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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Pet peeve: the Google AI effort is the product of ${LARGE_NUMBER} of engineers. This marketing page highlights a half-dozen luminaries. Not only do these luminaries also get comped ($$) one or more orders of magnitude more than rank-and-file, but now they get the glory as well. Sigh.

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This is true in all endeavors. There will always be leaders who get the majority of credit and grunts who do most of the actual work and don't get any. See a cool building? The architect gets all the credit but the people who actually built it get none.

This is why I'm happy most of all the iterative improvement and breakthroughs in ML are happening at research labs, public or private. When papers get published, you usually know who contributed to the endeavor.

I'm curious how you would even know? If Google is making ML breakthroughs, I think it's quite obvious they won't be immediately publishing them if they are actually commercially useful.

On the contrary, Google has a very large number of publications every year at top AI conferences.

Right, but I'm saying once they actually hit commercially useful breakthroughs (e.g. AI game changer/black swan) they certainly won't be sharing them any longer.

Or put another way, they could currently be holding back 90% of their current research and only releasing 10%.

I'm not saying that is the case, it's just I think private research into some fields is much more opaque than folks (myself) realize. Relying on Google (or any other private company) to publish findings is likely not a path for long-term success.

Yeah and that's fine.. hedge funds do this all the time too. You trade name recognition for money.

Yeah, that one always gets me too, because it is so universal and so natural for the bigshot architect to proudly say "I built that," and never once acknowledge any of the guys who risked, and sometimes even gave, their lives actually building it. It's one of the last bastions of such unchallenged arrogance.

This is true but unfortunately inevitable for large teams. For the average company, how many peoples' names would you like to remember? Zero? One?

That why we have company names, brand names, etc.

I occasionally see emails with lists of VP's and I know none of their names, and I work at Google.

If the leaders are thinking they'll thank the team at some point.

True, but the leaders have to take the scorn through the bad times with the glory from the good. As usual, the satire from the writers of Silicon Valley is on point:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160310211414/http://www.hooli....

vs.

http://hooli.xyz/assets/LetterFromHooliCEOJackBarker.pdf

But the featured staff are undoubtedly the highest performers and/or most creative in developing new ideas and technologies. Setting ego aside, I think the main goals in one's career should be working on very high value problems and enjoying every day at work. Working with a few people who are more knowledgeable/creative/etc. is a big win.

In my experience, HR facilitates such things. They're attempting to improve employee engagement and satisfaction.

And none of them were AA or Hispanic. I think Google's top lawyer is AA, but who is the highest ranked minority technical leader in the company? Adewale Oshineye perhaps?

Um, Sundar Pichai is Indian and Fei-Fei Li is East Asian (plus the list is 50% women).

Or is "minority" only black and Hispanic now? These goalposts seem to shift so often I can never tell.

The CEO?

Regardless of how anyone feels about minority representation, it never ceases to boggle my mind that many people think about the whole issue in terms of individual examples rather than overall proportionality.

The single example of the CEO doesn't tell us anything about the demographic makeup of their engineering force, unless you think the example of the former is a good basis for inferences to the latter.

(But this is admittedly a total derail from the point of this thread.)

Wouldn't the optimal solution be to hire the most qualified regardless of background?

Again, I wasn't taking a position (eg "regardless of how anyone feels...") on what to do, in order to keep this from being too much of a derail. I was making a point about the strange way people attempt to quantify minority representation with one-off examples.

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