The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker

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Yay! Google is buying your company! Boo! They hired everyone except you. :eek:

Last week, amid the overwrought start-up angst and sexual escapades that clutter the anonymous messaging app Secret, a hint of genuine drama emerged: a post that said, "Google was interested in buying my 5 person company for our team. They hired everyone but me."
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You didn't get paid half of what your male coworkers made because you're female. You got paid half of what they made because their skillset is more valuable. You probably didn't get acqui-hired as a result of the same reasoning. Google has good marketing people. They just plain don't need you.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
You didn't get paid half of what your male coworkers made because you're female. You got paid half of what they made because their skillset is more valuable. You probably didn't get acqui-hired as a result of the same reasoning. Google has good marketing people. They just plain don't need you.
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Exactly what I read too. It sucks though, but it's Google. They don't just let anyone in.
 
"I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to!"
 
Ducman69 said:
"I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to!"
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Yep she does get pay much higher than the India tech support! What is she cry about! Beside she has wealthy boyfriend , what to worry about . On top of that she got free 10k$
 
TeeJayHoward said:
You didn't get paid half of what your male coworkers made because you're female. You got paid half of what they made because their skillset is more valuable. You probably didn't get acqui-hired as a result of the same reasoning. Google has good marketing people. They just plain don't need you.
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Pretty much the first thing that sprang to mind. Google is the Last company I would try and imply "sexist" hiring policies. Basically just a butthurt female who somehow thinks that "art degree" was worth something and wants to play the sex card since she got told it wasn't.
 
After what happened at Google, she wasn't even sure she could bring herself to interview for another job. "I feel like I have no power, that this happened to me, and it’s my fault," she said. "I feel so betrayed. And, at this point, I don't really feel like I have it in me to fail again."
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Who says shit like this?

Life doesn't give you options like that. You deal with your failures the best you can and move on to other non-failure types of things. Jesus, if I said that every time I got ran over by life, I wouldn't even be here. ;)
 
Seriously? People suggesting that she sue because she wasn't hired? That's insane. Their company failed. It wasn't Google that screwed them. If Google had not come along, they would have all been without a job. And if she was the designer, and their company failed to gain market traction, then perhaps she isn't as great a designer as she thinks she is. If she was paid a fair share out of what Google paid for the company, then she has no reason to complain to Google. If her coworkers betrayed her, then she should sue them perhaps.

The comments about others saying "This will make me think twice before I sell to google" are also ridiculous. It's like all these companies are being built purposefully to fail and get acquired! As if it was Google's responsibility to buy up their broke assess.

Your company was a failure and you walked out $10k ahead. That's not a set back.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
That's where I got the marketing thing from.
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I am in a small company as a data center admin, and I've worked on marketing material... am I therefore marketing?
 
It would be different if she was an engineer too and the only one not hired but that's not what happened. Also the bit about her making less than her coworkers is only comparable if they were doing the same job; which they weren't because she's not an engineer and they were.

This would all be different if she did the same work and held the same job as her coworkers but it isn't so all I hear is "I didn't get pity hired when I expected to get pity hired."

If google had been more impressed with the marketing than the engineering then maybe she would have been the only one hired and her coworkers would have been out of luck.

Sorry but don't cry just because someone needs your skillset less than someone else. Get over yourself.
 
FLECOM said:
I am in a small company as a data center admin, and I've worked on marketing material... am I therefore marketing?
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It was just semantics. My brain latched on to "marketing" instead of "designer". Can't go back and edit my post now anywho.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
It was just semantics. My brain latched on to "marketing" instead of "designer". Can't go back and edit my post now anywho.
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yes I'm just messing with you, I too see marketing and I imminently think "worthless" lol

if I were her I would have stuck with designer instead of designer and marketing
 
Did Google guarantee her a job? I don't think they did.
Did Google interview her for a job? It seems so.
Did she get the job? No, she didn't.

Now woman up and move the hell on.
 
FLECOM said:
I am in a small company as a data center admin, and I've worked on marketing material... am I therefore marketing?
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According to the comments, a company called Green Throttle Games is the only one that fits the profile of a small team, bought by Google, and US based.

The company was formed by some somewhat known people in the industry (Guitar hero guy, and two palm pilot guys), and centered themselves around android peripherals (which fits the profile of them failing).

As well, the supposed originator of the article "SecretAmy" made no mentions in the article itself, or replies she made later to commentors; as being anything other than marketing.
 
Good grief, Since when does someone have a guaranteed job if they get bought out.
Usually some of not most of the people at the acquired company get the ax.
The buyer is after intellectuals properties or product lines to merge with their own.
The employees are usually not needed.
In these cases, the owners or upper management get a fat check. The rest get booted to unemployment.
 
So they hired the people who did the real work and opted not to a hire somebody that is very replaceable? Googles PERKS for a year would cost them more than the $60k salary she was previously getting.
 
I too am a spoiled tech industry worker but I was taught from years of poverty not to bitch and cry when things don't go my way. We call it perseverance.
 
Steve said:
Who says shit like this?

Life doesn't give you options like that. You deal with your failures the best you can and move on to other non-failure types of things. Jesus, if I said that every time I got ran over by life, I wouldn't even be here. ;)
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This is something I've noticed a while back. A lot of women just see the end result of hard work and assumes that it just happens, because for a lot of things in their life it does sort of just happens. More attention in school, help in college, help in getting a job, the benefit of the doubt in social situations, etc. Because that's their life they assume everyone's life is like that, so when the times comes that they actually just don't receive something they can't understand it, so they assume it's the glass ceiling or sexism that blocked them from something they deserve.
 
I've lived in many conservative areas of the country and hardly noticed any racism, and only a slight tendency toward sexism. I noticed plenty of bullying, sure, with race or gender used as an excuse from time to time, gender more often than race.

(Important distinction: bullies target whoever is convenient and seemingly weak, and race or gender are simply a mechanism used. Racism and sexism are an inherent tendency to prejudge someone based on said trait. They're very different mechanisms here. Bullies are everywhere, and nobody is ever going to stop them, but we can work to help their victims. Cops are quite often bullies, not racists. Managers can be racist or sexist, aligning their hiring tendencies or promotion tendencies to their judgement that a certain trait. Bullying extends from feeling powerless, fearful, and low self esteem, while racism extends from stupidity and voluntary ignorance, and a feeling of superiority due to that stupidity and ignorance. To fight each, we must know them first, in order to know how to combat them. Very different tactics are needed for each.)

It was odd when I started my computer career. My first encounters with blatant racism weren't in small towns or conservative churches. It was in very liberal areas.

When I first started my career, I was sent to replace computers at drug rehab centers in downtown Chicago. The racism of the leaders of those drug rehab centers was plain on their face, most were white and showing extreme distaste at dealing with their mostly African-American clientele and coworkers. One was black and strangely racist against the other blacks there. (I locked my keys in my car, right there on the side to Roosevelt Road within blocks of the I-90 bridge, one of the worst criminal areas of the city. The staff of the drug rehab center were intent on staying out there with me as I waited for the locksmith to come unlock my car. Funny that the locksmith had no compunction about believing me and unlocking my car with no proof.) I worked in other suburbs that were far more conservative, and I worked with many people of other race with no issues either from management or coworkers about race or gender, except one case where management was hesitant to criminally charge a thief caught red handed stealing from women's purses because he was black. They ended up firing him, but not actually pursuing charges for the thefts.

Years later, I was sent to California, San Jose and Irvine, on multiple business related trips, to encounter the worst racism I had seen since Chicago. In San Jose, the racism was everywhere. Mexicans were pigeon-holed into restaurant and hotel jobs. Nearly all the engineers I encountered were Asian, and none of the management were Asian. The management and project managers were all white. There wasn't an African-American in sight. This was obvious in all of the restaurants, hotels, and businesses I went to over my three week visit. Irvine was better, but division was still pretty plain.

It's so strange that so many people who vehemently vote liberal constantly show the worst racism and sexism, while the most conservative places show much more equality. By their voting habits, you'd think it would be the opposite. I think it is more of people who do such things feel guilty about it and basically vote to punish themselves, while those who have nothing to feel guilty about resent being accused of such things and vote against those who would push such accusations.
 
jimmyb said:
god damn these forums are filled with misogynists.
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Maybe, but if you were unable to see that article as written was clearly pointing out she was a woman at every step of the way and trying to use it as a point of "leverage" saying that's the reason she didn't get hired, or got paid as much, then you're just as blind as someone who wouldn't hire her because she's a woman. I mean they even go so far as to say that these kind of deals where they only hire 4/5ths of the existing company are unheard of, they're purposefully trying to slant this story, they didn't hire ONE person... but lets just say 20% of all the workers were not rehired because that sounds way more dramatic!

"I did our user experience, our logo, the marketing – all that stuff," she said. "When this went down, I was like, Is this really happening?"

Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else wrong with her application.
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Because she's female? Uh no.

Because she's not an engineer? Umm probably yes.

She really doesn't explain what she did for the company to much of a detail, she did the logo. That by itself is not a big skill. The marketing... ok sure, how much marketing did a 5 person company really have? I mean shit one of those 5 people was the "CEO". People telling her to "lawyer up" on that Secret.ly webpage are idiots. She didn't get hired because she didn't have ANYTHING that Google wanted. Google often doesn't hire secretaries, the cleaning crew, or anyone else that do not have a set of skills that can't be done by virtually anyone else.

Also got to question the article, often it's referred as "her start-up" as opposed to "the start-up she worked for", maybe this was just a point of contention with her in that she felt it was her company. Also the fact she says the other people got $250,000 salaries plus signing bonuses? I know Google pays well, but that well for run of the mill engineers? If that number isn't completely fabricated, it's probably because they are extremely talented and yeah, have skills that are a little more useful than designing logos.
 
sfsuphysics said:
People telling her to "lawyer up" on that Secret.ly webpage are idiots. She didn't get hired because she didn't have ANYTHING that Google wanted. Google often doesn't hire secretaries, the cleaning crew, or anyone else that do not have a set of skills that can't be done by virtually anyone else.
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Yeah, lawyer up and do what, exactly? Sue Google for not hiring her because she's got a mediocre set of easily replaceable skills?

Getting $10k out of the deal is "failing", and you're not sure you can stand to fail again? Jebus, what world do some people live in? May as well end it now because shit gets WAY worse than that in the really real world.
 
mkrohn said:
So they hired the people who did the real work and opted not to a hire somebody that is very replaceable? Googles PERKS for a year would cost them more than the $60k salary she was previously getting.
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That's unfair. Graphic design is real work, with a lot of similar headaches to development (I'm a developer with some design chops and a Bachelors in comp sci, and my wife is a full time designer with a BFA in print design). She doesn't get paid nearly the same as I do fro two reasons.

1) when a designer produces something it is very hard to tell if it is broken and a bad idea until much later unless the designer is a totally incompetent hack.

2) at least based on the interviewing for job openings around here, for every dev/admin like opening, there are about 300 applicants of which about 80 have something resembling an IT background in vaguely the right area. Of those 80, about 40 turn out to not be lying, and of those 40, about 10-20 turn out to actually have a skill set that is a semi reasonable fit. of those 10-20, about another 25% have a decent skill set and enough personal networking that they don't last long enough to get through how long it takes us to whittle down new hires. Of the 7 to 10 that are left, we will like 4, the 3 best will usually turn us down over money, the last one is a 50-50 shot, and we'll usually offer to our 5th choice if 4 turns us down because it has been over 3 months by this point. Additionally there is about a 1 in 4 chance that the one or two people we offer to will have ignored the fact that we stated up front that we can't hire H1-B peeps. It will then take about 30-60 days to determine if they are in over their head. On top of that, about half of those people we wind up offering to will be over 40 or close to it, so dismissing a lot of people during probation will look a lot like age discrimination. Needless to say there is incentive to help them swim rather than let them sink. For an opening for a job my wife might apply for, there's usually between 500-1000 applicants, of which about 3/4 are not lying about being in said field. Most shops needing the service will not have the ability to filter through that many people so will just pay a staffing agency fair market value. If you pass the skills test, the staffing agency will get you work that is an effective salary of about 25% of what my job would pay (general market compensation levels for the area). If you keep customers happy and appear to be competent, the staffing agency will bump you up to about 40-50% of what my job would. For an in house hire to make near what I do, they would have an MFA, and likely be hired at an established agency with several notable successful campaigns to their name (i.e. be a scarce commodity in a scarce job). For the bread and butter jobs, 80% or more of those 500-1000 applicants will be under 30. There are also less of those jobs than there are of my job, and college graduation rates for her job are increasing while for mine are decreasing.

The work is real, and a good worker is worth more, but jobs are scarce and the labor supply is not, and works well vs works ok vs works poorly is a much more subjective and hand wavy affair in her line of work. Me, I only bother with keeping any of my design chops up to speed for web dev with a primary focus on how the heck to do ADA compliant online interfaces everything else I keep current on is photography based as that's a hobby of mine and largely belongs in the realm of how to make photoshop do stuff and how to make sure the prints look decent.
 
dgingeri said:
Years later, I was sent to California, San Jose and Irvine, on multiple business related trips, to encounter the worst racism I had seen since Chicago. In San Jose, the racism was everywhere. Mexicans were pigeon-holed into restaurant and hotel jobs. Nearly all the engineers I encountered were Asian, and none of the management were Asian. The management and project managers were all white. There wasn't an African-American in sight. This was obvious in all of the restaurants, hotels, and businesses I went to over my three week visit. Irvine was better, but division was still pretty plain.

It's so strange that so many people who vehemently vote liberal constantly show the worst racism and sexism, while the most conservative places show much more equality. By their voting habits, you'd think it would be the opposite. I think it is more of people who do such things feel guilty about it and basically vote to punish themselves, while those who have nothing to feel guilty about resent being accused of such things and vote against those who would push such accusations.
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No, the really strange thing is that people think that California is some bastion of liberalism.

San Jose and Irvine are two of the most conservative places on the planet, let alone California. LMFAO
 
pcjunkie said:
You need to find a better place to shop...
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And you need to lurk and learn more.

deskref3.jpg
 
mope54 said:
No, the really strange thing is that people think that California is some bastion of liberalism.

San Jose and Irvine are two of the most conservative places on the planet, let alone California. LMFAO
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33 of California's 53 reps are Democrats, and it has voted Democrat for President by 60%+ for the last two elections and 50%+ since 1992. It is a bastion of liberalism, and growing stronger in that position every year.
 
dgingeri said:
33 of California's 53 reps are Democrats, and it has voted Democrat for President by 60%+ for the last two elections and 50%+ since 1992. It is a bastion of liberalism, and growing stronger in that position every year.
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well not Irvine. HAHAHAHA

seriously you need to check your assumptions
starting with the fact that 33 out of 53 leaves 20 non-democrats!

you really think you have a good assessment of an area after three weeks?
tell you what, why don't you just look up who our representative is in Irvine and go from there...
 
jimmyb said:
god damn these forums are filled with misogynists.
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In most cases, I'd 100% agree with you, but unless what we're reading is totally not how things really are, I'd have to say she's trying to make her gender into an issue where it wasn't. I hate to see that kinda thing happen because all it does is make all the guys on the planet who already actually are misogynists point their fingers and shriek, "SEE?! This is proof that all women are like this and all women are horrible people who should just shut up and suck on my naughty bits or get naked for me in the kitchen while making sammiches!" It makes the uphill struggle that much harder for women in the tech field when one of us does something like this.
 
oh yes, California...that bastion of liberalism...never mind that we gave the world Reagan, Nixon, and the largest prison industrial complex in the world.

We haven't voted for a democratic candidate for nearly a hundred years!
 
mope54 said:
oh yes, California...that bastion of liberalism...never mind that we gave the world Reagan, Nixon, and the largest prison industrial complex in the world.

We haven't voted for a democratic candidate for nearly a hundred years!
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In the last 10 presidential elections Californians have never even come close to voting for a Republican president. 44%R vs 54%D in 2004 was the narrowest spread......
 
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