Google executives see cracks in their company’s success
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
> at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
It sounds like a power struggle gone the other way from reading this. And it certainly doesn't seem like either of the sides are more noble than the other.
But props for you for doing what you loved best, if only one day any of these can be decoupled from politics.
Never underestimate the power of imposter syndrome!
Deep learning, on the other hand, is so fraught with pitfalls and traps. Even if you can code up a model successfully, it's very easy to trick yourself that you're doing very well (see a previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27376839). In my opinion, most of the work should be spent on making sure that you're not tricking yourself.
MD?
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.
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".
What? I could understand 6 months, but how the hell do you add a year to that?
Also, managers/directors/etc often have to overcome the issue of reversing momentum on past praise or ratings given to these individuals.
In the Google perf (performance review) process, many individuals that probably should have gotten PIPs and/or counseled out also got high performance ratings in past reviews (for other reasons) from the very same managers and directors.
Generally to initiate a PIP, there needs to be a rating to justify the action (i.e. "Needs Improvement" - lowest rating). Giving a rating two levels or more above or below the last rating also requires justification in the rating process.
Google also cancelled/deferred its mid-year perf cycle during 2020 due to WFH/COVID challenges, which delayed opportunities for managers to give such ratings or feedback through the formal process. (for context: Google traditionally does "perf" twice per year, which are the formal opportunities for employees to receive performance ratings as well as nominations for promotion); this may or may not be correlated with interesting product launches or changes you might see as an end user during the year).
I really don't care. I've never wanted to work there anyway.
Even to my socialist EU mind this sounds untrue and pretty crazy.
i'm talking about employees who are in good standing, like Timnit was at the time. She had just been previously promoted. A person like this, even if they are annoying many coworkers through emails or papers, can't just be terminated because the manager doesn't like them (huge liability risk). Instead, Google (or IBM, or whomever) wants a paper record showing that somebody is unable to do their job, is put on a performance improvement program, cannot improve performance. At that point, Google can terminate the employee and if there is a lawsuit or mediation, Google has the paperwork required.
Instead, the problems of the to-be-fired employee needs to be abundantly clear to everyone nearby, so that when that person is fired, it doesn't have deep social impacts.
Combine that with desiring to fire someone when a replacement is trained up (often many months), and at the end of a big project (sometimes a year), and not just as management is reshuffling... And suddenly a firing takes 1.5 years.
There are other things you can do to make it clear they need to move on but it's usually way easier and more efficient to just directly negotiate a severance and have them resign.
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 don't know if a lawyer didn't look at the firing, but Megan has a tight relationship with HR, and if she told HR to resignate the employee because they were damaging to the company, it would be done immediately as a special-case override. I'm 100% certain Megan has had to terminate employees for cause in the past (think: ads engineer who threatens to steal money from google) so I think she has an expedited path.
Timnit’s goal is likely closer to that of effecting reform. A lawsuit isn’t necessarily the best tool for that unless it’s so big it establishes new precedent. Even the Andy Rubin / breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit was largely ineffective.. While Timnit has a strong case here, it’s not really as strong as the evidence of the General Counsel of Google openly engaging in and protecting the sexual misconduct of himself and others.
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
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.
Btw plenty of us ex Googlers think Jeff Dean's reputation was enhanced still further by that move. Gebru was acting in crazy ways, she really should have been fired much earlier, but taking the opportunity when she so helpfully presented it seems like a no brainer. Sad that the rest of Google lacks that approach.
I agree, she should have been fired earlier. However, she was just promoted, which meant she must have had several quarters of excellent perf.
I think one thing that would be truly excellent, but won't happen, would be to have Megan Kacholia defend herself by explaining her actions to the wider Google community. In particular:
Why was Megan, a person with effectively no research experience, a VP in Google Research and making decisions about research papers being withdrawn? Her lack of experience in the area seems to have led to an exacerbation of tensions.
Why did Megan convert an offer to have a discussion about a resignation into an interpretation that Timnit resigned voluntarily, coupled with an accelerated departure (immediate, with termination of all Google services)?
Why was Megan pushing so hard to have the paper withdrawn, given that the paper wouldn't be that impactful on Google's reputation, made some useful (if obvious and a bit overstated) points, and wasn't being published in a prominent venue?
To Jeff and Megan: to what extent did Jeff support Megan's decision to fire Timnit over a refusal to withdraw a paper, or did his support come after learning Megan had fired Timnit? To what extent did Timnit's previous tweets calling out her employees and mentioning confidential Google Research activities play a role in her firing? Was her discouraging email really a reasonable justification for accelerating her termination?
My guess about all of this is that Megan and Jeff decided to fire timnit when timnit posted several negative tweets attacking Jeff and google Research, and used the paper and the email (and vague offer to resign) to justify the firing and they didn't think through the implications of firing a twitterati like Timnit in a roughshod manner. This seems most consistent with all the evidence I've seen.
The moment an employee says "Do this or I quit", and the company refuses to "do this", then the company is correct in assuming that the "I quit" part will apply.
Gebru said "do this or I resign". The company accepted her resignation. She then attempted to "unresign" by claiming her statement she would resign wasn't an actual resignation. Clearly you support this kind of meritless word games from her.
As for Megan, why is a non engineer running YouTube? Why did someone at lightweight as Gebru end up being paid as a researcher at all given that her research had no real validity? Why was she allowed to behave in such toxic ways for so long? Google is neck deep in identity politics, that's why.
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.
I find that there are two problems that contribute to this belief system.
1. People believe that doing the same work for more time should get them promoted. "Doing maintenance" can mean a variety of things and simply clearing minor issues until the end of time is not necessarily actually changing the landscape of technical debt. Something about the state of the world needs to change or the work is just large scale bikeshedding.
2. People are often truly terrible at measuring the results of their work. This introduces a bias towards launches and new products because their impact is often very easy to measure (there have been processes put in place to resist this force with various degrees of success). But I have seen cases where somebody's work on debt and maintenance is measured by "total number of changes" with zero evidence that the changes are actually useful or valuable. Even just getting some leaders to write down "trust me, this is important" would go a long way and people still fail to do this. Then people complain that their work isn't being valued when that was never the problem.
I do think this is one space where my org has an advantage. Because we do this sort of work so frequently, managers are good at helping their reports measure the actual quality changes in the codebase and build an argument that the work was meaningful.
I also agree that UncleMeat is definitely not one of Zappa's best but I didn't think too carefully about the nic when I created it.
It blows my mind that there are some major issues with Gmail that haven't been fixed - for instance, if I find a message in my Spam folder that isn't spam and mark it as such from inside the message, it instantly disappears from my spam box and the view returns to the spam folder view instead of staying on the message. The message is now marked as Read so I can't find it by going to my inbox and viewing unread messages, and I can't use the browser's back button to navigate back to it because when it's out of spam it gets a different URL. So I have to remember exactly what I was looking at if I want to go back and find it. It's a hugely inconvenient UX made even worse by the fact that Gmail flat-out IGNORES my whitelisting certain email addresses from people I work with, so I'm always digging around my Spam folder looking for stuff they say they sent me that didn't land in my inbox.
Uncle Meat may not be Zappa's best albums, but it's definitely one of his best and most catchy album names.
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.
Google Cloud was also one of the first providers to offer confidential computing. Google also contributes a lot to open source and so Android has a lot of options and different ROMs to use. Compare that to the proprietary OSs like Microsoft and Apple. With Microsoft, no matter what I do they keep uploading my activity history of every App that I open just because I signed into the Microsoft Store to play Minecraft.
LOL!
So with this setting off, Google forgets the IP you use to sign in to your Google Drive and GMail account and doesn't use it to identify and track you across the estimated 80% of web sites that have embedded Google trackers? And you've verified this how? Did they show you their tracking source code?
Makes perfect sense to me since Google earns most of their revenue from privacy invasion. Their entire business model depends on it. No one is more insidious, pervasive and widespread.
Largest Study of Online Tracking Proves Google Really Is Watching Us All
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/18/160139/largest-s...
Yes, that undoubtedly explains how they earn $200 billion a year.
It may be the case that they are not "spying" on you, but just because there is no proof of something happening, doesn't mean that it isn't happening. So this type of thinking is flawed.
> I can turn off all the history settings
Can you elaborate? Which settings specifically are you talking about? Are you seriously suggesting that google isn't keeping track of what you are watching or searching and tailoring your ads based on your activity?
> Google Drive offers some of the best storage
It's very convenient to use, yes!
> and you can encrypt your files
There goes your convenience. If you are encrypting your files, you might as well use any other major file storage service.
The little gnomes are watching me through the cracks in my ceiling. My psychologist told me my thinking is flawed, but I told them @ksd482 thinks their thinking is flawed cause they don't have proof otherwise.
> Are you seriously suggesting that google isn't keeping track of what you are watching or searching and tailoring your ads based on your activity?
I can't say for sure, but again that is what youtube-dl, Minitube, etc are for and VPNs. If you're liking, commenting, etc on videos of course they are probably going to be tailoring content based on what you're engaged in. They do have the option to remove all that though and to delete your feedback history.
> There goes your convenience. If you are encrypting your files, you might as well use any other major file storage service.
Google Drive really is the most convenient even with encryption, especially for something like rclone if you look at what is supported.
Clever rhetoric aside, what are you suggesting?
Google has been using user's behavior to learn about them. This has been known for a long time. Even your emails aren't safe from it. So it stands to reason to "speculate" they might be doing something similar with your files as well. This may turn out not to be the case at all, but one can speculate given their track record.
Your original argument was "...and there is no proof that they are using your storage to spy on you", which effectively giving them a benefit of doubt.
But they don't have a good track record. So you still want to give them a benefit of doubt?
Apple is a company who I would give a benefit of the doubt in this space.
So my thinking is simply: a company that has a good track record with privacy --> give them a benefit of doubt. A company that doesn't --> don't give them a benefit of doubt.
When I look at your argument and fit it into the above model (probably overly simplistic), it is flawed thinking. That is what I meant.
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.