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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#201

Post by throwawaylinux »

hintymad wrote: post #153
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…

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens. She's a disgrace to the research commun…

> She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three.

This is basically mainstream teaching now (see critical race theory). It's like witch burning, if you don't agree with their claims and accusations then that only proves you are a sinner. And if you do confess, then Lord help you.

I must say though, it is a bit rich that Google suddenly doesn't like it when the monster they helped to feed turns on them.

> For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens.

The secular high priests of this ideology do and are.

Re: Leaving Google

#203

Post by SantiagoQ »

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.

I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between.

They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts.

As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.

Re: Leaving Google

#204

Post by greatgib »

huma wrote: post #98
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…

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.

Re: Leaving Google

#205

Post by RNCTX »

achow wrote: post #151
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.

This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features). For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and…

Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?

Re: Leaving Google

#206

Post by jimsimmons »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #18

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team. It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you. The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it. Perhaps my ideas are the problem,…

What about JAX is so amazing? It takes the worst of functional programming and tensor programming and gives you yet another half baked lib with 12 edge cases at every API call

Re: Leaving Google

#207

Post by capableweb »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #55
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…

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.

Re: Leaving Google

#208

Post by capableweb »

shoto_io wrote: post #197
dilyevsky wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

> Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.

Re: Leaving Google

#209

Post by rurban »

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…

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do.

My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

Re: Leaving Google

#210

Post by kgwgk »

ergocoder wrote: post #193
emodendroket wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.

Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns. Compensation in tech is so insane. Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close. It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company. This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.

To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.
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