Why I left Google. What happened to my book. What I work on at Facebook. | Hacker News Reader

Why I left Google. What happened to my book. What I work on at Facebook.

thinkoutsidein.com

321 pointscsmajorfive80 comments

Go Paul! Having experienced the 'its not a great idea until someone with an Employee # < threshold has endorsed and/or invented it' first hand, I totally understand how weird that all feels. Glad you did the right thing and got to a better place.

I wonder if there's any way to avoid this if you happen to be an employee # < threshold.

It's an interesting problem - you can't just endorse the idea because the whole point is to create a culture where good ideas can thrive regardless of whether they're endorsed by a Big Important Person. Ultimately, it's like the scene in Life of Brian where Brian's telling everyone to think for themselves, and they just parrot his words back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqq3e03EBQ

I get the impression that the employees with # < threshold would actually prefer this, but when it comes to what people actually allocate their time to, the vast majority of employees are far more willing to devote it to what top brass thinks is important than what brilliant peer thinks is important. It's a shame, too - the biggest benefit of working at Google is that your peers are incredibly smart, and most people recognize that and verbally say that those ideas should get more air time, and yet when it comes to allocating actual engineering time, people generally work on what they're supposed to.

There's probably a selection bias at work as well - people who don't like taking orders from the top generally don't work as an employee of large companies, which means that the majority of employees do like taking orders from the top.

"I wonder if there's any way to avoid this if you happen to be an employee # < threshold."

That is, and continues to be, an excellent question. At Google some of the low employee number folks were actively trying to break this bias. (for them its a question of being able to scale their time, if nothing gets done until they engage in it, they become a limit to scaling. And while there will always be people who bask in the 'I'm so important the company stops when I do' limelight, I felt that in general those folks were in the minority.) It was the overall bias in the otherwise weak senior management (remember Google is very engineering driven) against ideas from people who weren't already 'well known.'

Prior to Google I was with a company called Network Appliance and they had an excellent program where every 6 months or so the senior engineers got together and talked about various ideas (some evolutionary, some revolutionary, and some very off beat ones).

It was later that I recognized that for a certain size and larger, you needed some sort of event like that so that folks could talk face to face, without the 'distractions' of the day to day fire drills, which created the constituencies which could champion ideas from any source. It also gave the folks who had to allocate resources (the managers) some notion that the idea had been surfaced in a place where, had it been untenable for some reason, those reasons would have come out and been discussed and weighed.

I knew it worked at NetApp when I participated, and I missed it when I was at Google, but more importantly I came to understand how important it was to have a company have a healthy way of having technical conversations internally when you were bigger than a single office in terms of your engineering staff. Without it, the ability for a manager to filter 'good' ideas from 'bad' ideas is limited to their own experience and I can completely understand how they might unconsciously (or consciously) use tenure of an employee as a crutch. At Sun we called it 'checkin approval by uid' (which was to say that some folks just wrote good code and so the gate keeper for a release would be much more likely to take their change than the same change from an unknown contributor.)

I don't work at Google, but it's hard not to read that statement as isomorphic to: "My ideas weren't accepted because the senior people are smarter than I am."

In every job I've seen, the reason for embrace/rejection of ideas from the junior employees is never a pure technical decision. If anything, senior people grab and push ideas because they lack their own.

At least Google's model works as long as the senior people are smart have good taste.

Given what Adams says about the book's contents (no proprietary information) and the prior written permission, it's hard to see how Google could block its publication.

Google could request their name not be used to imply any endorsement, and perhaps raise a stink about the similarity in title to their now prominent feature.

But prevent the publishing of its contents? On what basis? (Threats of disfavoring the publishing house in the future?)

Even if the book did have trade secrets, our legal system isn't big on placing prior restraint on authors/publishers.

Isn't it actually the case that this book was written as part of his work at Google and therefore they OWN the copyright of the book? At least that is what I make out of this.

Indeed, I'd overlooked Adams' phrasing "I wrote the book in collaboration with Google". That implies some sort of formal co-authorship or sponsorship/branding was previously agreed upon, though probably not that the whole thing is a Google-owned work product.

That definitely makes for a more messy analysis, especially if parts were written on company time and had contributions/review from Google coworkers.

Some commenters on google+ are saying he might have signed a NDA. Isn't that the case?

Everyone who works at Google signs the "Employee Agreement" which includes, among other things, a blanket NDA. The other parts that it includes are you transfer to Google all rights and ownership in anything you work on while you are employed at Google (during work time or not, on Google supplied equipment or not). And while there is a specific California exemption (since California has wording in its labor law that forbids this sort of blanket grab) there is wording around that exemption even in the agreement which, according to some opinions, attempts to have you give up that protection as well.

I had a dispute with them about it, I talked to a lawyer and his advice was pretty simple. He suggested that yes, you could probably litigate it and get your rights back in California, but if you were litigating against the company you were working for, you rarely continued to work for them, so in my case (since I had not yet started on my project) his advice was to quit and then work on it which would make things much clearer for everyone.

In Paul's case if he had written permission to publish and then they verbally revoked that permission (which was what he said as I recall), he could probably litigate it successfully. But cost of lawyer vs the expected royalties on an technical book? I think publishing a new book is a better choice.

I'm sure secretive Google has one of the strongest NDAs in the industry, but also: they typically can't cover anything that's publicly known, and Adams describes the contents of the book as a summary of already-published research. So some specific agreement about the book collaboration, rather than the employment NDA, is more likely the source of Google's leverage.

I can't show it to you because the agreement itself is covered by the NDA, but I can assure you that you are under estimating its reach :-)

Paul Adams' last year presentation on Slideshare had a huge impact on my work designing social products. He really put it out there the frustations caused by Facebook. I am really glad he joined Facebook to work on those problems. I can't wait for his new book to come out.

Judging from the post, it doesn't seem like he's working on any of the problems he was talking about. He specifically mentions he isn't working on lists or groups, but rather working on advertising.

>Many of you have asked me why my book ‘Social Circles‘ was delayed

>The good news is that I’m channeling this frustrating experience towards a better place, and am writing a new book. It’s called Grouped

Anyone think that's a coincidence?

I think I'll assume the reverse, and work from there.

Which means they decided to change the book's name to "Grouped" before joining Facebook. Hmmm... either serendipitous in the extreme, or the most epic book-marketing stunt I've heard of; start writing book about X, get X implemented, change name to company Y's offering, join Y, get X implemented at Y.

The scandal of it all will drive book sales through the roof, allowing them to leave Y and live on royalties, richer than they could've been from programming.

I like this plan.

Hey so we know that facebook has hired PR people to try to make google look bad .. what's up with these recent anti-google posts from ex-googlers? Can anyone verify that these posts weren't paid for?

interesting timing of this "blog post"...Facebook's PR machine has been known to go to great extents in the past. Hopefully the author was not influenced by that.

I wrote this independently. Just my own thoughts - I think it's pretty balanced. Wanted to get some facts out there as people were speculating.

that's good to know. were you able to get clarification around who "owns" the work produced while being employed by a company? based on my understanding in CA the company owns pretty much everything unless you can prove without doubt that it was done outside of work/work resources.

Hi there!

It is funny: Everybody assumed you are responsible for the newest-cool-thing-feature in social networking and are now bringing the light to Facebook. But instead you are working in a rather different area.

It was an interesting read, and thanks for coming here to talk about it! There were a few questions that came to mind...

- In what ways does Facebook prioritize social science over technology? By all accounts it's just as engineer-driven as Google.

- Also, you seem to have pivoted away from research upon your arrival. Does Google not allow researchers to transition into product development? Would that have been a desirable path for you?

- Finally, did you leave Google before or after you knew about the Google+ launch, and is there any part of you that wishes that you retained some input into the product? It is quite evident that it was built centrally around the results of your research, and I wonder what it must feel like to be working for a competitor when the product of your vision finally goes live and reaches 10 million users.

It is a lot more likely that the discussions generated by Prasanna's blogpost (http://rethrick.com/#google-plus) probably prompted this "clear the air" kind of update.

You can't work there and not be influenced (at least somewhat) by stuff like that.

nothing says "open" like blocking publication of a book

Yeah, and I bet they lock their houses when they leave for work and that's like not open at all! </sarcasm>

But he also switched from what is generally considered a more open company to one that doesn't even let me export my contacts.

>> Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level.

So the answer? http://www.facebook.com/designjobs/

Quite disappointed that Google has blocked release of Paul's book, even post G+ release.

I guess "don't be evil" does not apply to this case in the house of Google. Sad.

"I wrote the book in collaboration with Google"

Chances are that he's not the sole author/owner of the copyright of the book. It's possible that other features of G+ that haven't been released yet are in the book, and that Google is waiting for a full launch..? That's my best guess.

The earlier book was called "Social Circles" and the new one is called "Grouped"? :)

Sigh. I feel like a lot of people in this generation are using their talents thinking up new ways to get users to click ads. Myself included.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

That's a fair point. But it's still probably preferable to them using their talents to design increasingly convoluted financial instruments for ripping off suckers ... which is the other thing the most talented members of this generation seem to be doing.

I certainly agree with you there, the latter alternative is much worse.

Um, what's the difference? Targeted online advertising involves enough research talent and money to make it not totally unlike an "increasingly convoluted financial instrument".

I don't think governments are going to be bailing out advertisers just yet.

Targeted advertising is probably less nefarious, but neither pursuit is going to cure cancer anytime soon.

Depends on who is generating the money and the type of things they do with it. Google seems to use its money benevolently, investing in projects and systems to improve the world.

Research: you learn about human nature, cultural values, usability, and other human expectations. In a time where technology is changing and more widely adopted, information on people's attitude towards what is offered in, through, and by different technologies is invaluable. The fact that there is financial incentive to do this research just makes it all the more potent.

How soon until wall street comes out with an advertising backed derivative. Then, the two worlds can merge.

I would assume making weapons of destruction would be the least preferable field to spend your talent on.

You might appreciate what Jerry Neumann has to say about that:

http://reactionwheel.blogspot.com/2011/04/advertising-fallac...

Short quote: "In that case, if I put an ad in front of someone, and that person decides to click it, then I must be solving a very difficult problem indeed.", but the article is best read entirely.

I hate ads, but then again, flowers are also ads, and they are beautiful. Maybe "human ads" will evolve one day to also be beautiful.

I like this point. But actually that has already happened to an extent offline even if it hasn't much online. Billboards are often sexual or colorful -- even beautiful: they are created by graphic designers. Adverts often have music that we enjoy. Some restaurants try to advertise their food by wofting the smell towards us, etc...

However it could go a lot further. I'm surprised people aren't spraying women's perfume/pheremones on adverts for Lynx for example...

> I'm surprised people aren't spraying women's perfume/pheremones on adverts for Lynx

The liability for this is a lot higher than you think. I have asthma and a coworker's perfume set off an attack yesterday that could have ended me up in the hospital despite having an inhaler.

Symbioses is the issue. The entire f-ing problem. People refuse to give up anything to get a better relationship so they create predatory disguises, try and polish them up and endlessly research ways to hunt customers instead of being one with them. Those who evolve to become one in need and desire with both customers and constituents wiil reap great rewards, monetarily and politically.Someday, someday this society will grow the fuck up.

If they're using their talents to figure how how to show adds exclusively to those people who actually want to see the ads, that's not such a bad thing.

Exactly. I've never understood the hatred for "targeted advertising." I, for one, prefer advertising to be targeted and relevant! Those ads actually help me and make my life better, as well as helping the producer...

Example: The advertising emails Amazon.com sends me... they usually have a pretty good idea of which artists I like, based on my history of CD purchases. So when those artists release a new album, Amazon emails me. Win-win... it saves me the effort of constantly trawling the Intarwebs to track down "new album" info, and it gets them a few sales that they probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Same deal on Facebook... I list a lot of the bands I like in my profile, so I recently got an ad displayed in Facebook, for the new Motorhead album. Great, I didn't know Motorhead had a new album out. But I love Motorhead... now I'll buy that album and (most likely) be very happy about it.

Yeah, sure, I get that some advertising is obnoxious, over-the-top, annoying or whatever. But I think RyanMcGreal is spot-on here. Make it so I only (or at least mostly) see ads I care about, and I'm not going to complain.

How is it any different then say, the mormans or whatever knocking on a million doors? Sure the few who convert are happy to have been targeted, but what about all the other people who have been bothered and made to do something just to be as they were before being targeted? "Targeted" in any way, shape, or form is predatory and disrupts the many for the pleasure of a few. Don't pretend it is a good thing for the group.

What you just described is the opposite of targeted advertising. Advertising, in general, can be disruptive, but targeted advertising is definitely better than random advertising (which fits better with your example).

A shotgun or a rifle, both are pointed at targets. But yes, some would prefer a cleaner kill. What I'm saying is those who Target their customers better help mostly just themselves and there is no need to lie about it. At least for the publics benefit.

So basically you think all advertising is inherently evil? If so, I don't know what else to say here, because we have a very fundamental disagreement on basic principles.

I personally object to advertising that is "invasive" in the sense that it interferes with my ability to do what I'd otherwise be doing, or makes changes to my environment without my permission... so in computer terms, pop-ups, pop-unders, ads that play sound or video by default (and even worse, can't be disable), those I despise.

But as far as banner ads, emails, etc. go, I mostly don't have a problem with the stuff that's A. easy to ignore, and B. relevant.

That's nothing like what we're talking about. "Targeted" advertising by Mormons would be if they came to the houses of only people who subscribed to a mailing list about Mormonism, routinely logged into a Mormon discussion forum, and had recently purchased a copy of The Book of Mormon.

What the Mormons currently do, as best as I can tell, would better be described as "spray and pray." Or "throw something at the wall and see what sticks."

If they actually did target their solicitation based on some insight about who is actually interested in Mormonism, it would be better for everybody, or almost everybody. The people - like me - who are atheist and don't give a rats ass about Mormonism, would not get bothered by them... the people who were predisposed to join up, would. How is this a bad thing, exactly?

"Targeted" in any way, shape, or form is predatory and disrupts the many for the pleasure of a few.

I don't think "targeted" means what you think it does.

Different was the wrong word. How is it any better(for the targeted) is the question. The assumption that " I know you'll like this" is at best a horrible guess and a lie at worst. I question the belief that tracking a few purchases gives one the ability to have insight into anothers desire to buy your shit.

I question the belief that tracking a few purchases gives one the ability to have insight into anothers desire to buy your shit.

Fair enough. My own empirical observation is that some ad targeting initiatives (the aforementioned Facebook example, the Amazon example) DO result in the delivery of relevant ads, which are actually beneficial to both the buyer and the seller. I won't argue that it guarantees that all ads will be relevant. But if I'm going to see a stream of X ads in a given day, I would personally prefer that the percentage of them that are for things I'd legitimately be interested in, be as high as possible.

Much, much better not to see a stream of ads. That's what's being left out of the discussion. The truth. Don't forget about the point of everything, to make a better life for the living, not just the shareholders. That seems to get left out a lot.

And many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in terms of the science and technology behind them. The endorphic rewards one gets from creating social apps is derived mostly from popularity rather than some internal sense of achievement, beauty or genius.

You're factually wrong about social sites running on vanilla technology. I bummed more cache misses out of tight paths, and invented more data structures in one year working on Facebook's search backend than I did in any of my nine years working on VMware's virtual machine monitor.

Being a mediocre guitarist is probably easier than being a mediocre violinist; and writing a Facebook clone that works for a few million users is easier than writing a web search engine that supports comparable traffic. But when you are trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible, everything is hard, even things that seem easy when tried in their simplest form.

Facebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.

I think you over value "science and technology" and under value interface design, ux, social behavior, etc. Well, you're at least biased towards one set of problems over another.

I've gained far more value from twitter, hacker news, facebook, etc than I have from most academic research that's been done on ... pick a topic.

i assume from your comment you are a computer scientist. this does not hold for most of other sciences.

This is true, and I don't know about other fields. My assumption is that they aren't that different. Most researchers are mediocre, and they find some "in" topic and poke at the periphery and get published.

Maybe I misread you, but you seemed to imply that good minds were being wasted working on social sites. I think this undervalues the ability to do things we know how to do, but to do it well and better than the rest. Apple is inventing new shit, but they make things better than everyone else. this adds enormous value to the world. Many hours of my life are saved because they paid attention and got a lot of details right. It's not science, but it's highly valuable.

er, typo, should have read "apple ISN'T inventing"

I suspect all of the mentioned services rely on a lot of academic research on many "science and technology" topics.

Sure, and they rely on many other things. Why act like one is more important than the other?

The audacity to make that comment using a Von Neumann machine.

Those people help make the web possible, and the web is a beautiful, world changing thing. I hope it won't be this way forever, but right now ads are part of the web's infrastructure; they pay the bills.

The political system and economic system encourages this. I think as a result, other fields tend to not pay as well.

Basically, I speculate that an average person wants to do good to others, but hardly at the expense to himself. Just because I believe in the importance of great education, it doesn't mean I would be a public school teacher and take crappy pay and suffer in a system that doesn't recognize excellence, if instead I could be paid much more in a job in Silicon Valley or Wall Street with interesting challenges.

I humbly disagree. For all those figuring out click ads & revenue generation, I think the light at the end of the tunnel is the example of a gentleman named Salman Khan of KhanAcademy.com. We're just buying our way to freedom until this generation's talent can break free enough from material needs (enough to cover living expenses at least) to truly be able to give the best of themselves to the world. Call me overly optimistic or a dreamer, but that's what I'm all about anyways :)

Without ads, Facebook would not be able to pay for the investments in various features like messages, video chat, etc. Plus, the goal is to create more relevant, social ads. Nobody is there yet, but that's the goal. The goal isn't to get people to click on those ads more per se, but to get people to derive more value from them (viewer value + advertiser value), a fraction of which the website can capture.

Disclaimer: I was an intern on FB's ads team last summer. I truly believed my work and those of my colleagues were very important. We wanted to reinvent advertising the "Facebook way".

Software is a relatively new field that doesn't have a lot of regulation associated with it. Advertising is somewhat protected from regulation by the Constitution. So naturally marketing software has a lot of innovation. Government is responsible for choking off innovation in other fields like medicine and money transfer.

That phrasing is a bit loaded. I'm an engineer on Facebook ads (I actually work with Paul, he's sitting right behind me. hi paul) and as much as people want to demonize ads, they do create real value for the businesses that use them and the users that click on them. We never think in terms of "get users to click". If we wanted to do that, we could make the ads bigger, flashier. But we don't because a good user experience is our prime directive, even for ads. And yes, there is a lot of room for improvement. zuck reminds of this regularly.

As I see it I'm building a tool that lets people promote their cause, their business, their band. The fact that they are paying for it is only because there is contention for that space.

I really think that what Facebook and Google has been doing with ads is nothing short of amazing. I find a lot of products and services that are so tailored to what I desire and want. When I am on Facebook, I am eager to find out what kind of ads are targeting my indexed information. It allows me to run into things I never would have actively seen on the internet.

That's where the money is. If you want people to do something, you need to pay for it. Want cures for various forms of cancer? Funding. A complete string theory? Funding. Improved transportation infrastructure, novel energy sources, dissemination of medical care to the impoverished, long-distance space travel, and sustainable food resources? Funding, funding, funding, funding and funding.

The ugly counterpart to this is that funding happens where desire is, and it doesn't need to be legislated if people really want something. If people really wanted cancer treatments / space travel / etc, they'd be paying for it, one way or another. Perhaps your complaint should be "consumers want to pay for their own entertainment, not the advancement of humanity". Don't shoot the highly talented messengers.

Incidentally, $activity for The Cure is such a joke. Have you ever seen anyone donate a substantial amount during such an activity? They throw in like ten dollars. Then they drop forty dollars on sushi to celebrate how fucking enlightened they are.

There's a lot of cool science being done in Valley startups...you just have to dig a little deeper to get through all of the mobile-y social-y noise.

I think people have a distorted view of how important typical work was in previous generations.

Many of the most talented people in some previous generations were thinking up new ways to kill people, so you can consider that at least an improvement.

He was probably ill fit for a company that "values technology, not social science" - I love google for that. And i think changing careers is always rewarding. What's more interesting is his thoughts about how the "web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people". Personally, i would not like to see that happen. The value of the web for me comes exactly because it's the information that matters, not who said it and what others think of it. I also see the ubiquity of identity information to be a blocker for radically free thinking, a factor that has given great value to the content of the web till now. It's good to have social networks for those who want to use the internet as a communication medium, but i personally dislike the way social networks become omnipresent.

"I love google for that"

Actually, I think the point is that Google was ill fit for using and rewarding his value, because it slavishly fetishizes engineering to the exclusion of other expertise. If you've been following this story, then you know that Google did eventually acknowledge the message from his presentation and book, to the point that people internally were upset his presentation was "leaked" and Google blocked and continues to block his book.

A very smart former former boss of mine liked to say, "The greatest engineering marvel ever created is sitting under a tarp in somebody's garage because the engineer didn't bother to find out if anybody wanted it."

I agree. IDEO's Design Thinking, which puts emphasis on desirability (people) helps avoiding problems with great engineering of undesirable stuff.

Still, Google does satisfy desires for a billion people. That ain't bad.

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