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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#91

Post by shaklee3 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #58
onphonenow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there. It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective. Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

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…

Do you have sources other than quoting yourself on HN? I'd like to read them

Re: Leaving Google

#92

Post by geodel »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #58
onphonenow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there. It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective. Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

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…

> I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events

I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.

Re: Leaving Google

#93

Post by topkai22 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #38

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would le…

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues.

While working in consulting I spent about 4 months with a manager who had 60 direct employees. That was a disaster, but I got to spend 3 /4 months with no responsibilities :)

Re: Leaving Google

#94

Post by joshuamorton »

freyir wrote: post #84
sillysaurusx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

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…

But her paper passed the internal review. It failed some additional internal review that wasn't policy at the time.

Re: Leaving Google

#95

Post by tdfx »

ashtonkem wrote: post #46
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.” I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech c…

It’s been a while since I’ve considered Google a pinnacle of anything. I think the executives of google might be a bit delusional about how far that propaganda is effective.

It's still a major selling point if you're raising money for your company. "Ex-Google engineer" somehow still makes rich people want to throw money at you, deservedly or not.

Re: Leaving Google

#96

Post by mikepurvis »

icelancer wrote: post #86
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.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another.

It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.

Re: Leaving Google

#97

Post by choppaface »

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…

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. (She told Jeff Dean and others that she was doing so in an email made public). That triggers Legal to retaliate and look for a reason to fire the employee, immediately. Jeff Dean let the conflict drag out 6+ months because he thought he had control of the situation (and he was wrong). Without Jeff Dean’s persistence, Dr. Gebru would probably have been retaliated upon as swiftly as those in the Alphabet Workers Union. That’s how Legal and HR work—- they retaliate if litigation looks imminent. (Levandowski lasted so long because he was dealing with not Jeff Dean but Larry Page).

Google handled Dr Gebru’s exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow’s huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn’t have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed.

A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru’s case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn’t COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.

Re: Leaving Google

#98

Post by huma »

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.

Re: Leaving Google

#99

Post by freyir »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #58
onphonenow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there. It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective. Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

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 late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.

I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

Re: Leaving Google

#100

Post by Jensson »

joshuamorton wrote: post #89
Jensson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but…

Why do we have to take Google's word and not hers? (Especially in light of corroborating witnesses who say that what she did was completely normal)

Because plenty of other researchers working at Google regularly publish papers critical of Google and are just fine? Even Timnit had already done that many times, she just got into trouble this time but all the other papers she published was fine. If Google really cared about these researchers publishing critical pieces then Google would have shut down that entire group rather than just firing her.
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