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After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

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Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#31

Post by marcinzm »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #16

I see a lot of people saying this seems not a big deal, or that his leadership deserved promotion. It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough: https://archive.is/wqdkF > "He would ask us to do personal things for him," one of these people said. "He said, 'I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.' [...] We had abs…

>We had absolutely no work in Russia.

Wouldn't the point of such a high level briefing be because they're tying to get work in Russia but don't already have any? It's rather common for employees to not know the details of the strategic plans of the executives until the execution starts.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#32

Post by neolog »

torstenvl wrote: post #12

"Misconduct" of "bullying"? With no further details or facts? Unless he was actually committing a crime and Google somehow shielded him from criminal responsibility, this is a nothingburger. When you are responsible for a significant step in AI progress you get promoted. I swear to God, the SV woker-than-thou crowd will be trying to cancel Babbage for "sexual harassment" of Ada Lovelace soon.

There are lots of practices that aren't crimes but which should nevertheless be discouraged within organizations.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#34

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Ftuuky wrote: post #17

> "Employees said Suleyman encouraged them to use private chat groups on Signal and Telegram for work conversations, some of which were set up to automatically delete messages after a set period. Employees were also on occasion asked to delete messages from their phones, a former employee said. They were also told to notify the group once they had done so. > "Mustafa was super paranoid about Google spying on him, so…

Whenever I've encountered managers refusing to use company-provided communications for company work, it's one of two explanations:

(Note these apply specifically to managers communicating with their teams. I'm not including ICs who just prefer to not use company comms)

1) Leadership has developed a reputation for routinely reading people's private communications. Specifically, not just for investigating specific events like harassment claims, but just to surveil people as lazy way of seeing how things are going instead of doing the hard work of actually talking to employees to see what's going on.

or

2) The person is behaving in a way that would be very incriminating, so they force the team to use communication channels that won't leave a record behind. I can think of one manager who was exceptionally kind and caring in company e-mails and Slack messages, but would constantly berate people from his personal Skype account. If you were on his team, you had to be available in both Slack and Skype, and you could usually guess the tone of the communications based on which app pinged you.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#36

Post by PhasmaFelis »

temp8964 wrote: post #22
sillysaurusx wrote: post #16

I see a lot of people saying this seems not a big deal, or that his leadership deserved promotion. It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough: https://archive.is/wqdkF > "He would ask us to do personal things for him," one of these people said. "He said, 'I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.' [...] We had abs…

Why is writing about Russia a personal thing? I think I will need more context to understand this.

It's personal because it's not work-related. He would demand people do random, pointless tasks for him to show dominance.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#37

Post by catillac »

temp8964 wrote: post #22
sillysaurusx wrote: post #16

I see a lot of people saying this seems not a big deal, or that his leadership deserved promotion. It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough: https://archive.is/wqdkF > "He would ask us to do personal things for him," one of these people said. "He said, 'I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.' [...] We had abs…

Why is writing about Russia a personal thing? I think I will need more context to understand this.

It sounds like it was a side task not related to the company or the company’s work, but rather the writing was at the whim of the person at issue. My framing is something like telling someone who reports to you to do your college homework.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#38

Post by xioren00 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #28
xioren00 wrote: post #15

> “He used to say, ‘I crush people,”’ one former DeepMind employee told Insider The horror...

Is this reaction sarcastic? As if to say "I'm not afraid of people who boast of crushing others"?

Are you saying you would be afraid of this person for that comment? Part of being an adult is learning to deal with adversity.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#39

Post by PhasmaFelis »

gigatexal wrote: post #21
lostlogin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the world has moved on from the days of letting visionaries like Job's rant and rave and yell and scream What evidence do you see of that?

The fact that we are having this conversation. And if engineering wants to grow past its problems it has got to change. (edit: the previous part of this disparaged those on the spectrum and I am sorry)

Can we not imply that "on the spectrum" means being an asshole? Autism causes a lot of social difficulties, but it has nothing to do with publicly humiliating people on purpose to make yourself feel powerful.

Re: After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him

#40

Post by tbrownaw »

jwilber wrote: post #10
tvirosi wrote: post #5

His disagreeability is probably correlated with his track record of innovation and if we cancel every outlier like that our ability to reach new plateaus will lag decades behind than if we only allow nice people to play.

Can’t see how being an asshole and being innovative are intrinsically linked. On the other hand, being an asshole and [taking credit for other’s work, stepping on others to climb the corporate ladder, throwing others under the bus, other sociopathic behavior…] seem pretty correlated.

Being innovative means ignoring the way things are supposed to be done, and maybe a bit of hubris to think you can do better.

I'd imagine that being an asshole likely also involves ignoring the way things are supposed to be done, and/or a bit of (differently applied) hubris.

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