What I learned getting acquired by Google(shreyans.org) |
What I learned getting acquired by Google(shreyans.org) |
Or you might not, in the case of Waze and Maps. I don't want to know what sort of politics were involved in the decision to keep both products rolling in parallel for 10 years.
Simple things done repeatedly can feel magical at Google's scale - like recalculating signals across the entire internet to improve Search. But much improvement comes from manual analysis and labeling data.
Surprising problems get tackled if the right teams are interested - like developing a math image recognition API from scratch in 6 months. But most products face many hurdles to launch.
There is an ever-shifting web of goals and efforts. Politics and frequent re-orgs can derail projects. Smart people argue rather than align.
Technical debt is real, but so is process debt. Layers of reviews and requirements accumulate over time. Top-heavy teams with lots of senior people can cause gridlock. More doers than thinkers are needed.
To drive something big, you must relentlessly sell the vision and get the right leaders on board.
Many acquisitions fail. The Socratic founders left, and some goals weren't achieved, but parts of the product grew significantly.
Overall, amazing things are possible at Google if you navigate politics, rally the right support, and play the long game. But it's challenging due to complex processes, shifting priorities, and ingrained ways of doing things.
I had to briefly stop reading this. I realize how _someone_'s promotion goal plays a part in a huge team making significant effort on solving a problem or building one of their chat apps.
How can the elitist and divisive aspect of this be so lost on everyone?
And now we have most using everything built by Google. Sad times when compared to times when everything was once individually created.
I loved being a part of Socratic by Google.
GJ!
I see, this why whenever anybody has problems with Google they just dial a number and get immediately connected to a caring live person ready to solve whatever issues user might have.
That said, here is a small list of things you’ll need to get a job at Google or any of the other Big Tech companies:
• Educational Background: it seems that you’re a student at https://www.dhbw.de/startseite, so you’re good.
• Develop Technical Skills: you’re already familiar with Go (https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories&language=go). Consider getting some knowledge of C++ or Python as they are common at Google. Python will help you a lot during the interviews.
• Build a Strong Portfolio: junior developers usually have much more free time to work on personal projects. I see you already have a GitHub account with a good amount of Go code, so I think you’re on the right track -- https://github.com/xNaCly?tab=repositories
• Gain Practical Experience: consider internships, co-op programs, or contribute to open-source projects, participate in hackathons or coding competitions to demonstrate your problem-solving skills.
• Networking: attend industry events, meetups, and conferences to connect with professionals in the field. Google often looks for candidates through referrals. Join relevant online communities, forums, and social media groups to stay informed about job opportunities and industry trends.
• Prepare for Interviews: LeetCode like a madman! -- https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/
• Apply for Positions: obviously, apply for a job; connect with a recruiter.
I could go on and on with this list, but you’ll discover the other things you’ll need once you have done most of the ones above.
Good luck!
That "may" is carrying a lot of weight there. Almost makes it sound like a fact, while in fact being merely an unsupported opinion.
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 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.
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.
They rewrote their whole system and then Google told them they didn't actually need the product (and from what I can tell, the help-over-gchat idea isn't really a product space any more). So they pivoted and made user profiles- that is, for every user at google, they inspected all the history of that user, and made a simple model that represented them. at the same time, several other groups were competing to the same thing- and a more powerful team licked the cookie and took ownership of user models at google (often, the leadership would set up various teams in competition and then "pick a winner").
After a few years, all the acquihires left google in disgust, because google had basically taken their product, killed it, forced them to pivot, and then killed their pivot.
What a shame and waste of resources.
Google Product Management is almost meme-level bad, and is carried + boosted by such great talent in virtually 95% of other departments at the company.
As an easy litmus test, think about whether or not you could quickly name 5 Google products still around that the company released in the past 20 years that _weren't_ seeded from acquisitions.
"Licking the cookie" has to be the single most common phrase that came up, but my general sense was that both Google and FB are full of weasels, only the latter is much more honest about it. Neither is particularly desirable.
EDIT: Feel the need to qualify, there is a lot of superb technical work there on many many teams, but it is the co-ordination of that (especially fights over gatekeeping that which goes forward) which is a total mess. The resulting strategic blunders and failure to execute create huge friction with the outside world.
is it a waste when 20 companies compete in the open market for note taking apps, and 15 of them die completely?
google happens to be big enough to have an internal market, that’s all. your team isn't guaranteed to win. but your work output isn't considered a waste, unlike the open market. some of the ideas might survive in another shape. remember wave? and you move on to the next project. (promo considerations aside)
different people will of course internalize it differently. some bitterly.
I'm not referring to the plethora of chat apps. Those are wasteful and demonstrative of google's failings.
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.
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 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.
Seems like every Googler cannot wait to tell us their stories about Google!
Hopefully over the last year the general public has started to see those bigTech more as a dystopian place than a source of pride. I still cannot believe that we have hyped becoming a cog at Google to the almost top level of professional achievement.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that this article is an example of pride or bragging. It seems like an inventory of what's unusual about Google. It also includes some somewhat cutting remarks about its dysfunctions, e.g.:
> Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.
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.
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.
> 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
It's not really a positive one.
Source: I’ve been in IT for over a decade, across all sizes of companies.
It really has not. Unless you consider commenters on HN and r/technology the general public.
I'd say that the high-point of the nerd/tech stuff was around 2017-2018, i.e. just before the pandemic, but ever since then techies have started being seen as a nuisance (and worst) by more and more people.
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.
People WAY over glamorize startups.
As a human in a capitalist system
As a mammal on Earth
As a cell-based organism on this arm of the galaxy
i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died.
the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game.
i loved watching how Google would continuously pat themselves on the back about how good they are to "their employees," and then openly shit on the people who worked full time at the company but technically weren't FTEs.
it's a caste system. a company that behaves this way should be run out of town with extreme prejudice. but instead they somehow took over San Francisco.
Microsoft learned the hard way to not treat contractors like employees. https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
Nobody else wants to learn that same lesson.
One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.
Google goes out of its way to emphasize that TVC "conversion" does not exist. You can interview, but you'll go through the same process as anybody else, they'll make sure you don't interview with anybody you know, and your achievements as TVC are discounted completely.
It's literally illegal to treat contractors too well.
But otoh you don’t need to deal with performance appraisals, office politics and all the other bullshit. Do your work, take the money.
In Australia we have laws protecting de facto FTEs.
We even have laws mandating that co tractors must add extra to invoices to cover their Pension fund contributions! They have to charge this by law!
To "stick it to the man" directly by being kind and generous is perhaps the best possible task I can assign to myself.
It took me a bit of thinking before I realised it was actually being done for my own benefit, as I was a contractor there. Had they invited me to the office party etc. it would have contributed to me being seen as an employee, and losing the status of a contractor. They could not do this, I didn't want it. Once I realised that, I was fine with it, but it did hurt initially.
I must say it would have been a whole lot easier if the boss had simply bother to explain, but it doesn't really matter, he did actually have my best interests at heart (as well as his own of course!)
In the UK we have IR35 laws that say contractors must be distinct from employees in various ways.
The legislation is a shitshow.
It was supposed to be a way to protect people from zero-hours contracts but ended up being a way to extort more tax from businesses.
As a result, contractors face very odd rules to ensure that if HMRC (the UK tax body) comes knocking ... everything seems legit.
This means everything is policed from how you write emails to if you pay for the Christmas team meal.
This was in the days of cubes, and contractors got the ones that were two folks per cube and there were other things.
Some of us did get hired and became "real". But the concerns that led to this kind of treatment were quite real.
There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.
Many people are unhappy and/or quit Google's FTE employment too, and feel undervalued at Google as FTE. The employment agreement is consensual.
All social institutions eventually become that.
It's inescapable.
Since then I've been a perm at a couple of places were I had hiring responsibility and teams that included contractors and I ALWAYS made a point of treating them EXACTLY the same. I also never encountered another organisation that was as fucked in their treatment of contractors.
Now contractors have to be treated much worse because there is precedent for legal consequences if you treat them as well as your employees. It's just business, it's certainly not good for morale or productivity to create a class divide, but not creating that divide incurs serious liabilities.
I was hired by someone with some clout who enjoyed reading two books I had written. He would occasionally call me to talk, and then one time he invited me to work on his pet project at Google.
Some of the perks were amazing. I took an 8 hour class ‘end to end’ that I would have paid a lot of money to take and in one day I got to learn how to use all of the internal systems I would need for my project, plus lots of other interesting stuff. Pure joy, that one!
I totally enjoyed the food (this was in 2013) and I went to invited speaker talks (I made sure that I wasn’t counting this against my 8 hours a day). Getting to meet Molly Katzen (author or Moose Wood Cookbook, etc.) and having a long conversation with her was great. Ditto for Alexis Ohanian.
I also have a work eccentricity, that apparently was not a problem: I always like to start work around 6am, and then leave early. As far as I know, this was not a problem. I need at least two hours a day with no interruptions.
Anyway, if you get a chance to work at Google for a while as a contractor, go for it!
Of course in the stories our heroes rally the rest of the Utopians to the plight of this 'untouchable' class, the evil overlords are over thrown, and a more equal society for all is established. But that's why they call it fiction right?
Given that this article is written by a team that was acquired 8 years after I left, and yet experienced the same systemic problems that I explained in my exit interview would eventually kill Google as a company, I feel sad.
Kind of the reason I prefer mid-market tech companies. More likely to treat "contractors" as equals. The place I'm at now they're indistinguishable internally from regular employees, they're just paid by another company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp
Effectively the fact that an employer treats a temporary employee "the same" as a regular one (i.e. by granting them the same perks) is construed by courts as evidence that they are not temporary.
So, if a company wants to hire temp/contractor employees, they just can't do this. It's not a "caste" thing, it's not about deliberate discrimination, it's not about keeping wages low or reducing overhead, and it's absolutely not unique to Google.
Blame the courts, basically. It was a terrible decision, for exactly this reason. Its effect is directly contra to its intent.
> If you worked with a TVC, you'd get training that felt like you were learning how to own a House Elf: "Remember, never give them clothing or they'll be free! And report them if they ever claim to work for Google."
Yes! That's exactly what happens. And it did, to Microsoft, and it was extremely expensive. So no one wants to see the same thing happen to them.
Blame them for enforcing labor law? Why not blame the companies for exploiting labor by misclassifying them to deny benefits?
If they had a will, they could easily force their vendors to provide same level of benefits.
This is happening exactly to cut costs, to keep reported headcount low. There will be no news if Google cut 50000 of such contractors, simply because they are not counted, not treated like a people. Just a resource, leased from another company.
No, blame these companies for trying hard to avoid workplace protection.
I remember before this decision, I worked somewhere where people could take longer to be promoted as a temp, maybe even 2 years. I don't know that this was exploitive, it was usually a mix of developing competency and department having budget. If someone left the company, usually someone got immediately promoted out of being a temp. If not that, it was dependent on department budget increase in the next fiscal year.
The legal change meant some roles like QA were put on a company switching treadmill.
In practice that rarely happens, as higher-pay => better-retention => becomes-most-knowledgeable-person-over-time.
Most contractors, not SME, are sourced from staffing agencies/partners. Sure, the resource cost is on par with a salaried worker, but typically the staffing company sourcing these people are going to take a huge chunk on that contract, at least 1/3. So yes, the resource/person is 280K on paper, but it's extremely rare they actually get paid that. The staffing agencies will provide benefits, but they're not even close to what in house staff are getting.
It also becomes nearly impossible to hire a contractor from partners in cases like this because you have to buy out the resource on the contract which is almost a non-starter because these fees can easily be 6 figures per head.
On the other hand, the “cloud consultants”, who were just old school operations folks who only knew how to do lift and shifts and make everything more expensive were billing $200 an hour. It was a small shop owned by the partners.
Long story short, I left there went to a startup for two years to get real world AWS experience, got hired at AWS in the ProServe department (full time job) and when I got Amazoned three years later (two months ago), I was able to negotiate a side contract with my former CTO for $135/hour and even that was low. I did it because I found the project interesting and I consider my former CTO a friend.
FWIW: I did get a full time job within three weeks.
Half of the things that feel like Google wanted to eject them was to satisfy IRS (e.g. paid rides on GBus), not because Google voluntarily wanted to treat them as such.
FWIW, most red badgers I knew were of non-engineering job functions and for them working at Google offices was a huge plus compared to their best alternative, not by a little margin, but a lot.
If I were to speak from the woke mentality, the author of the blog, who got sweet money through acquihire of a product no one ever heard of and probably never passed Google interview bar would be the bourgeois class at Google and every regular-E-badger with a PhD who works on ads for next to nothing, comparatively, to pay him is a third-class nobody. Gimmie. A. Break.
No awkward team lunches
No useless tchotchkes
No boring all hands
No forced participation events like 'hackathons'.
I just worked. It was great
Source: former Cisco.
Apologies, could someone de-acronym this one please.
On the reverse of that is a company that's mediocre to work for. The contractors might seem like the lucky ones in that scenario (hence, resentful language like "highly paid contractor" etc.) In fact, the same TVC might be the "highly paid contractor" at the same pay and treatment somewhere else.
Other posters already explained why it's like this - mainly because they are employees of another company, with a much lower barrier to hiring (and firing), a different liability profile, etc.
Google is already too big at this point, I'm talking about producing anything that would have a real impact in the medium to long term.
In a way, that's good, the last thing we really want is for really talented people to be able to do meaningful work at Google's scale and given Google's current incentives, on the other hand you have to feel for those talented people and for their wasted intellectual potential.
Kind of seems like Google bought the company, mushed the team into the rest of Google and killed the app off.
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.
This article summarizes clearly why Google is getting their ass kicked by OpenAI, they had all the tech but way too much bureaucracy, red tape, and lack of bold leadership to get anything out the door. If you look at the GPT4 paper credits half of the team worked at Google Brain and apparently felt they had to leave to get their work into production
I left for a funded opportunity to travel Europe while doing an urban studies masters (https://www.4cities.eu/) but it wasn't an easy decision. I hope we work together again in the future. If anyone is looking to work at an education startup check out maven.com for sure.
> What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.
I started as someone excited to learn, make things happen, and work hard. Within a few months I realized that the team I joined was the "wrong" version and the "right" version of that team was in another department I couldn't transfer to. My manager was in denial, my team-mates were quitting rapidly, and my skip manager was incredibly toxic.
But the worst part was that doing even a simple thing was a monumental task. Something that for a startup could take an hour to pick up, turn into a PR, get review, launch and get analytics on would take 2 months at Google. You could do other stuff in parallel of course but the iteration cycles were horribly slow and the ability to get feedback almost non-existent. The team I joined had worked on their product for 6 years and only just got the most primitive feedback metrics a few months into my joining.
3 months in and I knew I had to quit. I was out of there 15 months after joining. I'm going back to the startup world on Monday and I'm actually really excited!
The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. The extra scale of Google doesn't matter to me. I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. If I get big pay I need to have earned that from excellent product development.
This is so refreshing to read. Feels like 80%+ of ppl i came across in SV over the last 10 years do not have this mindset.
Hold this philosophy close and guard it fiercely. It is your secret weapon in a world of rising mediocrity
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior folks -- leave.
I stuck around (for another 6 years) after my 3-4 years of golden handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.
Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.
In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ... though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly without us.
2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a while.
It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.
Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.
Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy..
It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.
IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses).
At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace.
IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world.
I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.
Feels a bit like the post is upbeat padding to share the real experience/criticism which is this part (ie exactly what you expect for a small focused app getting acquired by a giant directionless company)
One takeaway is that if you get acquired by Google, you should try to advocate for such an arrangement. Having worked for a firm that was acquired, it was incredible and devastating imo how much talent was squandered by these endless rewrites. Each IC’s decision to do that, to be fair — the money or something else wins for them. But just a bummer to see.
OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
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.
There's probably some infrastructure needed to maintain a corporate Google M&A team which is probably is essential at the size of Google, but I can imagine there is a bit of downtime in between large deals that are actually exponentially value accretive (i.e. Youtube, Nest, etc.).
If the downtime between rational M&A is too long, you probably start having staff attrition, in fighting/restlessness, lack of practice - not to mention a need to justify the existence of the department via OKRs to the rest of the company. Hence the need for some smaller, slightly less rational M&A deals to get done in order to keep the team in a ready state.
So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.
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.
There is only one reason why you would sell: lots of money. You understand this going into the transaction. Once the company is acquired, it's no longer yours.
And you understand very well why you sold to Google: Because they are so big that they can give you a lot of money. Unfortunately, a large company always has a lot of bureaucracy. Surely the author knows this.
That's it. No need to criticize, you got the money, you got to the finished line.
It’s hard to develop savviness and a sophisticated sort of skepticism (ie a kind that doesn’t merely border on cynicism). So it’s disappointing when one’s optimism is exploited.
Which, Google, having gone through this sort of thing so many times — “knows” they are exploiting.
I say “knows” because Google M&A know this stuff in spades. Whether it’s reported up is another matter; as to say “the company we acquired is unhappy” is to bring blame upon M&A folks who are just doing their jobs.
Also see Judas Goat — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat
Practically, what this means is to first do the work that is given to
you. But once that's under control, to reach out into the vast Google
network, to learn what's being planned and invented, to coalesce a
clear image of the future, to give it shape through docs and demos, to
find the leaders whose goals align with this image, and to sell the
idea as persistently as you can.I was part of a similar acquisition story and feel many of the same things, but the company was eBay so all the talk about great things wasn't as applicable. Just mostly the bad things.
The question for Google is: how much are they willing to bet they're the whale and not just a fish that's too big?
I wonder if this helps explain why Google is getting smoked in the LLM space right now.
OpenAI and friends are able to move quickly, but (so far) they're not able to translate their LLM innovations into high-margin revenue with any significant moat.
Give it a couple years to see where all the cards settle and who's actually making money "with" LLMs.
Google 'we'll buy your ship and crew'
Crew 'cool what do we have to do'
Google 'Well we need you up to code for sailing on our ocean, so you need to rebuild a lot of your ship to look like our other ships'
Crew 'ok we're done, now what'
Google 'drift between our many beautiful ports'
Crew 'whats the end goal'
Google 'we'll forget about you, stop maintaining your ship, and you'll drift aimlessly on our ocean for some years until one of the directors scuttles your ship on a whim'
This is golden. I've seen this pattern in a couple of places I've worked unfortunately. Mainly people who love to argue against, but not for something.
> Most problems aren’t worth Google’s time, but surprising ones are. Most 10-50 million user problems aren’t worth Google's time, and don’t fit their strategy. But they’ll take on significant effort on problems that do fit their nature, strategy, and someone’s promotion goals.
A quiet acknowledgement of the promotion based culture driving product.
> Google is an ever shifting web of goals and efforts.
> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t.
> Top heavy orgs are hard to steer.
> Technical debt is real. So is process debt.
> Amazing things are possible at Google, if you play the right game.
The most valuable part of Socratic to me as a user was not as much the fancy technology, but rather the explainers, which provided useful information on a variety of topics in an nice, brief manner that made them easy to understand. However, I never understood why more weren’t written and they were never made available outside the app, such as inside Search. However, the explainers might be available under a Creative Commons license [1].
Total anecdote and not worth much, but I've seen it enough times to make note of it.
While extending it to things as small as a team lunch is going a bit far, it's understandable that they don't want to open up a slippery slope of it looking too much like an employment relationship. In many European countries that can result in false self-employment and get both the company and the contractor in legal trouble.
Blame government regulations in this case, probably? It seems implausibly evil that they would be that anal about things just to preserve the in-group club status. But, if it's about employee vs contractor distinction for regulations, it makes total sense (well, not at a global/system level, but the behavior in isolation).
For an example, anything/anyone that wants to access user data at Google faces an extremely high bar for access, with layers of access control, auditing, approvals, and enforcement, starting at the design phase through to implementation.
At Google that's a good thing. However it would be pretty silly at a 10 person startup.
What Google isn't great at is taking risks on new product ideas (for many good and bad reasons), and that's why they often acquire companies that do that sort of thing.
You could change none of the facts of this blog and write it as an aggressive rant about how Google murdered their startup, forced them to re-write the entire thing, stopped them shipping by being a bureaucratic nightmare, and the big take away is you can succeed at google if you "play the right game" if you know what I mean. It's ... not positive.
But if you look at the true final outcome, the post you are responding to was correct: they bought Socratic, rewrote and then relaunched it, and now Socratic is for all intents and purposes dead.
So, upon reflection, saying "there were good things and bad" feels a bit like the famous "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" joke.
I'd be pretty happy.
As for "happy story", I think the founders of Socratic learned a lot. Shreyans is just trying to share his learnings here. Not celebrate or mourn.
Not "killed off" exactly, no.
I've heard that's become better, but maybe not.
Google's search & ads billions keep raining from the sky, so killing acquired product isn't a big problem.
So if this is a PR piece, then it is not a great one.
waves to Matt Hancher
So just like when changing jobs?
It's more like getting a layoff and then offered an interview for a new job.
For me, we didn't have to do the interview. But there were a lot of other strings attached, most drastic being having to move cities (or have a 2-hour-each-way commute).
The money makes it worthwhile, but it's not a happy happy joy joy moment.
I also got a peavish Google recruiter all pissed at me about the fact that we were sharing notes with each other about the offers they were sending us, which I thought was pretty funny.
on acquihires you can have a full interview
I went on this meet and greet and it was more of a googlyness type thing just to check you have a pulse, others didn’t at all, all the team was hired, my only guess it could affected leveling and price
Soooo much of the Ego of Google engineering -- at least in the past -- is built around their sense of superiority of having made it through that interview and being selected as one of the "best engineers in the world."
Gave me heightened impostor syndrome for 10 years.
I think one is better off getting the interview.
> 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.
Not too unusual, other companies I've worked were very similar.
This is not true.
I will also call you out on this. The word is very strongly negative, so I think it's inappropriate to use in this context.
Because the buildings are usually located in very central city locations - I've often used the offices as a way to kill time til' check-in opens for hotels after a long-haul flight (grab food, caffeinate, have a shower, etc)
Recently I took a night train between Stockholm and Copenhagen.
Showered in the Stockholm office, walked 5 minutes to the train station, slept, woke up in Copenhagen, grabbed a hearty breakfast in the CPH office.
It's a little perk that is honestly vastly underestimated
Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.
It's more that almost all of Google's features are ad-funded, and the company has chosen to make lots of (apparently) free, but poorly supported and uncertain products, rather than a smaller set of well supported products. It's a tradeoff, and Google has made a good tradeoff for both themselves (who collect more data and have more ad supply) and the majority of their users (who get a wide variety of "free" services), but it has downsides, of course.
This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.
I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but their users have not yet accepted that.
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.
It's really weird watching hackers defend the idea of monopolies like Google now, at the expense of FOSS. It makes me wonder if Microsoft had been spending more money publicly buying startups back in the 90's if hackers would have defended them then.
On the other hand, as a big company, it's really nice letting the plethora of startups try various approaches and then buying one that is working, rather than making an attempt or two in house. You usually end up with better solutions for cheaper that way.
I think a partial solution to this is to ensure a minimum level of support for say 10 years. A planned and community-agreed roadmap, bug and security fixes. Google could afford it without any practical cost. Founders get the money. Consumers get a product for a decade.
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.
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.
"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."
But if you are just doing staff augmentation, probably not.
However, it sparked an interest in having a theremin - so perhaps it'll make a return!
Cisco mostly eliminated the upper tranch of their two-class system.
I don't think we have much protection for these types of labour hirec(as we'd call them in Aus) arrangements
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.
[1] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/sites/default/files/migration/72...
[2] https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-e...
This said, referring to the section 'sham contracting', actually covers, by far, the majority of contractors, which are effectively full time staff.
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 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.
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.
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.
Thus, it's a bad ruling. I'm all for reform of contractor labor laws, but this decision broke things.
"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.
I get that just badging in is a way better experience, but when I travelled to other offices it was just another bullet point on my travel to-do list.
I don’t know/remember what the policy was regarding same-city buildings, as there was just one office in my country.
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.
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!)
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.
It is the same with undocumented workers. Would it better if they were deported than to be denied benefits afforded to citizens?
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.
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.
Typically the business gets billed for the privilege though
You are not their problem.
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.
* Ashish Vaswani - Founder, Stealth Startup
* Noam Shazeer - Founder, Character.AI
* Niki Parmar - Founder, Stealth Startup
* Jakob Uszkoreit - Founder, Inceptive
* Llion Jones - Founder, Sakana AI
* Aidan Gomez - Founder, cohere
* Lukasz Kaiser - OpenAI
* Illia Polosukhin - Founder, NEAR
Is that somehow not operationalized?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are pictures and diagrams of some of the above features here https://mcdonoughpartners.com/projects/901-cherry-offices/ .
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.
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.
Which Microsoft would never have hired them, if that was the case, they would have hired normal FTEs.
So either 1) hire contractors and treat them as contractors (without the employee style treatment), or be sued later.
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.
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.
Adobe hasn't finalized its purchase of Figma yet.
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.
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.
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.
I just said you could freelance through them. A lot of people do.
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.
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.
It shouldn't.
It's clearly more linked to the type and structure of work performed.
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…
Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees.
It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.
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.
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.
What you're saying defeats the purpose and idea of having contractors.
We understand the """"purpose"""" of having contractors.
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.
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.
Always felt kind of gross to me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+dublin&oq=google+dubl...
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.
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.
Tell me more about this.
I feel big tech in general is looting its brands for profit, that while it's not 100% obvious yet, we're in the decline phase.
Both are amazing.
Hence the focus on 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.
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 offer flexibility. Contractors can be engaged and disengaged without labour law complications.
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"
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
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.
And that arrangement exists solely so that the company whose work you're actually doing can fire you more easily or avoid legal liability.
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.
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.
Obviously there are different policies for internals and contractors, but fruits and pizza are for everyone in the office.
(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.
Contractors (cleaners, catering staff, etc) got yellow ones IIRC
(I interned at ARM in Cambridge 2017 and 2018)
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
All the other stuff, too –– wanting to innovate but finding everything so slow, lots of process, feeling very pampered, etc.
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.
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 have known some folks getting insurance through their partner's work who passed on going FTE because it would be a pay cut.
Yes, they are not allowed access to a lot of stuff (source, telemetry, etc.).
Real IBMers got all kinds of stuff. We had to pay full price for the GR meal.
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.
Who won out, HR or treating contractors humanely? Or did they come correct without firing required?
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.
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.
A very similar-sounding caste-system. Europe’s great and all but it isn’t Utopia.
(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.
This is a cultural thing.
Just like every commun... ehem... socialist system, it achieves equality at epsilon.
They weren’t temp in the same sense as T temps - which are temporary workers hired from temp agencies.
It feels like contractors forget they are contractors...
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?
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".
> 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.
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.
Denying that is... something else.
Also most of the time these people are not receiving more money, more like the same or less.
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.
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.
These laws do not protect workers, they protect entrenched wealthy body shops.
I get why 1099s can’t but what’s the deal with the other, now more common situation?
Yes? Whats wrong with hiring a cook if you need to cook?
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.
Those kinds of regulations are a prime driver for this kind of contracting.
People that complain about the plights of contractors need to understand the above.
It might mostly exist for that reason, but not 'solely'.
Otherwise, there would be no contractors in eg Singapore.
The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the same as an FTE.
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 idea is that covers 70-80% utilization, unprofitable engagements, HR, benefits, etc. Plus profit to the company.
3 would mean your firm had sources of revenue other than services/consulting.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social mobility is significantly constrained
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.
Government taxes 50% of that
Then add on top the lower wages.
And regardless, if you're middle income or higher, you're paying way more in taxes in Europe than those things cost in the US.
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.
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.
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.
When I lived to Austria I was appalled at how many American friends asked me about the surfing.
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.
You know. "Fact" and "rigorous research".
They pretty much were giving away the farm, and if they kept that up they’d be bankrupt - not an incredibly valuable company.
Anyone doing that at scale is going bankrupt quickly. Which is the point.
Ah yess, cooking food is like deepwater welding, and an average adult has no idea how to manage the risks involved.
Seriously, how can an adult write something like this?
I know people who have, and it is far from an easy or straightforward thing. If you want to stay solvent and out of jail anyway.
Most restaurants go bankrupt within a few years.
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)
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?
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.
See https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-law-firm-isn-apos-0514053... . Valuing law firms is not that straightforward, and profit margin numbers are not defensible.
I would appreciate the source you are basing your arguments on.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
This is a very wrong assumption. You cannot have the same outcome even if you start from the same position - everyone poor or everyone rich.
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?
We discussing a canteen for employees, not a commercial restaurant. You don't need marketing, you don't need to turn a profit.
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.
I am honetely to lazy to look up a list of ESA space missions for you, Wikipedia might have a decent overview so.
you aren't arguing seriously. reread what I said. You're replying as though I said the complete opposite of what I actually said.
> make it so hardworking people born into poor families can outcompete wealthy failsons
I said you can't and you do not agree. Please tell me how do you see this happening and what is the barrier to this now?
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.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-government...
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?
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)
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.