391–400 of 939 posts
Hard to place the blame on a single person, though I do think a "management consultant wearing an engineer costume" captures Google's engineering leadership these days
Yeah. But what do you expect when the boss comes from McKinsey? Not only does the place teach a particular skillset, it also selects for very peculiar employees. It would be downright weird if an ex-McKinsey employee were anything like a decent engineer.
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To be clear, I meant the author does not have full context.
That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam sites and make ads and search results nearly indistinguishable.
Correlation isn't causation. Don't just buy that someone is fully to blame because someone told you they were fully to blame.
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> where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.
It's also a good lesson for the new AI cycle we're in now. Often inserting ML subsystems into your broader system just makes it go from "deterministically but fixably bad" to "mysteriously and unfixably bad".
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Agreed. I struggled to keep going after "computer scientist class traitor". A very juvenile take that reflects poorly on the author, IMO.
You don’t find it to be succinct? It’s certainly pejorative, but in four words it explains quite nicely how the author feels about Raghaven in a way most engineers can probably relate to. If he’d said “engineer who no longer builds but leverages their past technical background to instead succeed in a management role, often to the detriment of their past engineering peers” it would roughly get the same idea across, it…
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> You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance. Can you elaborate?
Yeah, what is scared into compliance?
https://sifted.eu/articles/deepmind-talent
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researcher-quit-google-op...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-07-13/ex-goo...
https://mdwdotla.medium.com/why-im-leaving-google-for-a-star...
What killed Google Search are the AI research papers that ultimately led to the rise of OpenAI
word2vec, invented by Google, killed Google? I mean, it would serve as a terrific headline but I don't really buy it, do you? I think it's more "Very poor search results, infested with ads, killed Google's dreams of becoming the next Microsoft and will now die a slow death and end up making millions instead of billions". Dying might not be that bad, after all.
You can tell Alphabet is panicking because they started showing AI-generated answers to searches above the ads they serve.
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I am directly citing emails revealed in discovery as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Google. They're all linked in there too! And you can even see who was CC'd. It's a little confusing because some of them are part of one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom up.
Thanks for responding. That'll teach me to skim-read while I'm on a meeting so can't give it my full attention.