Google's top quantum scientist explains why he resigned

That's not limited to academia. In the industry (and even outside of tech) people who will have a sufficient understanding of how something works will at some point in time no longer purely want to follow orders, but want to drive things and innovate on their own.

In this situations both sides - the current leaders and someone who wants more responsibility - need make some compromises in order to try to accomodate this interests.

...to the degree that you can do that without getting fired.

It's always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Trying to convince a bureaucracy of anything is futile.

A great deal of the recent progress has been on honing, parallelizing, and automating the same processes one used to do by hand/at small scale in 2013. You'll probably instantly recognize most of the things going on in the lab, and could become productive on a short schedule.

However, I'd be wary of the medium-term prospects of the field: The discord between the perceived and actual capabilities of the hardware remains as big as ever. You could consider re-entering the field if you're happy contributing to incremental technological advances relevant to other researchers. Progress with meaningful societal or economic impact is probably much further off.

If you have ever spent time in a FAANG research org - it can be incredibly frustrating to see so much lack of focus. Everybody does what they want. This is not an issue for most e.g. ML research (my org) because there is so much money to go around, and researchers will leave if they are too constrained.

For hardware/critical projects or customer retention, this is very much an issue. Just look at how the TF ecosystem developed API wise.

There can literally be a project with enormous importance for an ecosystem where multiple teams under one VP do the same thing slightly differently. VPs do nothing and have no opinion on the details. Internal and external users get frustrated because there is no clarity.

If you do a project where you have resources for just one shot in a given timespan, this simply won't cut it.

>The pattern seems familiar, take a succesful, self-propelled creative inventor, typically an engineer kind of person, put that person in a group where they need to submit to ideas of others, and things eventually go wrong

Not saying any view particular is right or wrong since these things usually are tricky

No one likes a 'silo' either.

That said, if someone has a proven track record in an area of expertise, it probably makes more sense to organise around them and move overlapping resource on to some another area of responsibility, if only for productivity's sake.

It would only be a bad idea, if no one was allowed to review or challenge the work produced by the aforementioned expert...

Who knows.

We only have one side of the argument here. I'm sure he'll find a better environment for himself very soon.

The first few tech rounds tend to be the same.

Then there is a set of research interviews and usually a research job talk.

The main observation is that hiring researchers, after passing basic tech rounds, is much more about taste and how people subjectively rate someone's research. It's insanely competitive, but in a sense it is also easier than pure SWE because there are not as many whiteboard hurdles to pass. You just can't really leetcode your way into the role, without a good track record with really interesting research most teams will not be interested.

Other large countries' governments are definitely funding their own research groups in this space and while previously in the 80s and 90s trade sanctions were a potent threat, it's become very clear from the experiences of India and China in the 2000s that there's nothing much US can do (short of a MAD nuclear war) to hold any moderately powerful country back.

So it's best to not fritter away the lead and throw what resources it can when there's still time to keep the lead.

What's the purpose of scientific funding: to progress science or to make money?

If the goal is altruistic progression of science, then undoubtedly that's best accomplished through free, nearly-unrestricted publication. That includes both work on nonpatentable fields (fundamental science, or advances too remote from commercialization for a patent timeframe to be viable) and not aggressively pursuing the full suite of IP protections for work that may be patentable.

If the goal is to make money, why should there be public funding in the first place? We don't ordinarily expect the government to run business ventures, and treating science funding like a Bell Labs writ large would be just such a business venture.

On the balance, the situation described in this article appears to be close to an optimal outcome: foundational science happened at a university, but a corporation came in with deep pockets and significantly more funding to work on the commercialization process.

I definitely think we should push for fairer and more transparent public investment in science, but saying that all downstream benefits from publicly funded efforts cannot be privatized just seems to tilt incentives in the wrong direction.

Yeah that was kind of annoying. Amazing how even a certifiable genius can fall so completely for such meaningless self-help bullshit