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I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI. Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea…
A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mos…
They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.
Not unique to Google. I would say I saw the same in 26 years working at Apple.
I think the Bay Area in general wanted to keep their employees. 'Cause God knows there is another company just across the valley that will hire them right up.
It should give all of us in the Bay Area, and especially during that era, some measure of humility. It's not necessarily that we were all talented, amazing, not expendable but our corporate leaders damn well did not want the competition to get us.
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I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
YouTube was a huge early acquisition for them around 2005 or 2006.
Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.
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Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.
I consider anyone raising a child as their parents, I honestly could care less who's physical bodies were involved. It's interesting to me that anyone raising a child wouldn't want to be considered a parent. Is the use of this term by request of people actually in this position, or wasn't created by third parties in an assumption that we shouldn't call them parents? Caretaker and legal guardian have different and mor…
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Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on G…
So, Google’s choice of architecture prevents them from open-sourcing or maintaining projects a tad longer than absolute necessary. I’d say they dug their own grave, if it has such a large impact on the trust of customers. Maybe Google3’s architecture was excellent for worldwide scalability and costs, but let’s see which one matters in the long term.
One big reason that this changed: The hiring bar dropped dramatically over time. Early Google engineers were almost all technical superstars who had a real passion for the details of computing technology. Maintaining this standard is really hard, especially when you’re trying to grow fast.
Over time, the bar gradually slipped until it was essentially “got good grades at a brand name school, and did well-enough (but not necessarily exceptional) on a slate of algorithm questions”. Some of this way a top-down decision (especially from 2020 on), but most of it seemed to be bottom-up: It’s just really hard to look at someone who seems smart, nice, and got the “right answer” (maybe slowly, or with some hints), and then write feedback that says “they’re not good enough”.
The problem with hiring “replacement-level players” is in the name. If you have cultivated a team of superstars, it’s worth going to exceptional lengths to retain and motivate them. It’s harder to justify those lengths when the median beneficiary is a replacement-level player, even if you still have a core of superstars mixed in.
My takeaway: If you want to maintain an environment like Ben described, you need to be absolutely ruthless about maintaining a high hiring bar. You need to be ruthless about choosing who to promote into leadership positions as well, but that would be a separate post.
All that said, I personally know several people that I’d consider superstars who were laid off in this round. In every case, they were long-time engineers in senior roles who had been outmaneuvered by more politically-oriented players. Very frustrating to see, but honestly most of them will be better off somewhere else.
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How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?
I've worked in one big company when something like this actually happened. First week one developer blatantly said to management in-front of the scammer that the scammer (CTO) doesn't know anything about technology and is a complete fraud. The developer got fired 10 minutes later. Others took note to not challenge him if they want to keep their job. That happened ~10 years ago and I am actually grateful for that expe…
's/big //'
So I looked at the original 2005 email and saw this: "Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground." Ah, that's why you have the problem now. You let the madmen take over the asylum! Sorry, guys, I know engineers love to believe that everything would be fine if engineers ran everything. It just ain't so.