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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#211

Post by freyir »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #182
freyir wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Nothing I said above was refuted or mistaken. You claim that her paper was internally reviewed twice and you chose to ignore evidence to the contrary.

And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit’s own responsibility in the situation.

Re: Leaving Google

#212

Post by opinion-is-bad »

nl wrote: post #178
xyzelement wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// 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.

These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.

Re: Leaving Google

#213

Post by azornathogron »

rurban wrote: post #209
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.

Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.

Re: Leaving Google

#214

Post by ir193 »

> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case.

i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

Re: Leaving Google

#215

Post by knorker »

All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points:

1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child!

2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay.

Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant.

> A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team

So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.

Re: Leaving Google

#216

Post by RNCTX »

DannyBee wrote: post #109
cletus wrote: post #19

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those: First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite ha…

"The argument for a pay cut" ... Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places. Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywher…

Another another argument would be that income inequality is not the fault of employees but rather the fault of management, whether politically, culturally, socially or all of the above.

Re: Leaving Google

#217

Post by poisonborz »

capableweb wrote: post #208
shoto_io wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.

Re: Leaving Google

#218

Post by burnished »

gerash wrote: post #170
freyir wrote: post #17

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical” In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and som…

Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background. I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too. Another very…

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

Re: Leaving Google

#219

Post by mehrdada »

capableweb wrote: post #207
lotsofpulp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fi…

Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral.

I am not sure if that is called survival.

And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.

Re: Leaving Google

#220

Post by kerng »

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary.

There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city....

A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC.

Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

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