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."
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?<p>Kind of seems like Google bought the company, mushed the team into the rest of Google and killed the app off.
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).<p>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.
>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.<p>This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production
I had the pleasure of working with Shreyans as a SE at Maven last year and it's funny to see how this blog post explains some of the experience working together. There was a strong aversion to meetings and process and big emphasis on empowering the employees to make judgement calls and just reach out for comment if they're unsure. Those things just made sense to me so I didn't question it but coming so recently from Google might have made those aversions stronger. At the end of the day, I enjoyed that way of working (which is probably much harder to do with bigger teams) and I hope to bring it to the next place I go.<p>I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an urban studies masters (<a href="https://www.4cities.eu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.4cities.eu/</a>) 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956</a> ... 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.<p>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.<p>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.
A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed:<p>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..<p>It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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)
> "At Google's scale, the external world ceases to exist and is only rarely and carefully allowed to enter their walls"<p>OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.).<p>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.
I don't understand authors who criticized the acquirer post acquisition.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That's it. No need to criticize, you got the money, you got to the finished line.
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":<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>I wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in the LLM space right now.
Crew 'we're building a ship to go somewhere but we need money lol'<p>Google 'we'll buy your ship and crew'<p>Crew 'cool what do we have to do'<p>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'<p>Crew 'ok we're done, now what'<p>Google 'drift between our many beautiful ports'<p>Crew 'whats the end goal'<p>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.<p>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:<p>> <i>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.</i><p>A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product.<p>> <i>Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts.</i><p>> <i>Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t.</i><p>> <i>Top heavy orgs are hard to steer.</i><p>> <i>Technical debt is real. So is process debt.</i><p>> <i>Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.</i>
“careers across the Socratic team have bloomed” nice reference to Bloom, which is what I assume to be the codename for the Socratic rewrite :)<p>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].<p>[1]: <a href="https://socratic.org/principles" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://socratic.org/principles</a>
I found the mention of most of Google’s code stored in a mono repo to be pretty crazy.<p><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2854146</a>
> 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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There is an ever-shifting web of goals and efforts. Politics and frequent re-orgs can derail projects. Smart people argue rather than align.<p>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.<p>To drive something big, you must relentlessly sell the vision and get the right leaders on board.<p>Many acquisitions fail. The Socratic founders left, and some goals weren't achieved, but parts of the product grew significantly.<p>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.
Had a wonderful conversation with the author just a few days ago (link here: <a href="https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC</a>), I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
> But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.<p>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.
> Look at Google’s collection of app icons and you’ll see four colors and simple shapes.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/jlcw0w" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/jlcw0w</a>
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?
>And counter-intuitively, adding more people to an early-stage project doesn't make it go faster.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law</a>
> 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.<p>How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?
> Google does things the Google way. Just about every piece of software and infrastructure used at Google was built at Google<p>And now we have most using everything built by Google. Sad times when compared to times when everything was once individually created.
Just interviewed author a few days ago: <a href="https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/9pCOn831FX0?si=gzBJsvWE8UQyPBGC</a><p>I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
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.”
Too bad their "Ceebo" icon is a broken link, I'd be interested to see what it looked like given all the purported fuss that Google made about it.
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
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...."<p>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.
a new post for <a href="https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/</a> ;)
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.<p>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").<p>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.<p>What a shame and waste of resources.
This picture from the post is worth a thousand words: <a href="https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://shreyans.org/images/posts/google/nooglers-no-more.jp...</a>
"When I was working at Google, we ..."<p>Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google!<p>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.