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

About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 607 posts

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#401

Post by saagarjha »

nickff wrote: post #376
saagarjha wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, an ultimatum is a choice between two options; she offered Google a choice, and they selected. Expecting them to try to carve out a 'third way' is just unrealistic. But you're claiming that for a company there shouldn't be a choice, it should just lead to termination.

Well, the company is in slightly different position from the manager. They can abrogate the manager's authority, but that would permanently undermine that individual. On the other hand, they can also choose to accept the subordinate's resignation. They could try to transfer the subordinate somewhere else, but that's also risky, and wouldn't really address the ultimatum in this case. Accepting a resignation achieves t…

I think you're coming at the ultimatum from some sort of strange power dynamic perspective, where an employee who successfully gets their ultimatum approved somehow disenfranchises their manager of their authority, enabling future employees to…what? Vie for the managerial position? This has a "crush dissent" kind of vibe.

In every employment contract there is a balance of things and employee is willing to do and an employer is willing to provide in exchange. If my boss said that they wouldn't pay me anymore I would rightfully respond with an "ultimatum" of "pay me or I quit". That's the ultimatum they respond to every day by paying me; they look at the balance of things I offer, consider what I provide to the company to be adequate, and then give me the money I ask for. The same is true for any ultimatum: you come to the table with one final negotiation; the negotiation of "do you value me? Then you must provide me this". It's an entirely transactional exchange.

Now, ultimatums are general to be discouraged not because they undermine some sort of authority, but because they are a sign that negotiations have broken down on both sides. As a manager, your goal should be to try to reach a compromise far before that point–not only does to hurt your relationship if you don't, even when the ultimatum is "successful" from the point of the employee, but by letting a conflict reach an ultimatum point you're exposing yourself to significant risk and often poor deals. The way to handle an ultimatum is to forestall "pay me x or I quit" with "I'll pay you almost x if you show good performance for the next three months". If you are at the point where the argument is "I'm going to quit" then yes, you may have to carry through with the termination if you think what they provide is less valuable than what they want from you, but you should really be looking at what you did to get to that point instead.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#402

Post by sillysaurusx »

dlp211 wrote: post #339
sillysaurusx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I’m not sure what to think. It seemed absurd to submit a paper for internal academic review one day prior to a major deadline. Yet today we’re hearing that it’s common (I can believe that; standard big company stuff) and that Google hasn’t been doing academic reviews at all until very recently / possibly this incident. So it feels like, suddenly, the cornerstones of the arguments against her are vaporizing…

> This could go badly for El Goog What does this even mean? The power and resource disparity between Google and an individual researcher are so vast that this in no way can go bad for Google. The idea that a few members on HN are disillusioned with Google is just another Tuesday for them. They literally do not care...no business of this size and magnitude do. The general public will never hear about this and if they…

You're not wrong. But like it or not, HN is the newspaper of our time. For many of us, anyway. So stuff like this tends to percolate in unexpected ways. And as a hiring manager, you get no feedback when people decide not to apply to your company, so it's probably better not to kill your hiring momentum.

If it seems absurd that anyone would turn down a job at DeepMind, well... Let's just say, in my experience, prestigious institutions tend to come with a pile of downsides that everyone puts up with (because prestige) but no one really talks about (because no reason). If you care about shipping results quickly -- some researchers do (or at least I do) -- then the idea of joining a big company is already worrisome. Like you're a professional rower, happily rowing along and navigating wherever you want to go, then you're asked to join a galley rower: https://youtu.be/TyzQ-bVaqPU?t=294

There's no substitute for Google-scale work. (Working on TPUs would be a dream, IMO; where else could you possibly build those?) But if you join Google as a researcher, it sounds like your ideas have to (a) pass through their internal academic review, (b) pass through a journal's review, and then finally your idea can be published to the wider scientific community for comment. (b) was painful but possibly worthwhile, with arxiv serving as a bucket to catch everything else. Why roll your own internal review process? And why is Google trying to micromanage what researchers are allowed to publish?

I know we're probably missing a lot of the story. But on the other hand, Jeff has now given an official side of that story, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to set expectations.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#403

Post by PragmaticPulp »

driverdan wrote: post #252
asfadfdsa wrote: post #46

There are a lot of people commenting that she didn't actually resign. I agree, but it sounds like the conversation went like this: employee: I'm not happy about x, y and z. If you don't do those, I'm going to quit. manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for your time. We accept your resignation and would like it to start immediately (i.e. you're fired). If you are gonna tell your manager that you pl…

As a manager I would only do this if I really wanted to fire the person already. For employees I care about I would give them an out. Part of being a good manager is understanding your employees and helping them succeed. If someone makes a statement like this in the heat of frustration it doesn't necessarily mean they will actually quit. If they're a valuable member of the team you should present them with an opportu…

> As a manager I would only do this if I really wanted to fire the person already. For employees I care about I would give them an out.

One of the more difficult lessons I learned as a manager: Once a team member starts giving ultimatums in order to get their way or override decisions, it's not in your best interests to give in for the sake of keeping that employee. The obvious exception is if you realize you were actually wrong from the start, but reversing decisions for the sake of caving to someone's demands is a problem.

If someone is so ready to quit that they'll flaunt it to the company, it's doubtful that reversing a single decision is going to suddenly make them happy again with their employer. Worse yet, it sends a message that threatening to quit is the way to get what you want from the company. Once you validate the strategy, you will get a lot more of it.

Unfortunately, if someone already has one foot out the door and has been complaining openly (even on Twitter, in this case) about their employer, it's best for everyone to go their separate ways. From there, focus on identifying and fixing any underlying problems to minimize the chance of this happening again in the future.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#404

Post by nickff »

dragonwriter wrote: post #400
nickff wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants to negotiate, they don't use an ultimatum.

If someone is using an ultimatum, they don't request an in-person discussion. The narratives from the participants on the actual communication differ on key points relevant to evaluating whether it was really an ultimatum.

Her description, quoted from a Wired article which she has re-tweeted (which I interpret as an endorsement) is as follows:

"Tuesday Gebru emailed back offering a deal: If she received a full explanation of what happened, and the research team met with management to agree on a process for fair handling of future research, she would remove her name from the paper. If not, she would arrange to depart the company at a later date, leaving her free to publish the paper without the company’s affiliation."

I read that as an explicit ultimatum.

https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s...

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#405

Post by btilly »

x0x0 wrote: post #118
ketzo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right -- he once again talks about "accepting" her resignation, when it reeeeeally just looks like they fired her. At the very least, she certainly feels like she was fired; why is that not mentioned at all? Even just, I don't know, "sorry we were abrupt?"

Dean previously said this [1] > Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept a…

And I'm sure that her lawsuit will allege bias, and will include a demand for exactly that information so that she can prove racial discrimination against her.

Which means that Google is likely to have to produce all of the documents that they didn't want to produce.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#406

Post by tempest_ »

nickff wrote: post #386
tempest_ wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the old I don't want to do my job and accept that there "was nothing I could do" which is middle management bullshit. It is fine if you think that, but accept that you are the weak one here. If you want to err on the side of keeping your job it's fine, but don't pretend you didn't make a trade off. You do not have to accept anti social behavior but a good manager would have handled this and it would never have rea…

Respectfully, we don't have enough information to judge whether she was net-positive to the team who was acting reasonably. That's a complex calculation, and I don't know whether management triumphed or failed. It does seem like she judged the situation incorrectly, as she is now complaining, not gloating.

That is sorta my entire point.

The fact that this has over-flowed into the public sphere is a failure.

If they handled the situation correctly it should have been sorted internally. Whether the person in question spilled the beans at all is proof of that.

Managing people is a skill, and being good at computer science does not make you a good manager. They should know that complaining to social media is an option that someone might take and they should consider that when dealing with these issues.

The fact that we are here discussing anything at all proves the above, It isnt 1995, if someone feels slighted for whatever reason, expect it show up on Twitter, true or not. You don't want to be chasing the narrative with a potentially one sided google doc. No one is giving the mega corp the benefit of the doubt in 2020 which means it is bad PR either way.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#407

Post by bayareaguy »

mpihaditfirst wrote: post #187
hartator wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did: http://cacs.usc.edu/education/cs653/Dean-MapReduce-CACM08.pd...

The key ideas were part of the MPI interface for a decade before Jeff came along and applied the new branding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

The distributed database systems of the mid 80s such as the Teradata DBC 1012[1] are better prior art for Map/Reduce.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBC_1012

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#408

Post by nostrademons »

dragonwriter wrote: post #399
nostrademons wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the definition of "ultimatum" that no further compromise is possible? You can try or offer different alternatives, but if the other person is really at the ultimatum stage then you've both already lost.

> Isn't the definition of "ultimatum" that no further compromise is possible? Given that, at least in Timnit's narrative, the email included a request to discuss the issue in person when she returned from vacation, I don't think that the "ultimatum" characterization is uncontroversially accurate for the immediate case.

I'm responding narrowly to the subthread here, which is about firing someone who gives an ultimatum in the abstract. I don't know enough about the specifics of Timnit/Google's situation to pass judgment. (I'm also an employee there, so doing so would be unwise and a potential violation of confidentiality rules if I did know anything.) To me I'm filing it under "Everybody sees through their emotions, and different people will have different perceptions of what actually happened and what people actually intended."

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#409

Post by CydeWeys »

lokar wrote: post #244
whimsicalism wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seemed absurd to submit a paper for internal academic review one day prior to a major deadline I think that there isn't internal academic review of the sort implied by Jeff at Google. Timnit seems pretty clearly in the right here. As an AI researcher at a competitor, this impacts my desire to join Google in the future. I imagine these sort of PR disasters hurt their standing in the academic labor market.

> I think that there isn't internal academic review of the sort implied by Jeff at Google. Why do you think that?

Because of the grandaddy comment of this comment chain.

Re: About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

#410

Post by nickff »

tempest_ wrote: post #406
nickff wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, we don't have enough information to judge whether she was net-positive to the team who was acting reasonably. That's a complex calculation, and I don't know whether management triumphed or failed. It does seem like she judged the situation incorrectly, as she is now complaining, not gloating.

That is sorta my entire point. The fact that this has over-flowed into the public sphere is a failure. If they handled the situation correctly it should have been sorted internally. Whether the person in question spilled the beans at all is proof of that. Managing people is a skill, and being good at computer science does not make you a good manager. They should know that complaining to social media is an option that…

You asserted:

"a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom."

My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better. We don't know enough to judge whether this could have been sorted out neatly. You seem to think that a clean resolution was possible, and you might be right, or you might be wrong.

Post reply on HN