I agree with this article's characterization of it as a scam, as they are pretending to be something they are not. This is manipulative and dishonest. What I experienced was less heinous but had the same elements- misrepresentation, name dropping, attempts at emotional manipulation with tone and timing (the first call being so dead, then enthusiastic in the second- very "HR recruiter", not corp dev.)

Worse, once I'd eventually figure out what was going on, and put one of them off of me, a few weeks later another would show up, with another variation.

I think the original author should name everyone involved. I understand why he didn't, but people can only get away with this shit because they do it anonymously and no one talks to each other.

This is a much less extreme example, but years ago my former landlord threatened to kill me over a small claims court case (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/08/28/dont-rent-an-apartment-fro... if you're curious) and I wrote a post about what happened using his real name. Perhaps not surprisingly, since then I've gotten two emails thanking me for the story—one from someone who'd rented from him and had a bad experience and one from someone who avoided him.

In general it's a good idea to keep non-public conversations non-public, but when the people starting those conversations rely on them in order to do nasty stuff the principle should no longer apply.

Be careful giving this advice.

This only worked because A) (minor) you filed a police report and B) (major) he didn't have enough money to drag you through a serious defamation lawsuit.

If he decided to drag you through a defamation lawsuit, you would likely have lost because you wouldn't have had enough resources to defend aggressively.

It's good to out bad actors, but do make sure that you aren't putting yourself in a vulnerable situtation.

Remember the British guy with the Nazi fetish? The tabloid that published that story lost even though it was true. In other countries (notoriously India), criticizing a government employee's performance is defamation (even if true).

Edit: Looks like Canada also allows for truth as a complete defense to defamation. That makes two nations out of 180+.

As with US and Canada 'truth' is a defence against defamation here also: http://www.medialawjournal.co.nz/?page_id=273

"The publisher will succeed with a defence of truth if it can prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the story was true. Minor errors may be excused, but not those that go to the heart of the defamatory sting or stings."

So guess you can add NZ to the list, but there are no doubt others - how about France, Australia, Austria.. Senegal?

Perhaps it is actually the UK that is the outlier in this regard?

If you stuck to reporting facts, how would that put you in danger?

1. It's fairly simple to post a fake review.

2. Yelp has been accused of what amounts to blackmail by offering to hide bad reviews if businesses buy advertising on Yelp.

3. It's not rocket science to see how 1 & 2 could team up

4. There is no objective standard for a good or bad review, so how do you accurately quantify the aggregate? If the restaurant was out of the dish the reviewer wanted because it was a half hour before closing on a busy night, that one star review carries the same weight as someone who legitimately had terrible service, cold food, and got food poisoning.

This amounts to Yelp being nothing more than the yellow pages, in my opinion. I don't see how this would change for other services.

(4) is addressed by volume. That's easier for something like restaurants than apartments or recruiters though.

Also, anyone can post reviews, which the companies take advantage of. We had an HR person at my previous company whose job responsibilities included posting one positive (4-5 star) review of the company per week on Glassdoor and similar sites. As you can imagine, doing so is a much cheaper way of dealing with negative reviews than suing the websites.

Is it possible that Google liked your product and subsequently thought you might be a good hire, but didn't like your product as a potential acquisition? That is where I think the difference lies. Were you contacted as "I'm from Google and we are interested in you", or "I'm from Google and we are interested in your product"? That is a big difference. The fact that you specifically mention "Their recruiters" would lead me to believe it was the former, but if they mention your product (beyond some acknowledgment of it) that might fall into a gray area.

Thousands of people abandon small side projects and independent businesses every year to join companies as an employee. Just because a company is recruiting someone who happens to have some product doesn't necessarily mean that the hiring company has interest in both the person and the product.

In the post above, the whole bit about being from "Google Corporate Development" is shady. We're only hearing one side of the story, but it seems someone at Google is using a famous name and the fuzzy promise of an acquisition to try to trick him into coming to California for a job interview.

I agree that being contacted by "Corp Dev" is shady if there is no intent on a potential acquisition. That said, I don't find it shady at all if a Google recruiter contacts talented technologists who happen to have some sort of side project.

If DHH gets a call from Google, they'd better have interest in Basecamp. If some Ruby dev who has a small product with 500 customers gets a call from Google recruiters (not corp dev), the dev shouldn't assume it's an acquihire situation. There is, as usual, some gray area of course.

If you look at the opening emails from the two Googlers (X and Y) then it's abundantly clear that the emphasis was on, in X's case, the company, and in Y's case, the product.

And more to the point: at no point did they say what a recruiter should say at the opening of any (honest and professionally delivered) cold call. Which is of course: "Hi, I'm Z and I'd like to talk with you about joining the engineering team here at FooBar."

Finally, it's extremely difficult to interpret the fact that they chose to identify themselves as comping from Corporate Development (rather than Recruiting, or even Engineering) as anything other than a (rather clumsy) attempt at misdirection.

Anyone distracting someone who could be spending time on their own business, or billing hourly, with a business offer, should be incredibly concerned about a Lost Opportunity suit. Come up with a way to value the time that you spent, attach it to an opportunity cost, and bam, your dishonest business partner has caused your other business dealings to fail.

I don't want to encourage further abuse of the legal system, but IMO it is an abuse of the legal system to engage in an act you know to be unlawful or harmful, but difficult or costly to enforce.

The emails you are referring to pertain to the linked article, and have nothing to do with my comment here.

If a recruiter's goal is to shave off $5,000 or $10,000 from your ask then they are wasting time because they could likely just as easily find someone who can fill the position at that compensation level.

I only talk to one recruiter. If I want a particular job I know is going I will direct him to it and he will handle any side lining from other recruiters.

Works a treat.

http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-...

what would your top three features be? (in an actual, online agent, actually on your side.)

First off, I can see how you might miss out on a lot of potential clients because you don't know just how good they are. You could reduce this miss rate by getting good at fishing out details from people you approach or who approach you. Even be prepared to write their resumes. I'd recommend having a technical person on staff to assist with the buzzword bingo and alphabet soup.

Second, a lot of people simply might not know how to negotiate a job search, but wouldn't really be lucrative enough to chase as clients. By-the-hour consulting might turn into a decent revenue stream. Then they can come to you in a few years when they are ready to chase the big bucks.

Third, there's a lot of wishful thinking out there that causes seekers to not chase or turn down perfectly good jobs because of that haunting vision of landing that whopper $120K+ job. (in Atlanta) Being able to tactfully talk them into a perfectly good $85K job could work out well for both of you. I've seen lots of really good guys strike out interviewing for those unicorn jobs because the company has ridiculously selective criteria. I know a guy holding out for $110K but doesn't want to go where he could legitimately make that money with his skills, e.g. a Java shop. He spent down his savings and told me it's going to hurt pretty soon if he doesn't find one soon.

One of the things that the recruiter who found me my job did for me was to interact with the company for me. I told him my concerns, and he either talked me through them or relayed them, through the filter of someone whose seen this all before, to the company. Had I had to do this directly with the company, I wouldn't have done so well, and I might have gotten passed over.

When my company wanted to keep me on a contract basis three months after his job was technically over, and I was prepared to walk, I called him, and he calmed everyone down and got the company to bring me on full time. Had I had to negotiate it myself, I might have said something unwise and a bad decision would have been made.

Now that I'm on the other side of the table, I find myself playing the same role my recruiter played for me as far as the interpersonal dynamics is concerned. I talk through his concerns, I discuss the money aspect with him, advocate his case, and protect him from HR bullshit.

I don't see a purely online web agent as bringing any more value to the table than (just another) job board.

Thanks for your input, though my question was specifically to lugg and asked "can you imagine what, if any, part of this could be done purely online". Still, your thoughts on a different subject have been interesting and thanks for them. You can also send me email if you'd like to write more.

- Honed my CV (more like made me rewrite it), it was full of fluff pieces and bullshit that made ME happy. He basically took a red marker to all the things that weren't purely factual and provable (or at least explainable.) He was an ex developer and current on tech so he knew what he was talking about in regards to what needed to be said and what wasn't. This could easily be done online with google docs and a skype call.

- Answered all the dumb questions every developer wants to know but really shouldn't be asking a prospective employer in an initial interview (can I wear shorts and a tshirt? how much $$$? flexitime? holidays? beer on friday? - This would be solved by an FAQ employers could fill out.

- Filtered jobs I'd call awful on anyway (multiple reporting lines, under paying, no source control, one man bands, etc etc This is easy for development, just make sure it passes the joel test.

- Found opportunities that actually match my skill-set (Full stack PHP Developer with javascript tendencies) - Sort of job board style sites attempt to solve this but suck at it pretty badly, because who pays their bills?

- Interview prep happens but its essentially just reminding me to be myself and if I don't have an answer say so. I don't know what would be worth it to you for putting this online but you could certainly do some last minute reminder calls with the candidate and follow up directly afterward to ensure everything went well / any issues can be discussed while they're fresh.

Sorry if that doesn't help much, a lot of it requires a person and a phone, I'd certainly start in those areas though, do things that don't scale n all heh.

Feel free to email me if you want any further info, don't follow HN too much.

If you can afford the travel, come and mingle at some startup events. Berlin is obviously the best city to do that, although Cologne (where I'm located) and, I imagine, Munich/Dusseldorf/Hamburg are pretty good too.

When I hire, I don't think about trying to find more people to interview. Instead, I think about designing the interviewing process such that it's short, simple, and fun for the person being interviewed—because the people who I most want, have the least time and patience for me and the most alternatives, so I have to make choosing to "try my job on" as easy as possible.

When I do this, word spreads (both among those who get hired, and those who don't) that "you may as well go and see if you like them, it's not too much of a hassle" and the result is far more inbound (qualified!) leads, and far less friction in outbound lead-gen.

So it's all a game, don't hate the players, hate the rules. It makes it hard to know when someone is legit though. I think that's one reason why investors are over reliant on their networks, as the signal/noise ratio is too low in SV. "Fake it till you make it" is the motto.

However, I don't think I can complain too much. Without all the hypes, we wouldn't have this favorable job market. Not sure how long it's going to last, but at least it's good for now.

There are no rules. Trying to paint this turd with catchy slogans isn't helpful either.

For example, "don't start a nuclear war" isn't an explicit rule by some world government, but it does seem to be a rule all the world-leaders are implicitly following. For another, "don't appear to be physically weak in prison" is a "rule" that everybody knows, despite no single authority enforcing it. The environment itself—made up of the other players and their incentives—enforce it, through their self-interested reactions.

If I _were_ to do so, it would sound like "There's no point in hating the rules, because the rules don't care. Hate the players, because they are the ones who care enough about them to follow them."

I don't care if these rules are explicit or not; I care that they don't produce the outcome I want. And the people who follow those rules are not absolved by weakness, ignorance, self-interest, or any other excuse in failing to resist those rules.

(There's no rule that says anything done in self-interest is correct. Sometimes it is correct to make sacrifices for others.)

https://www.theinformation.com/Google-Was-Willing-to-Beat-Fa...

(He was also rejected by twitter)

Start collecting pseudonyms and storylines in a github repo? This could make for an entertaining movie script, where a Skynet-like company uses advanced surveillance technology to triage a talent pipeline.

Startups encounter a random obstacle course and are only recruited after clearing a statistical threshold of surviving economIc warfare. When a candidate says no, they are moved to a different level of the game. All the while, the recruiting algos grow smarter as they generate new startup obstacles and observe how the talent responds.

The Exam experimented with this concept, http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bkdt2Sygew0

This article just seems to be a real world example of PG's essay this month about "don't talk to corp dev." [1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

If you are a lone engineer, but is capable of making a successful app, you have a certain aptitude for programming. This is useful to google. The recruiter is making a bet that this lone engineer is not business savvy enough to know how much their true worth is, and if the bet worked, google would've been able to low-ball hire a really good engineer. They failed this time, but you don't hear about the times this strategy succeeds, because those 'acqui-hires' might've even been celebrated by the "victim" as success!

And the $300-$500k+ salaries that Google is frequently throwing at engineers these days are worth more than the marginal chance you'll make a multi-million dollar exit event.

So I'd hesitate to call anyone hired by Google a "victim."

It's not the absolute amount that matters - it's how much they are "underpaying".

If the diamond could be worth $10M when polished, but also could be worth $0 because of flaws you can't yet see, and there's only a 20% chance that it will be worth $10M, then $2M is exactly the right amount to take. And in this particular case, I'd take the $2M every time, because that's the exact expected value of 20% odds of a $10M valuation.

And when you have your own company, there is always some level of risk. The chance of $10M may be far less than 20% -- and there may be a 1% chance of $200M.

It's only if you think your diamond has either already been polished to the point of being worth more than $2M, or you feel your own odds of success at polishing are better than 20%, that you should say no to the offer.

The original author believed that, which is perfectly fine. He had previous experience with selling a company, and so he may have even been right.

But those with less experience may actually do well to sell unless someone with more experience is around to tell them they're sitting on a diamond mine that's worth way more than the offer. Or you can roll the dice based on your own appraisal of the odds; that's fine too.

I've actually been in the situation where I did say no to terms I didn't find good enough, but then later the company failed and I ended up owning 100% of nothing. So having them "underpay" for me would have ended up with me owning 40% of something at least, since they were going to fund it to the next level.

It's easy to take a look at the odds and guess wrong -- and it's also easy to be an armchair quarterback and tell people that they should have taken a chance instead of the easy cash. As a result of my experience, I'd likely lean toward the easy cash at this point, but feel free to make your own decisions as you see fit.

If it's a solo founder, and especially if they're not being recruited to work on a similar sort of project, I don't think there's anything to make it an "acqui-hire" instead of a "yo, shut down your company and come work for us".

Consider, a single-engineer company with an interesting app and talented engineer, just how much do you expect to be acquired for? Recognize that a $1M-2M offer is about what you could make in 4 years at Google at the appropriate level and with the appropriate amount of restricted stock units.

So, if the amount of compensation would be approximately the same, but the one pathway (acquisition) requires a lot more legal groundwork and expense, and the other doesn't (just extend an offer of employment with generous signing bonus)

I think there's a little bit of ego involved here. It's easy to believe you have a winning app that's going to be huge, and be insulted when other people don't see the potential. ("A mere engineer!? Me?! I'm an entrepreneur who should have more respect!"), but the reality is, very few apps on the app store take off like rocketships, most fail, and so unless you have unique very valuable IP, or have built up a lot of valuable data, chances are, most companies are going to view it as an acqui-hire.

Paul Graham was right, you talk to Corp Dev if you're very successful, or nor very successful (probably going to die). As Kenny Rogers said you've got to know when to fold 'em, and this could have been a situation to negotiate a nice big fat signing bonus.

Instead of the claim of "I can easily get to twice £X million" -- in revenue? profit? valuation? -- it looks like the author's RoomScan app is near-moribund. RoomScan Pro, which sells for $4.99, hasn't been updated in over half a year and is listed as "optimized for iPhone 5." It's been mentioned in only two articles indexed by Google News in the last eight months. The Roomscan Twitter account hasn't been updated since November. The free version of the app has been updated more recently, but free in this context isn't exactly going to pay the bills.

These are not the signs of an app that is getting to "twice £X million" anytime soon.

I do think it's an innovative idea and a good implementation, but as we see on HN all too frequently, not all innovative ideas and good implementations amount to a "twice £X million" valuation. Any company (or product) is only worth what the market will pay.

As for Google, I don't know how their corpdev team works, but my rule of thumb after working at some very large companies is: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy. It's not unusual for different teams not to know what the other is doing, even when they should. I don't see anything that justifies speculating about nonexistent employees named Maxine, and that kind of bizarre speculation likely poisoned the discussion.

Whoops.

Once you get sucked into the conversation you've lost. This is business, not social chit-chat. Know what you're hoping to get out of the conversation and direct it toward getting that; if they won't oblige, end the conversation and don't waste time on it.

> These are not the signs of an app that is getting to "twice £X million" anytime soon.

Easy to say nearly 10 months on from when this happened. From the article: "By this time, the app is topping both the free and paid charts in its category in many countries, and into the overall top 10 in some." Sounds quite healthy to me. Remember only a short time prior the guy had only 30 sales per day. There may be other metrics that would indicate that this app wasn't going to be a screaming success like his previous one, but his sales and media coverage at the time Google / recruiters got in touch aren't it.

> As for Google, I don't know how their corpdev team works, but my rule of thumb after working at some very large companies is: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy. It's not unusual for different teams not to know what the other is doing, even when they should. I don't see anything that justifies speculating about nonexistent employees named Maxine, and that kind of bizarre speculation likely poisoned the discussion.

For sure. I found it hard to follow his logic here.

Then why be shady? Why not just say this? Seems very odd to beat around the bush.

"Hey, man. Your app is great and we really like but upon further review we feel like it still needs work. We'd love for you to come work for us and help integrate into product yyy"

^ That seems a hell of a lot more likely to get a bite than basically faking an acquisition.

Write code, Ship product, get promoted, tranfer.

The acquisition pathway with your numbers would be 2-3 times the value before you discount the present value of the salary and RSU's because of the additional risks associated (even assuming the acquisition amount would be similarly restricted and spread out over time). It seems like you assume that an acqui-hire would mean he'd sell and then not get a salary for four years.

Point being, there's nothing scammy about a deal being negotiated down, or falling through, and ending up as an employment offer instead of an acquisition, especially if they're only interested in the person, not the company, an acquisition is really just the 'shut down' cost of your business.

Deals fall through all the time and valuations can get reduced once due diligence is done. A business which looks great from the outside can look much less interesting later. And of course, during talks, the other side -- who are usually interested in investing in people -- could become less impressed with you.

If that is the case the hypothetical offer (that never was) starts approaching insultingly deceptive given the way they went about it.

If I started talking to someone about an acqui-hire and they expect to get a "discount" on salary and options/RSUs based on the acquisition price, then the acquisition price is artificially inflated to get my interest unless the hinted at acquisition amount makes the salary and RSUs a rounding error (in which case they'd be idiots to potentially antagonise a desirable hire over it). And I'd be tempted to tell them to fuck off just on principle.

Of course Google is not obliged to make him a good offer. But they ought to realise the damage these kind of approaches are doing to their brand amongst potential hires. For my part, while I've never experienced anything like in this article from Google, my experiences with (half a dozen plus) Google recruiters have been entirely negative whenever they've approached me, to the point where I recount my history with past Google recruiters every time a new one calls to make it clear to them why I am going to be short with them until/unless they prove they're worth my time. No other company's has been as disrespectful of my time.

> Point being, there's nothing scammy about a deal being negotiated down

But there is plenty scammy about not making it clear that they are trying to hire him but instead giving the impression they are after his product.

It's the blatant dishonesty of the Googlers making the approach that is inexcusable.

"I’ve already built an £X million company in this area that was limited to the UK & Ireland; this time it’s global and I can easily get to twice £X million"

Based on the number of reviews for roomscan I'm going to guess that getting to "twice £X million" has not in fact been that easy. The app does show creative thinking though and you can see what Google may have spotted potential in him. $2M would have been an incredible exit for him.

I suppose there is something good in entrepreneurs having outsized, seemingly delusional expectations for their startups. However, it's important to be self aware and not take deep, personal offense at what are reasonable market offers for your work. You can just say no thanks, $2M is too low of a max offer.

What you do definitely not do is have a paranoid meltdown on a blog post and start wildly speculating about deceptive practices like using fake identities and fake meeting requests with zero support. Also probably not a good idea to send over paperwork from your last company's sale to prove how awesome your current company is.

It may be hard to accept the reality of how your project is really doing but don't slip into a bad mental place like this. You may just end up passing on a million dollar outcome.

And $2M is definitely an acquisition.

I don't think the article establishes that googler #1 (with the name MARXXXXX) is Maxine. It's all very confusing; why mask out the name in one place, then use it elsewhere? And why would a web search turn up that MARXXXX exists and then we decide that Maxine may not exist "Max will never meet Maxine; she probably doesn’t even exist".

Where is the evidence that #1 works for #2? I see the claim, but what is it based upon?

If he truly believed RoomScan could be a massive success and the market was showing adoption, his expected value is much higher for sticking with RoomScan, especially as he had sold his last company and didn't /need/ a few extra hundred thousand dollars that year or the next year in order to be happy.

[0] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp

But in any case: It comes in addition to a salary if they hire him, whether or not the $2m would be paid up front or in tranches, and if they genuinely wanted the product, not to hire him, he'd expect to be able to still earn a salary. In fact, I'd argue that he'd expect to be able to increase his income potential: He'd have a Google acquisition to put on his resume.

Taxes change all that and make things more complicated ($2 million lump sum is taxed more heavily than when it is split up over 4 years). I'm not sure how that works out though.

This places the value of not selling at >= £2.4 million and the value of the sale at <= $1.6 million. At £/$ of 1.6, this is a gap of $2.2 million in favor of not selling.

Then consider the opportunity cost of going to work for Google for a serial entrepreneur. There may be a 0.8 probability of $250k/year for four years. But that comes at the price of not developing a startup with the potential for a fuck-you money exit.

The hindsight we have doesn't include an assessment of the toll of relocating from the North UK to Silicon Valley with a spouse and children while leaving behind family, friends and community.

In the end, if you're looking for a $2,000,000 exit. You're not really founding a startup. There's nothing wrong with that. But "startup" in the sense that people like PG use it is not the right term.

Actually its a pretty good way to steer clear of a scam. If once I determined the people I was talking to were not interested in acquiring my company and only trying to lure me in for an interview, what's to say the rest of their story isn't all BS as well?

What are the odds he even gets the 2M to exit anyways? If you smell a scam, then everything is rotten, from the head down. No way I'd trust Google to pay up after sniffing out their scam.

Even if it were the "golden handcuffs" situation someone posited in this thread, where the money would come over three or four years, it's a situation most people would be pleased as Punch to find themselves in.

Naturally, everyone thinks they're Tom Brady, and they're going to be the ones to be the next golden boy getting courted by M&A and feted by TechCrunch and all the rest. But most of us are really just the Danny Aikens of the world, working hard, in the game, happy to be paid for what we love to do.

The author wrote an app. By all accounts, it's a good idea, reasonably well-executed. Not world-changing, not something that's going to build a new industry and launch dozens of careers, or a service that will transform people's lives, or disrupt a market. A nice app.

For that, he's indignant that he might get a multi-million dollar signing bonus and a secure job at one of the largest and most influential corporations on the planet.

If there were ever an example of the arrogance and entitlement outsiders pin on Silicon Valley and the startup / tech community, this would be it. Work because you are passionate about it, because you want to build great things and meet great challenges. Be grateful that you have a good life. Life isn't a lottery.

The OP just wants the Google person to say, "Hi, I'm from Google HR. Interested in talking about a job?" versus the smoke and mirrors they represented.

I explain again that I’ve already built an £X million company in this area that was limited to the UK & Ireland; this time it’s global and I can easily get to twice £X million. I don’t know what Silicon Valley numbers are like, I say, but surely even there acqui-hire numbers don’t go as high as twice £X million? She replies that it’s usually a maximum of 2 million. I guess that’s dollars.

If he was unhappy with the way Google approached him with their generous rock-star offer, he could simply turn them down and move on. A lengthy blow-by-blow essay seems like pointless complaining about a problem 99% of the world would give their eyeteeth to have.

If he believes he can sell his company for $10M and thus rejects a $2M offer, he is not suffering from entitlement and arrogance. He does not feel entitled to $10M. He does not believe the world owes him $10M. He is simply not selling for a lower price than he thinks he can sell for later.

He said that against a backdrop of having done a sale at half the value he listed in the past in the same niche with a much smaller potential market. He might very well be wrong, but he gave a reasoning that is not all that unreasonable. If he didn't believe in the potential value, he presumably wouldn't be working on it.

What he complained about was the deceptive initial implication that he was talking to someone wanting to acquire the product, rather than an acqui-hire. Had the e-mail been from someone identifying themselves as a recruiter, wanting to hire him, and indicating that there would be room for talking acquisition to compensate him for giving up the business, it would have been a very different situation and presumably he'd have said no at the outset.

The section you quoted is where he points out to the recruiter that if it is an acqui-hire, presumably they do not have the budget for the kind of amounts that would make the job worth it for him to give up his company over.

There was no "generous rock-star offer". There was a deceptive approach where $2m was indicated as the maximum that might be offered for an acqui-hire, with no indication of what kind of salary he might get offered. Having dealt with Google recruiters in the past, I know how cagey they can be about salary and total offer value, and frankly in the cases I managed to get a range out of them, they were not worth continuing conversations with. There's no indication of a "generous rock-star offer" in the article.

It may not have been interesting to you, but the audience here includes a lot of people working on startups for whom this kind of situation might be relevant. Maybe not Google. Maybe the cap isn't 2mill. But I've been in similar situations before, and it sucks. It's ok to get angry at deceptive approaches even if you make good money.

(For my part I'm not surprised to see yet another story like this about Google - I have nothing but bad experiences with Google recruiters whenever they've approached me; each time I get less inclined to ever want to consider working there)

Even so, the article several times point out that maybe he was naive about how these things works. I read it more as a cautionary "look here how the recruiters worked over naive me" than unwarranted whining.

It's bugging me that I can't understand how it works, at least not in a way that would produce accurate results in most environments (i.e. No GPS).

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/roomscan-app-iphone-floor-...

Anyone have any ideas?

One of the lesser-appreciated qualities of Apple hardware (more accurately, hardware and drivers) is the quality and accuracy of their sensors.

In my experience moving and the stopping the phone would always end up with the two accelerations not exactly canceling out so that the calculated position would drift away from the true position at a constant rate.

Even applying a floor to velocity to eliminate the drift, the distances calculated for simple linear motions were consistently off by ~50% in either direction.

This was a few years ago so sensors may have improved - have you actually done this in practice and found it to work?

Right. RoomScan requires you to stop and touch the device to the wall frequently. This allows them to re-zero the velocity. Small IC accelerometers and gyros aren't good enough for dead-reckoning over any substantial distance.

What you really want is 3D SLAM, using the cameras. That's been done on Apple devices, for a rather lame "Ball Invasion" game. That team was acquired by Facebook for their VR effort.

There's source code for SLAM. See "slam6d.sourceforge.net". This is the right way to do indoor localization. The better robot vacuums (Neato and Dyson) use it.

My first guess was pure optical, an inside out 3-d scanner basically. OK, image analysis shows there's corners and walls, and the building code requires all doorknobs to be at exactly X inches off the floor, countertops Y off the floor, stairs of certain rise/run combos, and the room dimensions WILL round to closest integer inch so you do some curve fitting and the highest correlation dimensions win. Especially when in the article he described it as placing the phone against all the walls. A simple inertial nav system wouldn't care if you held the phone at an angle or upside down, but optical needs flatness. You'd be making one of those 360 degree panorama pix, kind of, then analyzing it.

Maybe I should be creating a 2 zillion pound startup instead of posting to HN?

Edit: http://www.gsmnation.com/blog/2013/06/19/echolocation-app-le...

Apparently they're much better than previously. When I first tried this around 3 years ago, I had the same problems you did. The errors get cubed by the double integration. Software Kalman filters and other tricks didn't really help.

A lot of the newer sensor chips now do "sensor fusion"[1] on the chip itself, which means that the raw data is much more useful, and requires almost no post-processing.

I assume that this, in combination with higher sampling rates, means that the errors are small enough for the output to be useful over "human interaction" scale.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion

Examples:

http://www.kionix.com/sensor-fusion

http://www.invensense.com/mems/technology.html

http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/sense_power/FM89?sc=mems

I think you are right about the likely cluttered response in a realistic room being hard to analyse into something useful.

You should get different results on different phones, but I don't think it would ever be reasonably precise on any one device.

Have you actually tried this? I have and the results were totally unusably off. If the accelerometer that costs a few dollars at best could be that precise, you'd see thousands and thousands of new apps that would use it in creative ways. It's just from my experience you can't calculate displacement using an accelerometer that cheap and therefore you don't see iPhone apps that use it.

I disagree. You clearly can - the app and the people who use it are proof positive of the sensor's capabilities. Having seen the raw output from these sensors a few times they're also startlingly accurate.

The problem is of course that it's not simple and there's real complexity in the solution. It's (of course) impossible if you blindly take the double integral of raw accelerometer readings.

In the same way we do all kinds of magical things with all kinds of sensors - but it's rarely as simple as plugging a pin into a ADC and reading the bits that come out.

Signal processing, in both hardware and software, is a gigantic field of study unto itself. I fully expect that the app is doing something non-trivial with its sensor readings to gain accuracy - but it's eminently possible, just difficult.

The intersection of "mobile app developer" with "skilled signals engineer" is pretty low. If someone capable wrote a library that did this, you'd bet that we'd see an explosion of apps that use this functionality.

Not to mention their consistency across the entire product line. I assume there are some Android phones with similarly good sensors, but it's definitely not something a developer can assume.

For an unfortunate example of an game release delayed by Android sensors, check out http://gameovenstudios.com/bounden-on-android-delayed/

The video is sad but hilarious.

EDIT> ... forgot the point ... years ago it wasn't good enough -- noticeable drift in a matter of seconds.

Inertial navigation was good enough to be quite useful before the Navy's version of GPS.

The Navy's version of GPS was done, at least started, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). They had a receiver on the roof, and it routinely navigated itself to within a foot.

I heard about that project because for a while I was doing applied math (the fast Fourier transform, power spectral estimation) and writing software in the JHU/APL group that did the orbit determination calculations for the satellites.

That project was a good example of how to do the technical side of a very ambitious project:

(1) Problem. The US Navy very much needed a means of navigation for the SSBNs.

(2) One or a few physics guys at the JHU/APL had an idea, of course, in terms of Doppler shifts from several satellites, etc., on the back of an envelope.

(3) Not much later, the project was approved.

Biggie Huge Project Point: Not long after the back of the envelope solution, the whole project was low risk and high payoff with, really, only routine, low risk work remaining.

Lesson 1: The problem sponsors were able to evaluate the project just on paper.

Lesson 2: After a good evaluation just on paper, the rest of the project was low risk and high payoff.

Lesson 3: The Navy did not say: You do the work, put up the satellites, show that it all works, and we will buy receivers for each of the dozen or so SSBNs.

For Silicon Valley: Want to do great projects, low risk, high ROI? Part of what you need to be able to do is to evaluate projects just on paper.

Of course, what evaluates well just on paper is mostly just the technical part. But start with a biggie problem so that clearly, obviously, no evaluation, no customer feedback needed, the first good or a much better solution is a must-have and not just a nice-to-have and where, due to the size of the problem (e.g., number of happy people times earnings per person), for financial success all that is left is that first good or much better solution and that is just technical and can be evaluated just on paper.

This way of doing projects is much of why the US has GPS, why the US Navy has it's version of GPS, why in WWII Patton at the Battle of the Bulge praised the US proximity fuse (a little radar set inside an artillery shell that told the shell when to explode -- great for exploding near an airplane or over the heads of troops) from the JHU/APL, the SR-71, the F-117 (Saddam, sorry you spent all that money on air defense -- all of it never put even on scratch on even one F-117).

Ah, Silicon Valley will never do that, not now!

"Using on your phone’s built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, and gyroscope to determine distances and the orientation of walls, RoomScan can reliably estimate measurements to within about half a foot, which should be adequate if all you need is a rough floor plan. If, you need more precise measurements, you can opt for the $5 Pro version, which allows you to specify exact distances, and will automatically correct the entire room if you adjust a couple dimensions."

Combining GPS, wifi-positioning, and the gyroscope should be fairly accurate for a floor plan. It's a very clever idea.

Judging by some screenshots and appstore comments I assume its only roughly accurate, and requires you to move your phone slowly between walls in straight lines (not via your pocket or around furniture for example).

I think I would have immediately dismissed an idea like this because I would have perceived the end result to be inaccurate and inadequate. Yet it's a popular app, so I guess I have learnt something.

What I'm curious about is that GPS is only accurate to within a few meters. If I turn on my GPS and set it on my desk for an hour, the resulting track will look like it's bouncing around the room.

My guess is this app averages a bunch of readings from each wall to correct for the noise, but I'm still surprised that works well enough to give accurate results.

As for using GPS, WLAN and others, you can get pretty accurate measurements with sensor fusion, even if the individual sensor values are all noisy or inaccurate.

From past experience I'd also expect GPS to not be available unless you're near a window. But if it's there you can use it to get a more accurate location.

Download one of the apps that shows individual GPS satellite signal strengths and tell me if you still believe this. Definitely not true for my phone.

Wifi positioning is based on triangulating (trilateralating) between 3-40 fixed points within 100 meters.

Assuming you can get access to the raw data, Wifi should be extremely accurate for calculating the distance between two points in space separated by less than 30 meters. (And probably pretty accurate up to 100 meters or so.)

The site claims it's accurate to within 6 inches which, based on a quick trial, seems about right.

You don't have to move it in a straight line as far as I can tell. I just moved it around the room and pressed it against the walls.

Like you, I wouldn't have expected this to work. But it pretty much does. I didn't experiment with what radio signals it needs to work. (Though for most uses I'm not sure it's easier than a laser distance meter and some graph paper.)

Companies are only interested in candidates that won't work for them and people would prefer to work for firms that won't hire them.

For all the talk about "competence" or "love" or even attractiveness or education, the only thing that really matters is social status.

All people ever want is trade up.

There are tricks to make this work; you can fool the other party (difficult and dangerous), you can fool yourself (easy and efficient, but kind of sad), or you can use different scales and engage in some kind of status exchange.

The recruiter needs to be a part of this trade by having some inherent tangible value themselves, to make the whole thing believable; I bet if Larry Page had made the call himself the whole thing might have worked, maybe even without any serious money offered.

But if the person on the other end of the line is a nobody the process is doomed from the start, because it signals there is no status on offer.

On the other hand, sending a copy of a former deal sounds needy and insecure, like a guy a party bragging that he used to date a model once -- something George Costanza would say. Why should anyone care? Are you dating a model right now is what we want to know.

What matters isn't whether I'm cynical or dry or cold, etc.; what matters is whether I'm right, and if not, why not.

This bit. Might be applicable for recruiting but not for dating. Perhaps in some cases but by no means all or even close to all. And for someone who claims not to date, I'm not sure you're even qualified to make such a bold statement.

Also, I thought I was saying something pretty much uncontroversial; I'm surprised people go out of their way to say it's "bold" and "sad". Really, it's neither.

Still, I find myself hoping that someone did turn up on April 9.

That's not what he said though.

He said not to talk to them till you are ready to sell. That's quite different from what you said.

Uhh... no it's not. Make that actually work and show it to some architects, interior designers, and real estate people. Be sure to have a mop on hand for drool.

    > Make that actually work

I could have used this when apartment hunting to show floor plans to my spouse. (Much better than just pictures)

I've played with it - with some calibration, it seems to work. But YMMV, and I got it mostly just in an appreciation of the author's clever idea.

Thanks!

I'm not sure I buy the whole "faked identities" thing, but even if it's true, I fail to see why it's such an outrage. It doesn't seem any more harmful than me telling them, "I need to check with my family" as a way of buying time to consider a relocation. People hide things or offer misdirections to improve their standing in a negotiation. That's just the way things work. It sounds like, at worst, the Google people were pretty straightforward once they'd gotten past the initial information gathering bit.

> She replies that it’s usually a maximum of 2 million.

Given that he has sold his company before, I think he has an idea of what upper bar $2M translates to.

There's absolutely no evidence that $2 million was ever on offer. What they wanted all along was for him to come in for an interview for a job...which he may have flubbed even if he had acquiesced. Lots of bright developers "flub" Google interviews.

But in reality an acqui-hire was the intent all along, Google was just being deceptive.

I don't see anything like that. Also, what’s the difference between a purchase and acquihire in this case? Both would surely mean an employment at Google.

Off the top of my head? Price, role at Google post accusation, golden handcuffs.

Where's the threshold between acqui-hires and acquisitions these days?

I posted this to the other thread, and I now see that my experience is perhaps tame compared to others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876561

Like someone else quipped: "oh no! seems like you can't walk down the street today without being aggressively offered a job!" There are worse problems to have. :P

1. Google recruiter emails me, says my name was recommended to her by somebody inside Google. I'm still not sure who the "somebody" was as I don't have any close friends inside Google and nobody mentioned anything to me. I suspect it may have been a HN'er actually, somebody who doesn't know me IRL, but liked something he/she saw in my posts here or some of my open source work.

2. I politely declined to pursue anything, explaining that I am knee deep in a startup of my own, and that my ambition is to run my own company, not work for anybody else - even Google.

3. Recruiter replied, expressed that they understood, and asked if they could contact me again in the future to see where things stood. I said "sure".

4. About a year later a different Google recruiter pinged me, mentioned the earlier dialogue, and asked me if my situation had changed. I answered that it had not. They replied and said "thanks for the update".

5. I haven't heard anything from them since.

All in all, everybody was polite and cordial, but then again, we never got into any detailed discussions because I just wasn't interested. YMMV. shrug

I don't know if the guy in this story is really as bad ass and worth as much as he thinks he is, but the interaction with Google sounds spot on.

I've met more than my fair share of the Googlers that exhibit an air of arrogance, but are you sure their hoops aren't just Google's standard interview process?

Google has stated their interview process is designed to produce very few false positives, accepting that false negatives are a necessary by-product.

I suspect it may've been because I was hired at the bottom of the 2009 recession, right around when they fired all the temps and all the permanent recruiters were fearful of their jobs and there were virtually no other candidates in the pipeline, while folks who applied in 2007 or 2011-2012 when it was much busier got a terrible experience.

Arrogance is the right word... I got the impression they would prefer candidates who were bending over backwards to get in the door, and by asking about salary and relocation costs I clearly wasn't.

Edit: Then about 6 months later I took a job in Sydney anyway, at a 20% higher salary... Then took another paycut to go back to Canberra (Sydney is expensive!)

This seems like a risky tactic. [Famous Named Googler] probably doesn't like [low level recruiters] misrepresenting their relationship with him/her.

    > Googler #1 doesn’t do M&A for [Famous Named Googler].

Personally I'd use social engineering to get the information I would need to prove this and dig our all the information I needed about Googler #1 and #2. First you need the real contact details. More appropriately you need to make sure that the numbers quoted in the emails aren't throwaways.

Ideally you need access to a corporate phone directory, which these days are harder to come by as a physical book. Years ago you could easily approach the right person (smokers outside are good because it is easy to start a conversation with a smoker especially if you smoke as well) and offer them a couple of hundred dollars for the internal corporate directory phone book). Cleaners are also a good target as they have access to lots of areas.

You'd be surprised how many people will give that book over for a small amount of cash.

As a secondary bonus, once you are finished with the phone book you can sell it on to a headhunter. They pay big money for such a useful item.

These days that kind of stuff is harder but not impossible. Social networking has made it easier to get information about people and what they do, who their friends are and where they hang out. People are lazy about their privacy and that is useful if you are trying to dig up information on someone, especially easy if they have an uncommon name.

Fight dirty tricks with dirty tricks is my opinion.