111–120 of 335 posts
Interesting that just a few days ago they posted about opening basically the same thing but focused on ML https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/02/MLOlympiad2023.htm... Interesting contrast and I guess a sign of the changing tides.
Am I missing something or are these just regular Kaggle competitions, but with no prizes? What is google offering, other than the branding? Why are competitors motivated to take part?
Is there any other, more gracious, way to interpret this as Google retiring for on being Google, if so I’d like to know. I think the direct impact of these competitions to hiring were minimal. The biggest impact was to have thousands perhaps millions of coders and researchers see Google as the place to be. As the place that gets it. The Mecca of coderdom, if you will. Now they are just another corporation. I hope the…
Can you learn to construct a grammatically sentence before you decide click the submit button?
Thank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.
He's such a bad CEO that I can't believe he's still in the seat. Just the way he let the employees revolt and embarrass him. If he had any dignity or pride he would have resigned then. He may know all the facts on how businesses should be run and is a good guy, but he has 0 leadership skills. Just an awful, terrible leader. The ChatGPT fiasco is further evidence the place has been mismanaged the last 8 years.
And sure, 99% of his compensation is Google stock, but at those magnitudes the marginal utility of the dollar is zero. What's the difference between $100m and $200m anyway?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tip outs are better in bougie joints frequented by tech workers. This sounds a little trickle-downy. Why not strive for an economy where people doing important work like feeding their communities just... Don't need to be tipped? I know it sounds crazy in today-terms, but if it makes any sense, it makes tipping culture look like more of a problem than a boon to anyone receiving the tips.
Servers love tip out. They can make hundreds a night and possibly even what a junior SWE can (pro rata) if they’re good. If you want fierce resistance from servers - ask them to split tips more equitably with the kitchen - offer to abolish the tip system altogether and just pay them $15/h flat, hell even $25/h
I'm not claiming it should never be a thing. I just wonder if we should collectively accept it and want it to be part of our economy and how our communities function. I have had many friends who do well as servers (and indeed, one earning more than I did was a junior SWE), but it doesn't seem typical, nor does it seem sustainable.
The restaurant industry certainly can't be responsible for fixing any issues with this; it's a symptom of something greater. I just don't think we should accept it as okay. Primarily due to the variability of tipping... I will always need to pay enough to cover the cost of the food and kitchen, so the restaurant is okay. But how can I be certain that the person serving me is taken care of? My individual tip isn't enough, and I know many servers do terribly depending on time and location.
I've worked shitty jobs, but I always got paid the same amount by my employer and there were legal frameworks to protect me. Servers don't get the same from us, and I don't think that's alright. We can point to when it works out well for servers, but again, I don't think that's typical.
Thank you Sundar for getting rid of the frivolous, Silicon-Valley-esque things like coding competitions for kids, extricating all of the humanity and decency that made Google so inefficient with money, and for doubling down on your focus to turn Google into the next iteration of Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It's exactly what this world needs, so you are the perfect leader for this.
Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was not going to be the next Facebook, but Microsoft had to try and fail in order to learn those lessons.
The real question is who- if anyone- will be the Satya Nadella of Google, bringing the company back for a third act in the post-AI world. And maybe, in this new world, the limiting factor of human progress is not the number of CS grads who can solve coding puzzles.
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That's hardly fair. Cisco, Oracle and IBM actually have some customer service.
Cisco does -- if you pay for it. As for Oracle -- never dealing with them again if I can help it.
Meanwhile in google land, you can literally be bring in millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue on your channel and asking for help from your dedicated Youtube contact/representative can get your entire channel retroactively demonitized
“We have enough coders, thank you!”
( pssst … actually we have too many )
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> line cooks I agree with you. However it is interesting that Charlie Ayers (employee #53 as a cook at Google), made millions when his stocks vested.
Charlie was not a "line cook." That's someone who takes prepped ingredients and combines them into a dish according to directions, and may in fact have zero ability to choose and create dishes himself. I don't know if he'd call himself "executive chef" but that's more like his job description.
Not a college dropout working the prep line, or, like many of the kitchens in the US, a Hispanic guy with semi-passable English skills and who may-or-may not be here legally.
Charlie got lucky.
Before jumping on the "Google is now Oracle" bandwagon, curious with anyone with even a little inside baseball knowledge can comment on the reasoning behind this. Because if it's for penny-pinching, "we need to be more efficient" reasons, then yeah, I'm ready to jump on the bandwagon too. But someone else posited it may be more that they want to focus on new skills needed for AI, for example (i.e. "Software 2.0" vs.…
Yeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club). I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a…
* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms
* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)
* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it
At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.
It seems like large companies are like government: Just like there's a power vacuum that causes governments to exist, there's an economic vacuum that causes large companies to exist. The question is not if these things will exist, but how and why -- and especially with what limits . It's sad to see Google -- the once very promising small company with big ideas -- getting sucked into the vacuum.
The size of these vacuums is a direct result of policy. Tax policy, liability policy, antitrust policy -- there are a dozen levers we could pull to create a corporate landscape that looks very different. But yes, with the levers in their current positions, what we see here is inevitable.