), the cost of university education, vast disparities in the quality of education available in different areas, and nepotism in the jobs market.
These factors are very different in different countries. I forget the name of the stat but looking at the percentage of people born to bottom fifth income parents ending up as top fifth income earners themselves is quite telling. If I remember right there is a dramatic difference between similarly "developed" countries. I looked and couldn't find the original data I read but here [0] is similar, showing denmark children born to bottom quintile parents reach top quintile 14% of the time (perfect unachievable meritocracy would be 20%), wheras in the US its 8%.
It goes without saying, but the reason it is important to point out that it is different between countries is to argue against vibes based arguments of people who just throw their hands up and say "oh but woe is us this is the natural way of the world why rage against nature it will always be thus" simply because they think that is the case without any data whatsoever. This is literally table stakes for even discussing the problem.
> Children of wealthy people who have no motivation to contribute anything to the world, learn no skills, and are lazy, should not end up on the same level as hardworking skilled children of poor parents. They should end much lower. Barriers to this include enormous inheritances, the housing market (prices driven up enormously by hoarding and inheritance), the cost of university education, vast disparities in the quality of education available in different areas, and nepotism in the jobs market.
My gripe is with the above. Why would they try when they don't have to? Would you? And what does it matter to you that someone just spends money they inherited? It's like winning the lottery.
And what has someone's else wealth has to do with university costs?
I am not arguing it is morally wrong for a wealthy child to spend their wealth. I am talking about the whole of society. It's really very annoying of you to persist in strawmanning me in literally every coment. Sure I used negative words to describe an entirely hypothetical person, but the reality is that people exist on a range of productivity.
let me switch to a tangent. You seemed to be concerned with making a wealthy society, where at least some people have wealth, right?
In order to do that we have to ensure that its worthwhile for a talented person to work hard. When someone cannot become wealthy no matter how hard they work, why would they work to make anything in this world?
and so society suffers. The way to make people work to make things, is to reward them for doing that. This is an economic reality, and is demonstrable, there are many economics papers on the relationship between income inequality, gdp growth, and income mobility. Suffice to say, no matter who you are, its in your interest for there to be more mobility, and for inequality to be in a certain range (not too equal, for incentive, and not too unequal, it causes dramatic negative outcomes like crime, unrest, addiction, violence)
One aspect is the work you do and what it pays. If you're in the right industry, you can become wealthy (being in top 5-10% or less of the population) working a normal job.
On the other hand, if you're in a industry that pays very little, then no matter how much you work, you're not going to make it. And probably you're going to make if you decide to become an entrepreneur and get a piece of the pie. But it doesn't work for all and the only thing you can do is to switch industries if you can.
And these days I think the inequalities are greater due to rampant inflation that makes everyone poorer (considering only money earned) and though in percentage terms it is the same for everyone, it hits the lowest earners the most.
The thing is that in a free market I don't know how this can be solved.
Well the taxes pay to enforce property rights. It sort of becomes your problem if others don’t have a place to live and you won’t pay men with guns to keep them from taking your place to live.
I don't think we are on the brink of societal collapse :)
And it is just like now, I use a gun to shoot people that try to enter my house. What you're saying is that I should have people with guns in the house for the times that I'm not at home.
How is this different than today when your house gets robbed during the day?
Anecdotally to me USA even looks like it's collapsing every time I visit it. In the larger cities there are homeless everywere, and often literally next to luxury yachts and limousines. A lot of the infrastructure seems like it's literally gonna collapse, and lots of it really does. It's quite a cyberpunk vibe when compared to e.g. the nordic countries.
Of course there are similar problems in many european countries too. Especially England is quite bad w.r.t homelesness and infrastructure. But England is in many ways culturally closer to USA than most europe.
It is financially unfeasible for most middle class households to pass down their homes to their children due to the estate tax kicking on assets over 100,000 eur.
Inheritance tax for children caps at 20%. That's hardly "unfeasible".
> College is vastly more restricted in France and unavailable to the majority of the population.
French citizen here, I'm really surprised by what your saying as it doesn't match at all what I've seen about french higher education.
> French taxation is incredibly complex and heavy on the middle class
Yes and no. French taxation can be complex, but it's also mostly pre-filled and automatized. For most people, it's simply a matter of checking if the tax form is correct (and I've never had an incorrect one so far, as my employer automatically transmit my paycheck info to the government)
> Life grinds to a halt with some regularity due to general strikes
There are often disturbance due to strike, but "Life grinds to a halt" is also widely hyperbolic. The last real impactful strike I remember was the late 2019 month-long strike on parisian public transport, which was annoying (and was quickly followed by Covid lockdown)
But I also agree on many points you bring, there tend to be far less upward social mobility than in the USA (I'm always surprised by how fast people seem to be promoted in the USA), and generally more disposable income and opportunities. On the other hand, instead of having everyone thinking themselves as "temporary embarrassed millionaires", it's more accepted that even lower socio-economic classes should have decent working and living conditions, along with a better safety net.
On the plus side, apparently very few place in the USA are actually walk-able, even the malls seems to need a long drive instead of being part of living in a city.
There also aren't any food desert, with unprocessed food cheap, tasty[1] and widely available. Also, while there certainly are a fair share of drugs and homelessness, it's quite also quite safe[2].
[1] I know how smug that will sound, but all the echo I have is that fruits and vegetable in the USA taste very bland, and are far less nutrient-rich than they used to be a few generations ago. A friend who visited the USA was shocked about it, and half-seriously though he had Covid when he tried them, and he wasn't the only one.
[2] There are however pick-pocketing targeting tourists, especially asian, but a "hot" neighborhood in France is waaaay safer than a hot neighborhood in the USA.
Startups operating in Americas are founded in US. Rest of the world is different. For example, Lazada is huge in SEA and was created by Rocket Internet (DE). Delivery Hero (again, DE) is massive in SEA as well, the US ones like DoorDash have absolutely no presence. Uber isn't a thing anymore either.
In fact I see far more European and Asian companies operating globally nowadays, US startups are quite isolationist.
I had the same two-caste system enforced in European office of US company. Legally it was a local company with parent in US.
But anyway, "food is only for employees". Funny enough, even student who was there for 20 hours per week and did anything but work was allowed to eat.
It is a legal and cost thing. Said student is directly employed, the contractors have an employment contract with the agency. And those agencies are used to reduce costs, hence no sponsored, free or discounted food.
No, that's a rationalization. It is because psychopaths are running the place. I have never heard of an employer paying benefit tax on pizzas, and if they did, surely they can bill the consulting firm in some circle if that is the case.
Ok, but at Arm my red (intern) badge was no more 'demeaning' than my blue (permanent) badge. Not least because they only left my pocket when I needed to open a door...
(Colours from memory, I think that's right, they were certainly different anyway.)
Point is you can certainly learn not to treat contractors like employees, have badged access, etc., without having such hostility attached to it.
Edit: no! Red actually was a 'badge of shame', that was 'I forgot my badge today and had to get a spare from reception'. Anyway, it's beside the point exactly what was what. Different badges and access/treatment don't have to bleed into social treatment, they don't even have to be that visible.
This conversation isn't about the difference between intern and full time employee but rather the difference between contractor and full time employee.
Depends on when you interned! Before 2018 you would get a green badge as an intern, 2018 and onwards you got the same blue as everyone else, when they moved all the offices to GDAS.
The Microsoft problem was *independent* contractors. I.E. treating people as self-employed.
Normal contractors are employees of a temp firm. None of these issues apply there.
Footnote: I started my career as an IC, before I had family or kids. It was great. 32 hour work weeks and time (and the legal right) to do startups on the side. Ton of flexibility relative to a real job.
The microsoft lawsuit applied to the contractor staffing agencies, too. I'd google it for you, bute they had so many orange v-badges back in the day, that it has to be pretty easy to google.
Web search says that contrary to stereotypes, the problem was that they did NOT have contractor staffing agencies, and that as a result, they were not withholding taxes. This was resolved by bringing in a staffing agency.
A second problem was that they DID have ambiguous language in their employee handbooks, which meant that once temps were ruled employees, they became benefit-eligible, including in retroactively.
Yup, when I read the blog post, my immediate thought was, "Hey, this sounds just like Microsoft when I was there." There it was blue badge vs. non-blue badge.
All the other stuff, too –– wanting to innovate but finding everything so slow, lots of process, feeling very pampered, etc.
There's "contractors" and then there's "branded as outsider". The red hot iron kind of branding, not the marketing kind. Red badging is what you do when you view people as numbers in a spreadsheet instead of people.
Yea I've experienced this in capital one. Some smaller non tech companies are chill, where there is really no difference in how they treat contractors and employees.
Intel used to do this. I was a high school and college intern in the late 90s and it was this blue badge / green badge thing.
The funny thing is, there was another level which was how worn out your blue badge was. The longer you had been there, the closer the badge was to white.
If by "this" you meant a caste-like system, then my experience at Intel in 2010s was very different. Different people (contingent workers with green badges and others with blue badges) worked well enough together, and got well enough along (with one or two instances being the exception, not the rule). That's funny about the white badge. I am sure they could have gotten new ones, engineers have the funniest status symbols...
Wow, somehow I missed all that despite being a contractor for about half of 20+ years of working in this industry... Perhaps it is a USA thing? Although I worked for a couple of US companies remotely and I never noticed it.
I'm currently doing contracting for a Polish branch of a US company you would recognise a name of and the only difference between being a contractor (other than tax stuff of course) is that I can't fill security exception requests, and I get asked if I want to work during certain national holidays or not (employees get a day off per default, I have a choice).
I remember Google had something like contractors need to pay $1 to use the gym, meaning it wasn't free so it doesn't count as a benefit, but the amount was clearly not something that was material.
In the UK at least, if you are a contractor you are legally not an employee.
If you took any employee benefits, the tax man could retroactively classify you as an employee and demand a huge tax bill from you.
So many contractors would refuse any such benefits even if they were offered. Some didn't care of course and took them anyway, but they were potentially setting themselves up for a huge legal and tax problem.
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.
If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink.
Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new insults might be complicated. But if the goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do X", I'd call that questionable policy design.
Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to say that this regulatory situation with contractors wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged" out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside the point.
This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you full time who you don't want to call an employee because it's cheaper not to.
The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees.
The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer.
This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.
> The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out.
Other way around. The status quo was that you could treat a contractor like an employee in everything but pay and benefits (like healthcare), and they were still a contractor.
A court ruling decreed that was no longer the case, so now for companies to have contractors at all they must draw a bright-line demarcation in perks between FTEs and TVCs. A line that is frequently dehumanizing, because dehumanizing is visible and easy to argue in a court of law.
Anyone who predicted any other outcome was naive, and those of us who want this silly pageant to end should be agitating for a law that functionally bans contracting.
Contractors are not normally cheaper than employees. All the overheads of an employee need to be paid for in the contract, plus profit, so if it comes out less than an employee, something isn't right.
Contractors offer flexibility. Contractors can be engaged and disengaged without labour law complications.
This is 100% on the companies who are working loopholes to avoid providing the same benefits and protections to some of their employees. The government would have zero issue with Google hiring everyone as an employee, but Google is choosing to twist the system to their own selfish benefit.
So... Google is legally required to treat contractors as second class citizens to afford them the privilege of being able to mistreat them and fire them at the drop of a pin.
We understand the """"purpose"""" of having contractors.
Not unlike how the GDPR resulted in banners everywhere, because the law stops short of banning contracting, companies have, of course, sought the optimal just-up-to-the-edge balance.
The biggest two reasons it matters (i.e. two biggest disincentives from just hiring contractors) are healthcare and quarterly reports. Healthcare provision is very expensive, even amortized across the employees in a company, and TVCs get no healthcare from the client company. And the client company can grow and shrink TVC contracts all day long without having to tell shareholders they went through a mass hiring cycle or a layoff cycle.
It's weird that we look down on people acting like massive pricks to save money in their personal lives. But once you wrap a business around them then most people don't seem to care.
As I grow older it bothers me more. Some classes of people have a facade where it's socially acceptable to be assholes, but other people, well, that's a moral failing. The US has a new religion, and it's worse than the last one.
“Full-time” is misleading noise here; the employee/contractor classification distinction doesn't hinge on term (temp/permanent) or time base (full/part time). Its true that some shops only bring contractors in for one side of one of those divides, but that's not what defines the status (or what defines who can be assigned each status.)
What they should be bound to is making "temporary-but-not-really" staff, just staff. But for that, strong unions are necessary, and US unions have been very week for decades (especially w.r.t. rate of unionization and centralization of power away from rank-and-file workers).
> the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game.
Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted completely.
Conversion of Temps (but not Vendors or Contractors) did exist when I started working at Wing (the Alphabet drone delivery company) in 2018. We talked about it when I interviewed there.
Well, "interview" is overstating it. They needed some airspace data importers urgently and knew I could do it based on my past work for Google and my experience as a pilot. So we met for lunch, talked about the project, and that was that.
I actually thought the "temp" thing was a brilliant hack: we agreed on a decent rate (paid through Adecco), and if they liked my work and I liked working with them, I could convert to FTE at some point (and this was true at the time).
Then in August 2019 a memo came out that Temps were no longer eligible for FTE conversion. Even those who were hired with promises of that possibility.
And yes, the memo was exactly as you said. The people you'd worked with closely for the last year, who hired you because you were just the person they needed and you already were doing a great job for them? They couldn't vouch for you or communicate with the hiring panel at all.
It would be a grind through the standard Google interview process, as if you had no history with the team you are already working with and delivering for.
What kind of a fucked-up system is that?
The thing that stung the most was that the memo also explained in detail that Interns were and remained eligible for FTE conversion, without any kind of full interview round like a Temp would have to endure. The rationale: Interns were already employees.
But remember that is because these companies were exploiting the use of contractors to deny them employee protections.
True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway. But these "red" people are employees in all but name, so that the companies can save money and other protections. A small slip up by Google (Apple/FB/MS/tons of others) and these folks get the protection they deserve.
Yeah being an actual contractor/consultant should feel GOOD. You should not be married to a single company for too long. You should have a sense of freedom.
There should be a simple test that if a person is working at only one client for too long (3 mo?) then they are to be converted to an employee. There's no reason for these middleman employers to exist except to make people disposable to companies. If that's the case, then they should be cycled in and out with a higher frequency. Nobody should remain a "red badge" at Google for any significant length of time.
> True contractors won’t care: they work for themselves and have multiple clients anyway.
Some companies will even go as far as to prevent you from having multiple clients. Try asking anyone who contracts for Apple if they have any side work…
It's not illegal - they'd just have to provide them employee-like benefits which would be expensive. So it's just costly to treat contractors too well.
This is a case with contractors in all big companies. You are not a company employee. The expectation is that your employer will compensate you and take you out to lunch, etc, etc.
But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.
In such companies you are not truly a contractor, but employee of the bodyshop company which lease you to the client.
As the result you deal with politics in both companies: your employer and their client. And bodyshop has performance reviews as well.
Not really. A staffing co like randstadt won’t give you perf reviews etc. You just work through them for tax reason. You hardly even interact with your account manager.
That’s a strange accusation. I never said they were a body shop. They are a staffing company. I’ve known people who have worked through them. Have had good experiences.
I just said you could freelance through them. A lot of people do.
Oh, you absolutely do have performance reviews. Not in the sense that they determine your comp or whether you're promoted, because that will never change, but if you have poor performance they will talk to you about it and possibly cancel your contract. Seen this happen to several a contractor.
I worked as a contractor for a decade before, I didn't find it demeaning when employees didn't invite me to team lunches or special meetings. Just charge more for your services. Do you care when you get paid $200 per hr, if you are not invited to employee only meetings/lunches? Definitely not. The issue is about the right pay, not so much about demeaning/or that 'caste system' everyone invokes whenever someone sees unfairness.
Agreed 100%. Our (informal) manual for consultants used to say something like
"The cupcakes in the break room are not for you. Most people will not care if you take a cupcake, but somebody will, and we will hear about it. We give you money instead, and we will certainly bring you a cupcake if you want one."
No doubt there are some HR/legal folks wanting to avoid the liability of 'training' someone on something that goes badly. The workaround to that is to have the training in an auditorium and not keep attendance on who is in the room.
Why would they train you? It’s the responsibility of your parent company and for all they know you’ve already been thoroughly trained for active shootings in numerous other companies you’ve worked at.
There have been some recent court cases, sponsored by the unions, seeking to include full time benefits to subbies, but it's all a bit hand-wavy and, on the whole, people working with an ABN are not yet equivalent to full time employees.
Refer to the Casual Employment Information Statement (CEIS)[1] and due-to-be-released-on-6-December-2023 Fixed Term Contract Information Statement (FTCIS)[2].
1. Person directly employed on an ongoing basis. The employer pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally contributes to the professional development of the employee.
2. Person directly employed on a fixed-term basis. The employer must offer employment on an ongoing basis if the employee has been engaged for a certain period of time. The employer pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally responsible for professional development of the employee (but generally more limited than what is available to employees under option (1)).
3. Person contracted from a consulting firm, where the consulting firm directly employs the person on an ongoing basis. Once one client engagement ends, the consulting firm try to place the person with a different client as quickly as possible, and will keep paying the person during this process. The consulting firm pays all insurances, professional memberships and generally responsible for professional development of the employee.
4. Person contracted from a labour hire firm, where the labour hire firm directly employs the person on a _casual_ fixed-term basis. The labour hire firm may be required to offer employment on an ongoing basis if the employee has been engaged for a certain period of time with a regular pattern of work apparent. The employee doesn't have to accept (and it typically wouldn't be in the persons or labour hire firms interests to do so). Labour hire employment agreements will typically specify a base rate and then a casual loading on top, so it is clear what the remuneration changes would be if casual employment is changed to ongoing employment (including if this occurs retrospectively). This option is generally used by professionals in unregulated professions such as ICT. Labour hire firms pay insurance, taxes, etc and clients and/or employees generally provide facilities and tools of the trade.
5. Person directly contracted through that person's "personal services income" "business" (note: it's technically not considered a business). This option is generally used by professionals in highly regulated professions such as medicine. The person's "business" pays the person wages, insurances, professional memberships, and more commonly than (4) also facilities and tools of trade.
For total remuneration benefits from highest to lowest, it's generally (5) > (4) > (3) > (1) > (2). Ongoing employment of (1), (2) and (3) are generally detrimental versus casual employment of (4) and (5) because a person could be employed for 6 years and have accumulated months of personal/sick leave and be close to having long service leave payable, and be forced out of their employment arrangement for an external reason such as a bad boss, a spouse needing to relocate or a family member some distance away needing care. When the person leaves their employer, they lose all accumulated benefits and start from scratch with their new employer. Options (4) and (5) ensure the person is no worse off when changing employers as the person has been paid the benefits upfront on a continuous basis, rather than waiting for a day that may never occur to obtain those benefits.
For job security, there isn't much difference. Sometimes directly employed persons are made redundant before labour hire persons. Sometimes it's the opposite and labour hire persons are first to go. The main difference is whether a person gets 1 day notice and pay (casual employees of labour hire firms), 4 weeks notice and pay, or longer if a person has worked for the same employer for over a year. As employees have to change jobs every few years to grow a career and gain higher remuneration, the redundancy payouts for extended service are minimal compared to missed opportunity cost of not changing jobs. 1 day or 4 weeks notice and pay is negligible in the grand scheme of things, and most of the time labour hire employees would get much more than 1 day notice anyway to avoid the client gaining a bad reputation amongst the pool of labour hire employees.
For the order in which people progress through these options in a professional career, it's generally (2)|(1) > (3)|(4) > (5).
For overall employment preference of professionals, I'd suggest perhaps most to least preferred of (4) > (5) > (3) > (1) > (2). (4) has less overhead and distraction of (5) as one can focus on their profession without having to worry about frequent changes to tax laws, changes to insurance policies, etc. But eventually to grow further, a professional would be required to switch from option (4) to option (5) and then may need to switch focus away from their profession and towards business priorities such as hiring support staff, engaging other professionals such as accountants, lawyers, insurance brokers, etc. (3) generally provides better remuneration and career growth over (1) and (2) because client engagements are shorter and more varied. But sometimes (1) is a good way to get a foothold into an industry or move into more senior positions (particularly management roles), and may make more sense than options (3), (4) and (5).
I'm sorry to hear about that. I always went out of my way to make the contractors feel seen and important. I'd find their manager from the contracting company and write glowing reviews. I'd talk with them, treat them as equals, give them extra swag I got as an employee.
To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.
IBM basically invented this particular kind of caste shaming in a business organization. Hardly their worst crime, and they're still allowed to operate.
I worked at a small company in London and got treated the same way: feeling left out, excluded.
It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially.
I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)
Referring to it as a caste system is pretty offensive tbh. It's a distinction between different types of highly paid tech worker ... not a system of oppression.
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.
I had the same issue when I was a contractor at Allstate in the investment department. They were frightened by the Quaker Oats decision where they paid folks as contractors who "forgot" to do their own tax withholding.
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.
I've worked as an employee and as a contractor in Silicon Valley (never at Google). While it was nice to be treated like an employee by some companies, my attitude was that it's just understood that as a contractor I'm not as much a member of the team as the employees are, and I'm the first to be let go if the money gets tight. Those were the tradeoffs of the flexibility I got. If contractors are the same as employees, why even have a distinction?
The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t hire for that position. Or that position would be as competitive as any other job at Google and probably would not be the same people that are currently red badges.
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.
Working alongside someone with significantly better employment conditions than you is disproportionately unpleasant, to the point that working under objectively worse conditions feels better.
I don't think that's a universal thing. I would rather make 10X working for someone who makes 10X (eg, very common situation in finance) vs making 1X sitting next to someone who also makes 1X (eg, DMV)
I get what you are talking about, but it's your choice to obsess more about what the other guy's getting rather than what you are.
So what about when two people have the same title, and tenure but one makes $50k more per year?
This is a similar situation and is happening at many companies. I know I make more than some peers that have higher job levels(and tenure in company) then I do.
> So what about when two people have the same title, and tenure but one makes $50k more per year?
Strangely enough that's a lot less viscerally unpleasant - perhaps because money is quite abstract (and you never actually see person A get a bigger pile than person B, whereas you notice immediately if there's a team pizza that person B isn't allowed to eat), perhaps because it's understandable that companies want to pay some people more and others less, whereas limiting who gets cheap perks feels like it's just nastiness.
LAWYERS and insane politicians are the reason why it is this way. Google is just working around all the BS which unfortunately leads to these bizarre behaviors.
I worked for one of the largest banks in Australia as a contractor. When I first joined, "we don't discriminate based on the employment type". The perm staff were wonderful in that regard. Then a new COO joined. He was a fucking sociopath. First we started getting locked out of various internal sites, needing to "reapply" for security reasons. Then they introduced the email badging that appended a big "(EXTERNAL!)" to your name in the address book. Then, if anyone attached anything to an email that included even one contractor as an addressee, they'd see a big WARNING! reminding them that they were potentially leaking the keys to the kingdom to us untrustworthy SOBs. Then in November a big rumour started going around that contractors were going to be "surprised" with a forced 6-week holiday (normal shutdown for contractors was 2 weeks over the break). I politely called out the COO directly on the internal Yammer, asking him to please put an end to the rumour mill and just confirm or deny whether it was true. I said the company would be within its rights to make that call but reminded him that "contractors are people too" and given the time of year, might want to know if their services weren't needed in January. I got a bunch of support from employees (and the managers I worked for) - perm and contractor alike. Many perms were embarassed and apologetic for this outcasting of contractors (way to increase morale Mr.COO). Anyway, within 24 hours, I was pulled out of a meeting and escorted out of the building. The entire Yammer forum was nuked from orbit (I still have a couple of screenshots) and I ended up in their non-existent "black book". I know this latter point because in the intervening years I would occasionally get pinged by recruiters for roles at that bank. I'd laugh and told them I was probably still in the black book and to contact so-and-so to confirm whether I'd be welcomed back. They were always surprised when they did so and were bluntly told that I was not welcome.
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.
This is a direct consequence of the infamous Microsoft case. Contractors used to be treated much better, similar to employees. Then some Microsoft contractors sued for shares worth a considerable amount. Their argument was that they were "treated like employees", and therefore deserve the same things as employees. They won the lawsuit.
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.
My experience as a red badge person was very good. While it is true that I was unable to bring my wife to lunch and I didn’t get free massages, everything else was great.
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!
Ah yes, the TVCs. Nothing said "We're evil" more than the subclass of contractors. It is almost a trope in Sci-Fi literature that our characters in this Utopia world discover there are people who are essential to the utopia and yet aren't "part" of the utopia.
Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right?
Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.
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.
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.
Again, to repeat: the desire in the suit (to prevent employers from inappropriately using temporary labor) was valid. The EFFECT of the suit is exactly the opposite: it's forced employers to performatively discriminate against temps in every way they can find as a way to prevent the kind of finding that hurt MSFT.
Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor labor laws, but this decision broke things.
No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community. MSFT was guilty of what they were accused of. If they don't misclassify workers, they won't lose such a suit.
> No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community.
"The rest of the world is wrong, only I know the truth in this thread on a random web forum" is an unpersuasive frame to be arguing from. Corporate legal departments may be inflexible and hidebound, but they surely know this stuff better than you do.
No, this is the way it works. If you do what MS did and offer unrestricted perks to your temps, they'll sue you and you'll lose. Period.
What you're arguing amounts to "no one should hire temporary labor to work alongside salaried employees". And, OK, that's a position. But if that's what you want then you should make that case and not argue that somehow Viscaino doesn't exist, because it does.
Microsoft wasn’t offering unrestricted perks to contractors, they were treating them like second class employees, paying them less, not giving them benefits or allowing time off, dictating additional rules, excluding them, and avoiding existing labor, discrimination, and tax laws — exactly the same thing they (and every other big corporation) are still doing now — with a codified fiction in place that didn’t exist previously.
Microsoft didn’t lose the lawsuit, they won a settlement — and their lawyers and lobbyists made sure it would never happen again.
Most corporations have preferred vendors and the 50% plus savings in salary and benefits has a large kickback that finds its way back to the employer.
The real issue that was skirted around in the lawsuit was that Microsoft actually owned the vendors that supplied them with contractors.
They weren’t temps, read the case - average tenure, 11 years. And the entire thing started because the IRS said they were dodging payroll taxes, so the common law employees sued for what they were rightfully owed. MSFT acknowledged wrongdoing and settled the case.
They will only win if you are violating labor law. Why is that so hard for you to understand. If they hadn’t violated labor law they would have appealed and won. And here you are 26 years later trying the case again on a “silly web forum”.
I don't think that the parent isn't aware of that. I think the parent says that providing employee perks for your contractors _is_ violating the US labor law.
Do you really think that Google should not be blamed that in cutting costs they don't want to provide same benefits for people they lease?
If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.
This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.
No, it's got nothing to do with workplace protection or wages. The original suit was actually about participation in the stock purchase program (which in the mid-90's was extremely lucrative at MSFT!), something that no contractor would normally expect to get. But because the contractors got free food at the cafe (or whatever), they did. Or rather they got a settlement making up for the stock the courts said they should have been able to get.
Basically, the rule per Vizcaino is "Any benefit offered to salaried employees must be offered to temporary ones too unless you deliberately discriminate against them in all your other benefits not related to their job."
And yes, that's a stupid rule. But it's the rule, and it's universally enforced at every US employer large enough to have a legal department.
The game is that the contractors are supposedly not working for the company that they're actually working for. Anything that might break that illusion puts the company at risk of needing to treat them as the actual employees that they are.
By that logic it's always fine for companies to get around labour protections.
Yes, it would be better if they hired no-one. When your job conditions are beneath human dignity, you don't get to hire people for that job, even if that means your stock price doesn't grow quite as much and GDP is lower this year.
I don't think workers generally agree with you. Certainly in the tech world, it is hard to describe contract work as "beneath human dignity". For blue collar work, I would understand your point.
> Certainly in the tech world, it is hard to describe contract work as "beneath human dignity".
Realistically in the US the distinction is mainly about whether you have medical coverage. Plenty of people work with no or bad medical coverage because they are some combination of optimistic/greedy/desperate; to assess how humane that is you'd have to look at how they feel about it after getting diagnosed with something that they struggle to get decent treatment for because they weren't an employee.
It's not "fine" but it's extremely hard to get them to do things they are disincentivized to do. And most government attempts do not result in the desired behavior.
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.
no - the reason the issue went to court in the first place, was MSFT and Apple and others, not hiring (stock, health insurance) and then making contractors "prove themselves" a.k.a. extra overtime, demeaning social situations, lower perks etc
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.
I've never seen a contractor have better salary/pay unless they're a fully independent subject matter expert and have no interest in being employed. I've hired a quite a few contractors and there is usually two cases, I need workers, or expertise that is highly limited.
Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting.
It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
The staffing agencies benefits are always subpar and more expensive.
And you’re right about the difference between “staff augmentation” contractors pay and SMEs. I just went into detail in a sibling reply.
But to add on, the company I ended up being a tech lead at with a full time position. I came in at $65/hour. I only took the job because I saw a chance to eventually wiggle my way into a tech lead role and I wanted to be on the ground floor of a green field project. I ended up working so much overtime - and getting paid for it - I made out pretty well compared to the local market. I got on my wife’s health insurance.
I also mentioned that now that I am a SME on a niche but growing AWS service [1], I am able to charge $135 an hour for a side project and that’s a discount.
[1] I beta tested the APIs while working at AWS and I was a major contributor on a popular open source official “AWS Solution” that’s built on top of it.
Not necessarily. I was a tech lead where I could only hire contractors. The run of the mill CRUD staff augmentation contractors were making about $65 and the contracting company was billing $100 a hour for them with no health care benefits, no PTO, no 401K match.
On the other hand, the “cloud consultants”, who were just old school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200 an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners.
Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour and even that was low. I did it because I found the project interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend.
FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.
I’m don’t think it’s true at companies like Google that contractors get paid better. My impression was they get a similar salary but no equity and worse benefits. I’m assuming we’re talking about the TVCs who basically act like ordinary contributors on a team. Not some specialist consultant, I don’t know about them.
Most large orgs don't have the perks of Goog, Meta. Amazon and Cisco don't have free food, massages, etc. so it doesn't matter contractor vs. fulltime.
It very much matters - paid time off, benefits, employer paid FICA taxes (if you are 1099). All that is just money and if you are an SME you can negotiate for a high enough hourly rate to make up the difference.
But if you are just doing staff augmentation, probably not.
I don't understand the concern. If a company has a choice of hiring more people with more elasticity, or not hire as much or at all, is that somehow a terrible thing to do?
Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.
FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their 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.
While FB had the same badge color for TVCs and FTEs, everything else was exactly the same. I later saw the red/white badge dichotomy at Google and thought that the explicitness of it was a bit better.
Cisco has/had an outrageously large contractor contingent (this may be different between Business Units). That's a huge cultural difference between Cisco the tech giant sets
Whatever fraction it is at Google, I'm willing to bet Cisco's is significantly larger, especially on "core-business" teams whose work is mentioned in analyst calls
The "TVC issue" is the flip side of Google etc culture and perks. When a company takes great care of its people, contractors seem unfortunate in contrast (since they are someone else's employees, there's no expectation of long-term investment from either side, etc.)
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.
> And report them if they ever claim to work for Google.
Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term.
In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.
> 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."
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.
> that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee
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).
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.
Code and infrastructure must evolve, and Google excels at building secure, scalable, performant, maintainable systems that squeeze every last bit of signal from noise. Startups don't have the resources to do that, and Google can't launch a product built in the startup way.
For an example, anything/anyone that wants to access user data at Google faces an extremely high bar for access, with layers of access control, auditing, approvals, and enforcement, starting at the design phase through to implementation.
At Google that's a good thing. However it would be pretty silly at a 10 person startup.
What Google isn't great at is taking risks on new product ideas (for many good and bad reasons), and that's why they often acquire companies that do that sort of thing.
// Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just squandering money.
I don't see it that way at all. Everything we do with business carries risk. It's really all experimental. Nothing is a sure thing. When you acquire something, you obviously incur the risk of that thing not scaling as well as you think, or over-estimate the fit into your org. You obviously want to make good decisions when you can, but there's a limit to how perfect you can be.
People are familiar with the VC model of betting on a small percentage of runaway hits. This might be similar.
So you can look at each acquisition in isolation and say "dumb" but you have to respect the machine that this is a part of.
> but you have to respect the machine that this is a part of.
I don't respect the machine. I think it reduces innovation across our industry.
The story of google acquisitions so often go this way. They start with a lot of promises - "Your product dreams will be so much bigger at Google! All the resources you need! We believe in you!". When they start at google, everyone eventually realises they need to rebuild their entire product on top of google's infrastructure, "the google way". Inevitably, the remade google version of the product doesn't have "google scale" numbers of users. Or its crushed by some other team within google. Or they're shoved within a product group who see the newcomers as an irrelevant distraction at best, or a threat to their own product at worst. The good people from the acquired team move on within google and the acquired product dies. It happens so often its become a meme.
There have been some notable exceptions: Youtube. Android. Docs (Writely). In each of these cases, google didn't have a similar product at the time of the acquisition and the acquired product team was largely left alone afterwards. As I understand it, Youtube and Android are (still?) kept at arms length in some ways from the rest of the company.
This is a machine of destruction. It destroys innovative ideas and innovative products. I get that they can't all be winners. But google's success rate amongst acquisitions surviving - let alone thriving - is ridiculously low. And I don't think the teams & products that survive do so because of the strength of their work. I think they survive because of luck and politics.
Other companies do this so much better. Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus are very strong products and brands years after being acquired by Facebook. Adobe seems to be taking good care of Figma. And so on.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if google went bankrupt, and all the smart engineers within their walls were suddenly forced onto the street, where they need to make interesting products people actually care about to justify their salaries. I bet there's all sorts of great product ideas that googlers dream of building - but never will, because of how cushy and comfortable it is there. Google does some great stuff. But I think their employees are capable of so much more.
I think it’s better for the world that a product is tested in the world than tested in the distorted world of Google politics. If your company can’t get product market fit - fine, maybe it was a bad idea. Time for all the talented people to do something else. But if a product gets killed inside Google for some bizarro Google reasons, well, maybe it was a bad idea or maybe it was a great idea. We have no idea. The effort was simply wasted.
Presumably they got well compensated for their time and effort. That's about the best you can expect at a large company. You're working on the company's products and priorities and getting paid to do so. What they choose to do with it is up to them.
The founders know of (or can easily research) Google’s track record with products and they knew the risk going into this acquisition. Probably an unpopular opinion but the time and effort was compensated as part of the acquisition.
The counterpoint to this is that individuals can decide if they want their firm to be acquired or not or to stay around after it has been acquired. I don’t mean to put blame or shame on said folks, it requires a lot of careful thinking and self-inquiry and attention to one’s emotions and body to weigh said decisions well; which is hard for many reasons.
Yes but that is a cultural thing. And this is a big theme at Google, and I can say from my limited personal experience working there that it probably stems from the perf process.
Look at it this way: Let Π be $PERFCOIN, the currency that is evaluated at performance review time.
- Buying the company, got some folks some Π
- Rewriting the code, got some (other) folks some Π
- Maintaining the code, was not a reliable way to gain Π
- Listening to users, interacting with and surveying them, and implementing what they wanted, was not a reliable way to gain Π.
I worked on an internal tool at Google so I didn't have to deal with the huge warnings about accessing user information,[1] yet topic (4), there was just no great way to contact your users, no great way to shadow them as they were using the product, there was a way for them to request features but obviously that would be dominated by 5-10 voices trying to use the product in ways it was never meant to be used...
Point (3) I eventually figured out how to do at Google before I left, first off you have to call it “tech debt” and THEN you need to create metrics for your tech debt and THEN you need to set an ambitious goal for “reducing tech debt metrics by 80%” and THAT is worth some Π to some of the managers reviewing your perf.[2]
1. Well, I actually did, because I needed a signoff from a privacy team to confirm that our use didn't violate Google privacy standards, which the senior members on my team understandably didn't even want to do, “can't benefit us, can only hurt us if they say we do need to protect Googlers’ privacy from other Googlers”—thankfully the voice of reason mostly prevailed, with a long tail of making sure that we used opaque UUID identifiers to refer to our projects, and not, say, GCP project IDs...
2. Worth saying, they transitioned not just to a less frequent less painful perf review process at the end of last year, but it was also a more authoritarian one, Instead of your perf being evaluated by a faceless committee of your manager’s peers, it is now assessed by your manager directly. This is a huge win for transparency and resolving the problem where (3) and (4) don't give Π , because pleasing the faceless committee involves standards that are completely unknown to you, but making your manager happy is what people do at any normal job. So this was widely internally criticized, but to my view it's actually potentially able to resolve the systemic problem, not immediately, but as culture drifts to be slightly more normal.
To me it reads more like someone with a positive disposition (or someone who has founded a start up and doesn't want to burn bridges) laying out the problems without saying they are problems. I mean come on - the upsides: we "merged cultures", "our app lives on", "careers have bloomed" versus downsides "we quit", and "we don't think we actually delivered what we wanted to". But it's ok because after everyone who cared about the product quit, maybe someone else will might make it happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You could change none of the facts of this blog and write it as an aggressive rant about how Google murdered their startup, forced them to re-write the entire thing, stopped them shipping by being a bureaucratic nightmare, and the big take away is you can succeed at google if you "play the right game" if you know what I mean. It's ... not positive.
> I mean come on - the upsides: we "merged cultures", "our app lives on", "careers have bloomed" versus downsides "we quit", and "we don't think we actually delivered what we wanted to". But it's ok because after everyone who cared about the product quit, maybe someone else will might make it happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do we ignore the most obvious upside, that this guy (and possibly/probably everyone in that startup) got paid a shit ton of money as a result of Google buying the company?
If you don't want to face the possibility of your product being shut down don't sell it to Google of all companies. Really, don't sell it to any megacorp, but they had to know Google's rep before they agreed to the deal.
Maybe it's ok for writing to not be so editorialized as what you're used to? To me this read like a trip report from which the reader can draw their own conclusions without the author telling them what to think.
I wish more things I read on the internet were written in that style. I don't need to be told what conclusions to draw, I can figure it out myself.
I think this has royally screwed up my emotional intelligence. American media always tells you how you should react. One of my cousins once told me they were having a baby. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it wasn't "congratulations, I'm so happy for you". It just didn't click with me that this was an exciting thing for them that they wanted to share with me and I kind of regret not responding better.
That's originally what I felt like reading this article, that there were good things and bad.
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.
Socratic by Google still exists today and is a widely beloved app based on reviews. They had to rewrite the code and infrastructure, but "killing off the app" implies that they just shut things down. That never happened.
As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.
I was at Google from 2015-2023 and not really. Even large acquisitions like Apigee, Looker and Fitbit were multi-year "integrations" fraught with all sorts of pain & suffering. Smaller acquisitions like Stratozone, Orbitera, AppSheet, etc all follow the Socratic path: acquire, rewrite, halfassedly integrate, create confusion and anxiety.
its a PR piece IMO. The google way is terrible for producing products people want, which is why they always have to purchase their way into new products.
After reading this, I was left with the impression Google is full of under-utilized talent, has poor product vision and has systems in place that discourage innovation and risk taking.
So if this is a PR piece, then it is not a great one.
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)_/¯
Normally I'd consider it an acquihire when a company acquires a startup / smaller company and immediately announces the discontinuation of the product. Less so if there's an attempt to continue developing the product, even if it eventually gets shut down.
That's an interesting word. I assume it's when a large company buys your startup just to have access to the talent, without much regard for the startup's product? What sorts of offers do they make to the founders?
Varies heavily depending on background labor market. In 2021: $1M+ per solid engineer. These days it's closer to $0 as they're not aggressively hiring and plenty of talent floating around.
Aquire a company not for the product, but to hire specific people working there. Like experts in a field. For instance if you have a competing product and want to build something using expertise or if you think the technology can be applied elsewhere.
> 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
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.
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.
Well, except that they just exterminated your former employer and all your stock options and compensation bonuses are tied to passing that gauntlet?
It's more like getting a layoff and then offered an interview for a new job.
For me, we didn't have to do the interview. But there were a lot of other strings attached, most drastic being having to move cities (or have a 2-hour-each-way commute).
The money makes it worthwhile, but it's not a happy happy joy joy moment.
I also got a peavish Google recruiter all pissed at me about the fact that we were sharing notes with each other about the offers they were sending us, which I thought was pretty funny.
it doesn’t depend on the size of the company, but the kind of acquisition and the terms of the acquisition
on acquihires you can have a full interview
I went on this meet and greet and it was more of a googlyness type thing just to check you have a pulse, others didn’t at all, all the team was hired, my only guess it could affected leveling and price
The company I worked for was the same, But it's a curse though. Always got the feeling of being looked down on for not running that gauntlet. If you're being assimilated into the Mountain View Googleplex -- fine, it's so massive nobody will care or notice. But being borged into a small site everyone will know and there were snotty people who openly grumbled about it.
Soooo much of the Ego of Google engineering -- at least in the past -- is built around their sense of superiority of having made it through that interview and being selected as one of the "best engineers in the world."
Gave me heightened impostor syndrome for 10 years.
>Amazing things are possible at Google, if the right people care about them. A VP that gets it, a research team with a related charter, or compatibility with an org’s goals. Navigating this mess of interests is half of a PM’s job. And then you need the blessing of approvers like privacy, trust and safety, and infra capacity. It takes dozens of conversations to know if an idea is viable, and hundreds more to make it a reality.
This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production
I 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.
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.
I had the pleasure of working with Shreyans as a SE at Maven last year and it's funny to see how this blog post explains some of the experience working together. There was a strong aversion to meetings and process and big emphasis on empowering the employees to make judgement calls and just reach out for comment if they're unsure. Those things just made sense to me so I didn't question it but coming so recently from Google might have made those aversions stronger. At the end of the day, I enjoyed that way of working (which is probably much harder to do with bigger teams) and I hope to bring it to the next place I go.
I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an urban studies masters (https://www.4cities.eu/) but it wasn't an easy decision. I hope we work together again in the future. If anyone is looking to work at an education startup check out maven.com for sure.
> 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.
> 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.
Never actually worked. When I was a teenager I went to a trade school to try it out and see what it was like to work professionally as a programmer. Ended up choosing something else and keeping software development as a hobby. It's been nice, perhaps not as profitable but nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The second passport thing is definitely true. When I'm abroad--even, recently, Buenos Aires--I have access to office space, free food, a gym, and even a music room where I can practice guitar and piano.
It's funny because later in the article he mentions the difference between Google and Amazon, and this is a huge one. At Amazon you can't even open the building next door without approval.
When I went to other sites I just had to file a ticket and that was it. If something were to be approved, it was automatic, unless it was a restricted office/building. Maybe it depends on the job role.
Not too unusual, other companies I've worked were very similar.
I think there's a pretty big difference between filing a ticket to open the building next door and having free workspaces around the world you don't have to do paperwork to use.
This is absolutely true and has been for years. You’re granted access to the minimum number of buildings required for your job function, and can file a ticket for temporary access grants to other buildings based on need.
It’s absolutely not true and hasn’t been for at least the last 5 years, in my experience.
I have access to every building in my city despite only requiring access to one of them, and I didn’t have to request it.
When I visited Seattle, I had to request access (which required clicking a grand total of 5 buttons in an internal portal and was instantly auto approved) to “the Seattle campus” and was granted access to every building, and still have that access years later. It wasn’t temporary.
Ditto for the other offices I’ve visited, both domestic and abroad. One office internationally I literally showed up and walked to reception and said “hi I work here but I’m visiting from out of town” and they immediately gave me access. I don’t see how this is different from the “second passport” described in the article.*
There are a couple of limited-access offices such as for subsidiary companies, but those are not the majority.
* - the one big difference definitely is the amenities and food, though. Amazon offices don’t have great, or even good, food. And the amenities are lame, most offices don’t even have a gym. There isn’t much of a reason to stop by an office unless you’re specifically there to work.
I worked for Amazon for a bit over two years, followed by Google for a bit over the last decade.
It never would have occurred to me to visit an Amazon office, so I didn't know about the ticket thing. I rarely worked with anyone remote.
When I joined, Google encouraged travel (less so lately). In the time I've been here I've visited over a dozen offices around the world. Some of them on vacation, because I knew there would be something unique about the local office, but also because with the exception of one office (Copenhagen), I'd worked closely enough with someone there to drop by their desk, say hello, shake hands, and get the best restaurant and bar recommendations I've ever found (and some great unexpected dinners with colleagues!)
Another great thing is you can usually find someone who is up to have fun, even if you have no social connections in a place you're travelling to. I was visiting Barcelona a few years ago and emailed the misc- alias seeing if anyone wanted to visit Montserrat with me, and 5 of us went up there and had a great day together. Best part is, it is usually cool people who say "yes" - the abject nerds aren't going to respond to that kind of email.
Nope, not even close to true in my experience. Almost all of the high performers I know have a huge social network they can tap into and you can't finger them as SWEs from a mile away.
Well, that's how I feel about some of my coworkers. I know it is a strong word, and I think it is appropriate. For the most part, they're not bad people, but they just have an extremely limited outlook on life(from my perspective).
It's almost literally a sidekick passport. If you fly into a city with a major Google office and you say you are there for work and you work at Google, the customs agent might ask to see your badge.
It has nothing to do with it being a passport, when you tell a custom agent you come for work and you work for company X they can ask for some proof. Nothing more to it.
TIL google has an office in Buenos Aires, wonder how that works with the current inflation, do engineers get paid in pesos? do they have to re-adjust their salaries every few weeks?
About 50% of my comp as a Canadian was in the form of RSUs which were in USD, so there's that. But of course, the amount you're given is indexed (in the past quite generously, but less so over time) against local compensation rates.
A few of the offices even have a pool (Google Dublin, and soon Google London)
Because the buildings are usually located in very central city locations
- I've often used the offices as a way to kill time til' check-in opens for hotels after a long-haul flight (grab food, caffeinate, have a shower, etc)
Recently I took a night train between Stockholm and Copenhagen.
Showered in the Stockholm office, walked 5 minutes to the train station, slept, woke up in Copenhagen, grabbed a hearty breakfast in the CPH office.
It's a little perk that is honestly vastly underestimated
On the topic of the perk of just showing up to an office and being able to get in, I completely agree that it's underestimated. I visited the Zurich office once and my flight got in at some terrible hour after a bad Frankfurt connection (aren't they all though?). I couldn't get in to my corp housing, but I just rolled up to the office with my suitcase and walked around giving myself the tour while the buildings were ghost towns. I think I dozed off in some room that had an aquarium.
Likewise, one time I was on vacation in Hong Kong and just waltzed into the office and hung around for a little while. I actually ran into a friend of mine in the office who I had no idea lived in Hong Kong or worked for Google at the time.
YouTube's San Bruno office (well, the Gap building at 901 Cherry) has a gym and pool. It's also bright, airy, and did I mention bright? So much natural lighting, it would be a shame if you had a super glossy monitor and no way to block glare 4 hours out of the day.
I got a tour one time of some of the less-visible infrastructure of the building. There is a huge concrete slab under the building that acts as a heat bank, and somewhere there are windcatchers (I don't see them in aerial photographs) which funnel air over the concrete before it goes into the interior. This keeps the inside cool in hot weather and warm in cool weather, without an active air conditioning system.
It's also nestled in the 280/380 interchange, so my commute very often took me up and back down on 280, which is probably my favorite stretch of road in the world. I grew up in the south bay, a stone's throw from 280, and driving up and down 280 has always been relaxing for me, even when there's (somehow) traffic.
In retrospect, I didn't fully appreciate that office. Thanks for the 5-minute reminisce.
That's interesting to hear that it is so relaxed in Europe. I work in EU at a multinational with offices all around the world, and within Europe, we are not legally allowed to enter the offices in other countries. The reason is simply that if there is a labor/work inspection (sorry, don't know the exact English expression) they can get a fine if I do not have a work order for a project abroad.
This is true in the US, too, but selectively and only really enforced in a meaningful way by a few states (including California). If you spend 30+ days in California for work reasons (visiting a employer's office would count, even if you're not on the clock when you do it) it triggers state income tax requirements. No fine, but equivalently unpleasant.
In my experience nearly every Google campus has a music room, and nearly all of them have at least a weighted keyboard.
In the Bay Area there are a lot of acoustic pianos available. There's even a special building that has like 12 practice rooms, each with an acoustic piano.
While an employee, I stashed 6 colored "p-bone" plastic trombones in google colors in various Google Cloud offices... (tokyo has blue, green in UK, etc)
A friend who works there reported that there's currently no theremin. It seemed to have been someone's personal theremin, and they took it with them when they left.
However, it sparked an interest in having a theremin - so perhaps it'll make a return!
In school, I did a research project on grand pianos in the lobbies of tech companies. Google was one of the few whose public relations refused to comment, but a helpful engineer I pulled out of the phone tree did ask around the MV office with my set of questions.
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.
Don't work for Google, but been to the Toronto office (it is on the smaller side).
It is in the heart of the Toronto downtown, near Richmond & Spadina, next to the old & new City Hall. Definitely disagree with GP, I'm not sure what better area you would pick (but I love downtown). Similarly in Taipei, the Google office is right in Taipei 101 (like having an office in CN Tower - very cool.)
To be fair, Amazon's office in Toronto is next to the CN Tower and has a great view of it - so maybe Amazon takes the cake here. You have to pay for the cake though.
> It is in the heart of the Toronto downtown, near Richmond & Spadina
No, it's Richmond and University or Richmond and Bay. It's basically in financial district which is as boring and corporate as it comes. My point was to the GP saying "Google always seems to lease the best/coolest office real estate"
My girlfriend works for Google. I just moved to the Bay Area and I can definitely relate. She gives me tours of the Mountain View headquarters (and the campus) quite often and I just feel... it's too tranquil... it's too nice... it's too serene and it's just such a privilege to be here. The atmosphere is calm, the location is on beautiful rolling hills of California, the food is fantastic, there is a strong focus on biking/walking/community. Just lovely.
In reality they were out of room at many of their offices pre-COVID, and they hired like crazy during COVID, and had no room for everyone to RTO.
Before I quit you had to book a desk if you wanted to come into the office, hybrid. I pushed to get myself my own assigned desk because I despised the stock monitors, etc.
At that point (fall 2021) hardly anybody was coming in, so it was a ghost town. But they would not have been able to fit everyone in if they'd demanded people come back.
I worked from the Buenos Aires office, as part of my week long trip there. I was new so I didn’t have a million PTO days. The office space was beautiful, centrally located, with incredible food, and genial colleagues. We watched a World Cup match together. Same deal in Istanbul.
Should be fine (although your ability to access work materials might be limited). Visiting the Shanghai office is a decent alternative to the tower's paid observation deck (similar situation at the Taipei 101 office)
I've heard blockages in the Beijing Wudaokou office, but that was before I started working at Google (I left China in 2016 and started at google in 2020, so maybe a big gap). Maybe it changed? (or my info was wrong)
Having been through this myself -- but as an individual-contributor rather than some kind of Thought Leader... and seen others go through it.. Sounds about typical for Google acquires.
Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior folks -- leave.
I stuck around (for another 6 years) after my 3-4 years of golden handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.
Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.
In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ... though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly without us.
2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a while.
It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.
This sounds approximately like acquisitions I've been through, except working at Google you get paid 3x as much. There are many, many huge enterprises buying startups; few have the pay scales of Google. (The general inability to act annoys me more than comp, though, which is why I left Google to go to a startup in the first place! I really miss the days of "rollout new code on green"; you could have an idea in production in less than 5 minutes. Not so in the enterprise world.)
I 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
I think the insularity is caused by that, they literally don’t build for normal humans. They think the rest of us that don’t work at Google aren’t smart enough to understand what they do.
This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.
Maybe it /was/ a good tradeoff for users but the past few years I think people have become very disillusioned with Google. If anyone still gets excited about a new Google service being announced it's either because they're new to the Google ecosystem and haven't yet experienced year-after-year of having products and services you rely on repeatedly cancelled out from under you and replaced with something noticeably worse, or they're a masochist.
But other big companies are the same. Engineers just don't communicate with users; that's reserved for product managers. The most you will get is a bug report.
I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts unless I can get engineers/developers and end users together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations can even conceive of how that might work once they are big enough.
Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.
I 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.
They're just the user, not the customer. For the real customers (big ad spenders) they do provide support, account managers and SLA agreements.
In their world a couple of dollars for your cloud storage isn't enough to pay for support and reading your email, browsing history and your site usage is a way to earn back the money they've put into creating and sustaining the "free" service.
I used to think about this when I was a kid. If 5 billion people pray to God at the same time and ask for mutually exclusive things, how can he possibly answer or even listen to them all? And it's now up to 8 billion and the problem isn't getting any easier.
I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but their users have not yet accepted that.
Im pretty sure that if there were only one single human in the world the success ratio of the communication with God would be just as bleak, and the situation there is more like a company that after digging a tiny bit you discover only exists on paper.
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.
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.
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.
Getting acquired is the end goal of a huge portion of startups and the vcs funding them. If that option goes away there will probably be a lot fewer startups, which may or may not be a good thing.
Maybe we'll have fewer it's Uber-but-for-washing-your-underwear companies then. And maybe only really good ideas will actually get to the level of obtaining VC funding for development. That's not a bad thing. VCs for the last 15 years were throwing ideas at a wall, when one stuck, 10 other VC componies copied the idea....
> Getting acquired is the end goal of a huge portion of startups and the vcs funding them.
I often wonder if that's a good thing.
On one hand, it provides VCs with more incentive to invest in startups, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry and allows us to more easily take risks trying new things.
On the other hand, it essentially guarantees the entire economy will eventually be consolidated into a few megacorps who might not even be good at what they do. It may be possible to compete with them, but instead startups are incentivised to join them.
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.
I agree. Monopolies are great for the monopoly, but inevitably cause less competition, and thus less innovation.
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.
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.
> 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.
I never understand this sentiment. Why should the startup founders be forced to work on at their company for the "good of the world", rather than taking a payday and enjoying their own life? This seems incredibly narcissistic and unfair to them.
From the Google side I wonder if the underlying logic of these types of acquisitions is actually more originating on the Google M&A department side.
There's probably some infrastructure needed to maintain a corporate Google M&A team which is probably is essential at the size of Google, but I can imagine there is a bit of downtime in between large deals that are actually exponentially value accretive (i.e. Youtube, Nest, etc.).
If the downtime between rational M&A is too long, you probably start having staff attrition, in fighting/restlessness, lack of practice - not to mention a need to justify the existence of the department via OKRs to the rest of the company. Hence the need for some smaller, slightly less rational M&A deals to get done in order to keep the team in a ready state.
No knowledge of Google specifically, but that M&A team is often part of strategy unit that's constantly looking at potential acquisitions to fill gaps in product offerings, valuing internal business units for possible sale, etc.
So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.
I'm curious about how compensation works for such internal M&A teams.
Definitely I don't have any real insight into IBanking but as I understand there's usually IBanking M&A division whose activity (and corresponding compensation) generally revolves around two activities - generating pitch books to generate transactions and then generating transactions. I imagine for IBankers there's only incentives to generate transactions regardless of whether they are good or bad for the two parties actually involved in the M&A transaction. I'm not aware there's any activity/compensation tied to the long term (i.e. 10 year ROI) success of deals.
It'd be smart if internal M&A divisions were held to higher standards - not only being measured on number of pitch books generated and transactions closed but also additional OKRs/compensation regarding the long term success of previous transactions for the company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very nice and sneaky article. It seems like a cheerleading article at first but if you read to the end you can see the cutting criticism, delivered in a way that makes perfect sense if you've lived it, but you might even miss much of if you haven't.
I was part of a similar acquisition story and feel many of the same things, but the company was eBay so all the talk about great things wasn't as applicable. Just mostly the bad things.
I agree. It really shows that at a large scale it is no longer possible to deliver new value. Google has reached that level. It can only go downhill from here. Albeit very slowly.
> 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.
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.
if the same invention happened at a university, no one would say MIT/Stanford invented transformer. We credit the people involved. Somehow, if it happens at a company, company gets most of the credit. Even when the papers and authors are publicly available. this is different from say iPhone which probably would not be developed at a university.
Bard is terrible at coding. It makes a lot of mistakes but is too insistent it got it right. My feeling is Bard confabulates more often than the recent version of ChatGPT.
The good thing is one can verify the output of Bard easily with the Google button and when asking for links it will give you reference (real or not). Other plus is the ability to access internet, so you can give Bard directly your own document for processing.
ChatGPT also seems to understand the intention of the user better while the filtering (clam down) of bard is very strict.
Crew 'we're building a ship to go somewhere but we need money lol'
Google 'we'll buy your ship and crew'
Crew 'cool what do we have to do'
Google 'Well we need you up to code for sailing on our
ocean, so you need to rebuild a lot of your ship to look like our other ships'
Crew 'ok we're done, now what'
Google 'drift between our many beautiful ports'
Crew 'whats the end goal'
Google 'we'll forget about you, stop maintaining your ship, and you'll drift aimlessly on our ocean for some years until one of the directors scuttles your ship on a whim'
I'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.
> 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.
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.
“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].
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.”
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
Definitely DO NOT work remotely as a junior developer. Achieving the appropriate career progression requires meaningful interactions with your more experienced colleagues, which may be limited in a remote work environment.
That said, here is a small list of things you’ll need to get a job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies:
• 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.
A company that stands to lose a lot of tax rebate money by not having enough asses in their chairs concluded that having more asses in chairs is better? Somebody, pinch me!
Meta are based in Menlo Park. Many senior engineers leave when they have kids because the commute is terrible. They have every incentive in the world to make remote work.
That being said, Facebook (when I was there) was a difficult place to work remotely from as it was a super in-office culture. I was essentially remote (not in the same office as most of my team) and it was very hard, so maybe it's more cultural factors that are causing the problems for them.
This is maybe getting offtopic but I still have no idea why the term "full stack developer" exists or why it's so widespread. Sure, if you specialize in JavaScript and you mainly work writing web UI libraries, you might mainly consider yourself a "frontend developer." Same thing for working on server frameworks that would, I guess, make you a "backend developer"? (I'd think in that case you'd probably just be into general programming, and not call yourself that)
Does a person that wires up a backend to do some business logic, hit some APIs, etc. and then send it to a frontend to be displayed really need a name like "full stack"? It almost implies your doing both of the jobs of a frontend and backend developer, but if you go by the example work I mentioned previously, you're not doing that. That's what I do for my job and it feels like I'm doing the Sesame Street of programming jobs compared to other areas of the industry.
I don't like how the term "software engineer" is overused either. Maybe just cause most of what comes out of the software industry really shouldn't be compared to what comes out of industries that build bridges and large machinery. I don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow are really implementing proper engineering practices.
> I don't feel like people who regularly joke about copy-pasting code snippets from Stack Overflow are really implementing proper engineering practices.
I think most people say this in jest; regardless, writing low-effort code that would be "helped" by this practice is just a small part of the job anyways.
As a backend dev, I probably know which teams are calling me but not necessarily why, and I rarely have occasion to try to read their code. I can’t call myself full stack because I haven’t seriously touched frontend for a while and it changes rapidly.
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
>" 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.
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.
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.
I think the outside world massively underestimates the viciousness of politics in the upper echelons of Google, and how it has been that way for a very long time. (It predates Sundar ascending to CEO). I have never worked for Google, but closely enough with teams and execs in those upper regions to know how the sausage is made and it forever soured me on possibly working there (and I believe that is entirely mutual). The post acquisitions which are not quite merged into the mothership teams tend to be on the receiving end of much of the worst, and it leads to the result where the survivors are the most obnoxious.
"Licking the cookie" has to be the single most common phrase that came up, but my general sense was that both Google and FB are full of weasels, only the latter is much more honest about it. Neither is particularly desirable.
EDIT: Feel the need to qualify, there is a lot of superb technical work there on many many teams, but it is the co-ordination of that (especially fights over gatekeeping that which goes forward) which is a total mess. The resulting strategic blunders and failure to execute create huge friction with the outside world.
competition isn’t a waste. for a google kind of company it’s fine.
is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely?
google happens to be big enough to have an internal market, that’s all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave? and you move on to the next project. (promo considerations aside)
different people will of course internalize it differently. some bitterly.
I'm not referring to the plethora of chat apps. Those are wasteful and demonstrative of google's failings.
It is actually wasteful to build 15 note taking apps that die. Free markets limit inefficiency as individual actors can only run out of money individually unlike governments who can bankrupt everyone.
Google gets the worst of both worlds by having multiple internal projects and having management pick winners. It’s exactly the kind of waste you get from monopolies where efficiency takes a back seat to politics.
> help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more
Couldn’t disagree more, most web presences in B2C have a chat box where you can talk to someone or something on the other end. Usually they’re horrible but when they’re good they’re fucking great.
I think the other problems you outline, plus the fact that google went through this process with gchat itself (anyone remember Allo?) are probably the main contributors. As a sibling comment notes: google’s product org is meme-level terrible from top to bottom.
help-over-gchat and B2C chat are two different things.
help-over-gchat was a matching system that allowed you to either ask a question about a topic, or declare that you know about a topic, and the system would match question-askers with question-answerers, all through gChat.
In my eyes it’s a PMF problem and an issue with their product team that Google couldn’t pivot. I know in 2023 a major CRM vendor has been rolling out the same idea as part of their SaaS. They’re trying to match individual customer service reps with depth of expertise across a broad product range. Not sure how much success they’re having but the idea is solid and requires an interesting combinatorial solver to figure out “good” matches within various constraints beyond expertise like individual workload, time zones, etc. with the goal to drive down case resolution time. Google is terrible at product and terrible at taking the long view, despite having known for decades that they’re going to struggle with innovators dilemma.
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.
There was a time when it was true that being a Googler meant you were pretty hot shit, but that was decades ago at this point. Not insulting any of the talented people who work there, it's just a much bigger company with 1000x more people on staff, so obviously it's not just the top, crème de la crème nerds in the world, even if many of them are there.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that this article is an example of pride or bragging. It seems like an inventory of what's unusual about Google. It also includes some somewhat cutting remarks about its dysfunctions, e.g.:
> Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.
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.
I've worked in large companies (thousands of employees) and startups (<20) and I actually felt more like a cog in the machine at the startup size companies.
I was literally just a means to an end to churn out code on a product. I could have been (and eventually was) replaced at any moment with another generic cog willing to churn out the same code without much of a thought.
After working at Google and Startups, I totally agree. You are much more of a cog at a startup due to the desperate need to grind out the next A/B test or customer requirement.
Don't agree at all. Have you worked at a startup with <10 employees? It's more like 25% cog at that level. Even at 50 employees you're at worst 50% cog.
I think it's useful for people who are founders or employees in a startup that Google (or similar BigCo) might acquire to read things like this.
Also, I think there's things to be proud about working at Google. In general working there does teach a diligence of quality that is often missing in SWE in other orgs, though many companies are picking up on the same practices anyways.
Personally, I found my time at Google to be useful from the POV of that, but also, yeah, just having it on my resume.
People usually don’t hand the keys to their company when things are going amazing. Very first sentence:
> As we started to raise Socratic’s Series B in 2017, we quickly learned that our focus on getting usage at the expense of revenue was going to bite us
As folks here seem be eager to read between the lines how terrible it was maybe they should read between this one too
Maybe you should read the article before bloviating about things (seriously, what's with this ranting and raving that doesn't even have the article it's supposedly answering in context?).
To the average person working at NASA feels the same. Most professional achievements are being a part of a cog and society functions by people working together as cogs to make a system function.
You always effectively a cog in the wheel. You’re never actually making a meaningful difference. There’s only a handful of universally “impactful” causes, the rest are just things that are part of the intricate world we’ve created. A job is almost always just a job, whatever the industry.
Source: I’ve been in IT for over a decade, across all sizes of companies.
Things are slowly but surely changing, and this goes for the tech world/culture as a whole, i.e. how we're seen by the "outside" world.
I'd say that the high-point of the nerd/tech stuff was around 2017-2018, i.e. just before the pandemic, but ever since then techies have started being seen as a nuisance (and worst) by more and more people.
