Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 464 posts

Re: Leaving Google

#171

Post by Master_Odin »

googthrow234 wrote: post #112
mikepurvis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employee…

I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

And after whoever started the project gets their promotion, the product will be killed off and Google will chase another shiny thing. How much does anyone trust totally new Google things these days?

Re: Leaving Google

#172

Post by fulafel »

random314 wrote: post #163
sillysaurusx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://tw…

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.

Re: Leaving Google

#173

Post by dilyevsky »

shoto_io wrote: post #162
titzer wrote: post #43

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private. This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

Re: Leaving Google

#174

Post by ant6n »

random314 wrote: post #163
sillysaurusx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://tw…

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

You mean Google bought pieces of paper and pretends that they represent removing co2 from the atmosphere, when in reality they don't.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...

Re: Leaving Google

#175

Post by dilyevsky »

ultrasounder wrote: post #141
titzer wrote: post #43

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

Re: Leaving Google

#176

Post by sillysaurusx »

freyir wrote: post #140
choppaface wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sentence was written after Dean had a lawyer represent him.

Which makes it more likely to be the truth, not less likely. It would be very foolish to write that if it were demonstrably false, as was claimed above. And I have to assume their lawyers aren’t very foolish. But this is all another deflection. Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed.

> Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed

This is where we'll have to agree to disagree.

As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. Someone confirmed to you that this is the case, and you're still arguing that her subsequent behavior was unjustifiable.

I think her subsequent behavior was a result of the unfair treatment. I'm not sure how I would've reacted in her place, and I have a lot of empathy for a scientist who is being scrutinized outside of normal policies.

Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published. And I think you keep saying that it's okay for a research department to stop publication of scientific work regardless of whether the paper was mistaken or not.

You've said that it needs revisions. I work in ML. It seemed not to need any revisions, as far as I could tell. Google's reaction seemed far out of proportion for what the paper claimed.

You can say "Well, that's life. Google didn't do anything wrong." The former is true, but I'm skeptical of the latter.

Re: Leaving Google

#177

Post by Rebelgecko »

random314 wrote: post #163
sillysaurusx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://tw…

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people who worked on BERT generated more CO2 commuting to work than they did training the model. It seems like a drop in the bucket.

Re: Leaving Google

#178

Post by nl »

xyzelement wrote: post #137
3grdlurker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing Y…

// See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing…

There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.

Re: Leaving Google

#179

Post by ergocoder »

choppaface wrote: post #133
ergocoder wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation. Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and imp…

The email about the lawyers is months before the “ultimatum.” The reason Dr Gebru’s case is so divisive in tech (especially in this thread) is because so many are agnostic or ignorant of the role of ethics in tech; and almost every employee is ignorant of how Legal/HR execute retaliation. Anthony Levandowski is a literal criminal and yet is still enjoying tens of millions of dollars of Google’s money. Same with Andy…

What does this have to do with attack Jeff Dean personally on twitter?

Please note that this was months before she left.

The 3 names you mentioned have nothing to do with Jeff Dean.

Handling those 3 people has nothing to do with supporting Gebru or Jeff Dean.

This has nothing to do with Gebru being a toxic person.

Re: Leaving Google

#180

Post by gerash »

oppositelock wrote: post #25
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.” I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech c…

I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time. In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel. I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimiz…

The perf process sounds good on paper. It's just like peer reviews in the academia they said.

However its outcome in practice can't be any worse. To this day, people "cook up" a project that doesn't need to exist and won't share the credit or their territory with anyone (or else the committee will doubt their ownership) and abandon the project less than six months after their promotion and switch to a new team.

Post reply on HN