I was recently talking to someone who worked for a company that was acquired by google. He seemed to think the setup was bittersweet. On one hand all he had to do was stay for 1.5-3 years (I forget exactly how long) and his 500K in google stock would vest. On the other hand he was stuck there, working on a really boring project translating some API (or something similar that sounded just as boring as he made it out to be). He said he was in at 11 and out by 4 every day, and most of that time was surfing the internet. It must be nice to get paid an average of 300k a year - with awesome benefits - to do nothing, but it also kind of sucks to feel like you don't accomplish much every day.
The way he put it it's not possible for him to switch projects, and it's not simple to take on a second project because he's supposed to be fulltime on the transition. But I don't know the details, I'm not clear how Google's project management works.
The way I see it, there are always boring jobs that need to be done, and paying more for them is one reasonable way of convincing people to do them. Yeah, it might be boring, but on the other hand he works short hours and gets paid really well. It's up to him whether this tradeoff is worth it - personally, I would say he should use the extra time he has thanks to his short hours to do something more interesting on the side, while still doing the boring job to pay the bills.
The way I read it is that Google has their hands in so many projects that they would have a good claim on your free-time work, even in California. Just another good reason to ignore their recruiter emails.
So, basically, the "best minds of our generation" aren't even necessarily pushing ads and pictures of cats? They're just turning the crank on something mindless and looking at web sites all day? What a waste.
When you have a company with 15000 engineers and maybe 15 solid products, I imagine there's a lot of mindless work going on :) But, if you're going to do mindless work I can't think of a better place than Google to be. Every single person I know there is, at the least, content with their jobs.
When you put the statistics that way, that makes for interesting corroboration as to why I hear anecdotes that everyone at Google is trying to get into Google X.
For comparison, when Google acquired Slide two years ago, the acquired employees numbered fewer than 100 (vs Wildfire's 400) and retention packages summed to $46 million.
I don't really understand why people get so mad when being acquired by Google. For me it doesn't make any sense to sell your company, even worse if it's to Google.
