I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core).
I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.
When I joined google, the only way I could get hired was as a test engineer on an SRE team, which I then converted into an SRE via mission control and wrote docs and shared them internally with folks until the principal engineers read them, and then they gave me infinite resources (Google Exacycle) to do everything I described above. I used that to get promoted to Staff SWE, and used that to launch a product (Google Cloud Genomics) and do some interesting machine learning for drug discovery (BTW, at this point mny career was effectively complete- I had set out to do everything I wanted, and was interested in what to do next).
The above happened because (beyond a wide range of boosts provided by parents and country) I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power. I kept networking to meet more and more people, and by meeting those people I got more access and support. I helped build up a team- Google Accelerated Sciences- which does basically what I thought Google should be doing all along.
unfortunately, at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
From what has been put outside, don't you think Timnit's mail to employees as a manager was out of line for someone in her role.
Even to me who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the whole thing, that didn't look appropriate.
To resign at Google you tell your manager you're resigning and then fill out a form (that's the process that makes it an official resignation). What Megan did to Timnit was immediate termination, combined with an advanced exit date, which only happens if you're truly and deeply violating Google rules or your country's laws.
When I brought up the Timnit firing situation my VP literally said: "It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee, I don't know how Megan did it so fast".
1. Google wanted her gone, ranging from good reasons (she was too abrasive) to possibly suspect (in this instance she was being abrasive about a paper with ethical questions on Google's practices being stopped from publication with no explanation given)
2. Her ultimatum email can reasonably be construed as a resignation. It roughly said "Do this or I'm quiting", and Google responded with roughly "We're not doing that, thanks for telling us you quit, we accept".
3. This does not follow the typical resignation process used at Google, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid resignation. It's unreasonable to assume a lawyer didn't look this over before they went ahead with it. The lack of Timnit suing Google for wrongful termination (from what I've seen) agrees with this.
4. Googlers were angry about this situation, because they disagreed with leadership's actions.
5. The leadership's response is legally bound to stick strictly to saying she resigned. This only inflamed #4 more.
6. They were ethically bound to not disclose all details of a situation involving an employee (where as Timnit could paint whatever story she wanted). Even if Timnit gave a full go-head, there were others involved and doxing is a real threat when names are exposed.
7. They were bound by business interests (at its root legal and ethical obligation to the shareholders) to not expose all of the details of the paper, the objection to the paper, and the processes involved.
So was Google in the right here? The situation obviously wasn't handled well. There were clear problems with Timnit, and she did give an ultimatum. However there are reasonable concerns related to "our ethics person gave an ultimatum and we called them on it" - but without the details it's hard to form a nuanced opinion.
Other takes welcome.
I personally think Timnit shouldn't have been hired in the first place, but if they were going to fire her, they needed to follow the path, which takes about 1-2 years, of establishing that she was not a good employee for Google.
Here is more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386
And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing.
Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
Basically, performance reviews and incentives are structured around doing something with "big impact," so there are a lot of needlessly "ambitious" (quotes intentional) reboots, revamps, redesigns, repackaging, etc. of existing products, mostly so that teams and PM's can say they went big and get a good performance review.
The flip side of that is that there's no incentive to fix bugs (and usability issues) in existing stable products, because unless the bug is losing tens of millions of dollars for Google it's considered wasted time from a performance review perspective.
This is why Google is constantly relaunching and rebranding products, even making them worse, while neglecting long-running problems in, for example, Gmail.
Recently, my main Gmail account was upgraded to the new Chat interface. It actually looks worse (subjectively the new font seems less readable) and has removed the "Pop out to separate window" feature that I used to use all the time. But hey, now the interface has animated transitions and I can forward individual parts of a conversation to an email with one click! Wow!
I don't know how to address this meme, since it is very clear that managers are telling their reports that this is how things work and leading to this widespread belief, but when I actually go into the promo sessions I don't see this at all.
- People are right and your org is an exception
- People are wrong and your org is the norm
My experience with Google products as a consumer seems to point towards the former.
Also, kudos on the Zappa-inspired username! It's not one of his best albums but it's certainly an interesting one.
It's really a shame; I feel like this transformation happened in the last 5 years or so. Most articles from NYT that I see posted here have this slant.
I've said this exact thing in the past about NYT. This seems to be their MO these days and is especially apparent in their international reporting.
Along his goals of "doubling digital revenue" and maximising subscriber numbers, the place obviously turned towards clickbait and left-wing cheer-leading.
Give the customers what they want - and they definitely don't want to be told their worldview is wrong or that their opinion of certain issues has valid counterpoints. So it's been a huge cratering of credibility and honest reporting.
I still remember their awkward correction about an article on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/pageoneplus/corrections-a...
Like the article mentioned, they should have bought Shopify when it was much cheaper and provided the Google cloud as a place for shopify app developers for running their apps. Shopify has native event bus support for AWS so app developers favor AWS.
Amazon (retail) does this too. My wife's email address can log into two different accounts depending on what password you use.
I would say the M1 is prestigious. It pushed tablets and notebooks forward.
You can also go back to 1977, the design of the Apple ][, and all the prestigious innovations (or bringing innovative ideas to the mass market) since then.
The fastest way to convince me not to use a product is to put the name "Google" on it.
A nice guy cannot execute a PMF pivot, but can milk and maximize a money printer. Tool for the job.
It’s all so boring.
The idea of "charge what the market will bear" has been taken to an extreme by the tech industry. The combination of venture capital, non-ownership (SaaS everything), adhesive ToS, anit-trust levels of monopolization, etc. all work really hard to get customers locked in and dependent on half-assed garbage with a big feature list.
Everyone is building robots that hold you upside down and shake the money from your pockets while calling is SaaS. Boo!
Instead, the god damned empire defense crowd is laying out that path, for almost a decade now, and its naturally a road to nowhere.
There is no real big vision coming from Google on what is wrong with how info is being mindlessly generated and pumped into people's heads 24x7.
They are very proud and happy they index 2 billion 'how to make a boiled egg' videos. WTF are they even enabling? They have no clue because its all driven by empire defense.
So I continue using Hangouts until now when I'm told it is officially being replaced. Whatever, I think, I'll just switch to Gmail Chat and uninstall Hangouts. Today, I get sent a video from someone still on Hangouts. They fucking play link takes me to the Hangouts page on the play store. I need to install Hangouts to watch the video.
You can't make this up.
Things like the jamboard turn me off of buying Google hardware.
Until it does. Go back 20 years and you could've written the same thing about Microsoft and end-user computing.
Google under Pichai looks increasingly like Microsoft under Balmer. Executing to stellar headline numbers, but increasingly paralyzed in anything other than their one or two anchor products.
It took a change at the top to turn Microsoft around. I expect Pichai to go the same way as Balmer.
Google Execs have an average vote that’s decisively short of “exceeding expectations.” But Google had an additional set of execs go for interviews that gave a more positive vote.
If I were to subscribe to every site where I've bypassed a paywall even once in the last few months (of have just given up without reading), I'd easily be spending over $300 per month. I don't feel like my consumption warrants that price.
