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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#181

Post by texasbigdata »

choppaface wrote: post #138
freyir wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don’t expressly criticize the employer’s work. That’s an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny. Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanch…

Other papers were late and didn’t receive the same prejudice.

Which ones? Specifically.

After the, (my words), harrasment of Lacun on Twitter, the sort of belittling of the internal award she was given (you'd have to really think they were evil to give her an award just to gaslight her), plus the short notice ultimatum to a very senior person (one level down from Jeff Dean right?)....no offense but from the outside she seems exhausting to manage.

The abstract came out, and honestly the paper was so so. Obviously it went against googles business model, but it'd be a wayyyy bigger scandal if they burried it.

Maybe Jeff Dean is a liar, but his comment was the paper missed incorporating significant recent research. As head of the group, and just out of respect towards the institution and to science, pondering it for more than 48 hours before bouncing on vacation or heaven forbid presenting at the next conference would have been reasonable.

Biased external view though. YRMV.

Re: Leaving Google

#182

Post by sillysaurusx »

freyir wrote: post #99
sillysaurusx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the common story, yes. But it evaporates when you dig into the details, which I've posted below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965631 I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events. Corporations have an astronomical amount of power and influence. Aren't you at least a little curious whether it's true? And if there was nothing wrong with her paper, that…

It very much does not evaporate. Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand. Your defense is that most papers were submitted…

(The subthread below contains the refutations, so I won't copy them here. I left a reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966286, but you might want to climb it upwards to see why this is mistaken. Suffice to say, her paper passed the internal review, and was subjected to a second review that wasn't policy at the time.)

Re: Leaving Google

#183

Post by [deleted] »

geodel wrote: post #105
mavelikara wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a ma…

I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Google

#184

Post by jsemrau »

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…

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

Re: Leaving Google

#185

Post by sillysaurusx »

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.

Could you explain in detail why the power consumption calculations were mistaken?

It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.

Re: Leaving Google

#186

Post by sillysaurusx »

Jensson wrote: post #115
joshuamorton wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but the claim is that Google instituted a new policy, and applied it inconsistently without telling people, until it blew up in their faces when she was fired. Only after that did they formalize the policy, and saying that she was fired for circumventing and then questioning a policy that ostensibly didn't exist when she was fired doesn't have the same ring to it.

But you claim she was fired for being critical of Google. Maybe what you are saying here is right and she was just the first person fired since nobody followed the new guidelines and at some point they will face consequences, it could just as well have been anyone else. But I don't see how that would make Google look bad, it is normal to fire one of the offenders as an example when a group refuses to follow new guide…

> And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy.

The policy seemed to be made up specifically for her paper. Her paper already passed the standard internal review, and she alerted them months before the conference that her paper was going to be submitted.

Re: Leaving Google

#187

Post by Leszek »

gerash wrote: post #180
oppositelock wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So... it's like academia.

Re: Leaving Google

#188

Post by [deleted] »

slimsag wrote: post #14
cube00 wrote: post #2

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

You left out the best part: > We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Google

#189

Post by onion2k »

slimsag wrote: post #14
cube00 wrote: post #2

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

You left out the best part: > We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.

I find it amusingly ironic that Google employees don't like the idea of being tracked.

Re: Leaving Google

#190

Post by gremIin »

jart wrote: post #130
Ericson2314 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact. It's inertia-led. I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.

If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?

Turns out love of large paychecks is stronger than hatred of ads.
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