Having been through this myself -- but as an individual-contributor rather than some kind of Thought Leader... and seen others go through it.. Sounds about typical for Google acquires.
Google will tie fairly lengthy golden handcuffs onto their acquired employees precisely because of what you see here. As soon as they run out, most -- especially the founders and senior folks -- leave.
I stuck around (for another 6 years) after my 3-4 years of golden handcuffs expired because there was nothing else that paid as well in my area. But most of my NYC colleagues from the same acquisition bailed as soon as they got something else compelling.
Going from a fast moving startup where you get to make decisions on your own rather small codebase, to a giant beast like Google is... hard. Much of what was in this article is saying is familiar. But when we joined Google it was "only" around 25k engineers. Now it's wayyyy more than that.
In our case they basically seemed to buy us out to eliminate us (or so the DOJ is saying now https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10956 ... though they didn't at the time). For the first year they kind of just let us flap in the wind without integrating us, while they just rewrote features from our stuff into their stack... mostly without us.
2 years in I felt a bit like the "Rest and Vest" scene from Silicon Valley. Though I got myself out of that trough for a while.
It was a weird feeling of simultaneously being happy for the opportunity and the Really Good Money, but also a tinge of bitterness about the circumstances of the whole thing.
This sounds approximately like acquisitions I've been through, except working at Google you get paid 3x as much. There are many, many huge enterprises buying startups; few have the pay scales of Google. (The general inability to act annoys me more than comp, though, which is why I left Google to go to a startup in the first place! I really miss the days of "rollout new code on green"; you could have an idea in production in less than 5 minutes. Not so in the enterprise world.)
I left early and left a lot of money on the table. If they carved out a space for people to get weird and creative, I'd come back, but otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life in the chaotic fun of startups.
Some people are built for the pirate ship, not the armada.
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.