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Sergey Brin's Unretirement

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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#91

Post by oreally »

vbezhenar wrote: post #81
p1esk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the problem - if you don't like doing anything, what will you do? What will you fill your life with? You will quickly get bored of anything you try. Your life will have no meaning, and you will probably turn to alcohol or drugs.

I can play World of Warcraft indefinitely.

Indeed, video games are probably the things most of humanity will retire to if they didn't attach so much ego and meaning to their jobs and by extension, the people around them.

Just be sure to swap games once in a while so you don't get bored.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#92

Post by dang »

lovich wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please not post snarky comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. No one is saying you owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

@dang, I get what you mean in a vacuum but this article is pretty insulting to the readers intelligence. The third sentence of the article is > But one misstep he admitted to might surprise a lot of people who dream of the day they can quit their 9-to-5. Does anyone really believe the co founder of google retiring after their rise to supremacy in search was the equivalent of someone quitting their 9-5? They might hav…

I hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.

The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.

(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#93

Post by dyauspitr »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her milli…

I’m not going to attribute Gemini’s success to Sergey. It was already basically there before he came back.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#94

Post by marcus_holmes »

cuttothechase wrote: post #47

Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work. We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the a…

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity.

I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.

But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#95

Post by jedberg »

qweiopqweiop wrote: post #85
jedberg wrote: post #37

I retired when my first kid was born. I had plenty to keep me busy playing with her, taking care of her, traveling with her. And then we had the second one, and were extra busy. But I was still "working" the whole time. I was running a small startup, and still keeping up on tech and taking speaking gigs. I was not great at fully retiring. I unretired when the second kid got to 1st grade. We could no longer travel on…

You didn't retire at all if you still were running a startup surely? You just had multiple jobs and quit one.

I retired in the sense that I was in complete control of my time and had no active income, living off of assets alone.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#96

Post by alansaber »

laughingcow wrote: post #30

It has been my observation that those that retire without solid plans to keep busy 15-20 hours a week really do struggle. You have to be missed by people when you are sick or out of town. You have to have a reason to get out of bed. I think your choice of activity tells a lot about you since the 'pay the bills and save for retirement" argument no longer applies. Some volunteer to better the world. Some continue their…

You're saying he should have gone the Gates path and formed an NGO? Fair enough but I imagine nothing else matches the thrill and stress of running the C suite at Google

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#97

Post by chihuahua »

About a year ago I had an unpleasant and demoralizing experience at work, and thought "fuck it, I don't need to put up with this shit any more" and decided I'd had enough of work for now. In the spring and summer and early fall, it's easy to find enough things to do outside. Right now in the rainy, windy winter it's a bit more difficult. Today I went to the gym at 7am, then did a 2 hour indoor cycling workout at home, then went for a short plunge in the lake (41 F). Then an hour in the hot tub.

It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.

So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#98

Post by ergocoder »

Retirement isn't quite applicable to billionaires.

They never have to work. They do it because they want to.

Retirement implies there was work you didn't want to do. You did it because you had (or wanted) to make some money. Now you have enough money. You've retired.

Hell, it isn't even applicable to many wealthy software engineers who got rich from tech startups. Many are coding as much as when they were working.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#99

Post by spiderfarmer »

m348e912 wrote: post #38
LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her milli…

I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.

You must be using it to create bombs or something. I never ran into an issue that I would blame on policy guardrails.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#100

Post by tock »

It was interesting to see my dad retire. He struggled a lot initially and even went back to work for a while. He had to actively work on learning to enjoy his hobbies and time once again.
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