After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him
morningbrew.com
morningbrew.com
It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough:
> "He would ask us to do personal things for him," one of these people said. "He said, 'I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.' [...] We had absolutely no work in Russia."
I originally made a joke in a now-deleted comment, but then was slightly horrified to hear people excusing this behavior. So here’s a serious one: if you get locked into a prestigious institution under someone like this, run.
EDIT: I should have known this would turn into a sub thread about whether it’s ok to demand an AI researcher brief an executive on Russian political history.
Here’s another one: gossiping about firing someone across the entire office, before you fire them. This article says he did that. I recommend reading through it. I have to go move into our house now, so I can’t paste everything. Suffice to say, the behavior patterns were not productive.
I think people want to recognize DeepMind’s eventual success. Having worked under some effective YC founders vs some Suleyman types, I’ve learned that sometimes a startup can succeed in spite of flaws. And remember, DeepMind was bought by Google. At that point they were the anointed child. Their success wasn’t guaranteed, but it wasn’t as tenuous as pre-billions Google investment.
Sometimes the reasoning behind the important request is not clear to the subordinate and it might seem pointless. A good boss would generally explain, but failing to do it is still very very far from bullying (plus, some important info is gathered piecemeal on purpose to avoid leaking things early). I am not claiming those are applicable here, just that much more context is needed to understand the situation.
I won’t do it for the Elongated Muskrat himself.
honestly I see that more as evidence of employment mobility and financial security.
a friend of mine works as a fry-cook as a chain restaurant. He is paid a low wage, and has a dwindling savings account. He told me a story about having to re-caulk toilets at the restaurant during low-traffic hours, I replied with "I thought you were a fry-cook?, he replied with "I do whatever keeps the job."
(i'd have serious misgivings about the history essay, too.. I just tend to think that our willingness to question the duty is just evidence that we're confident we could go elsewhere and write code instead. That confidence isn't intrinsic in the workplace across all professions.)
Is this just speculation or do you know more examples where he did this?
Given his background of bringing up his political activism during tech conferences he could have just been using it as background for his talks (which has included AI ethics). In that context I could see a connection to Russian politics.
Still likely personal but not "random tasks to show dominance".
No one claimed there was. They said that not doing it makes him a bad boss. You seem to be in agreement.
It’s possible to get an immense amount done and/or be remarkable effective despite being a bad boss - if the folks working for them put up with it.
And it isn’t illegal to be a bad boss, as long as someone is bad in specific ways and not others.
I'm going by the article at the top of this thread, which is the source for the "Russia" passage we're discussing.
That's how to get fired. If the boss says "do it" and you say "no" and you each hold your ground, eventually it gets to "do it or you're fired." (In a few companies it might be "do it or you're fired" vs "stop asking or I'll transfer" but it's rarely "stop asking or boss is fired.") A good boss won't let it to that, but that power over another—to hire, promote, and terminate—is what fundamentally defines the hierarchy.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt as to who was toxic at those jobs that ended badly, it still sounds like you're significantly more assertive than most workers. I do agree that people should stand up for themselves regardless of their position in the hierarchy. There's no excuse for mistreatment, and especially these days, consider how someone who's mistreating you may mistreat someone who's more vulnerable.
(edit: moved under the right parent post)
Wouldn't the point of such a high level briefing be because they're tying to get work in Russia but don't already have any? It's rather common for employees to not know the details of the strategic plans of the executives until the execution starts.
No?
So why are they being asked to do them?
I yelled at a CEO because he asked me to do something that wasn't related to software engineering role. He stopped asking me and anyone else in eng due to that confrontation. But - guess what - he wanted to fired every single day I worked there after that incident. I only remained because I had a lot of people protecting me.
So - you have to ask - are you willing to lose your job over it? If so - great - see ya! If not - then take your lumps and get it done.
Was your CEO within his legal rights to ask you to do the job? Sure, assuming it was legal and not forbidden by your contract. Would it have been advisable for you to do it anyway, for the sake of your job? Probably. But that doesn't mean that the CEO was doing his job well by asking. And evidently he knew that, because he didn't actually fire you and the people protecting you.
In the case of Google, a public company, it is simultaneously true that individual low-level employees should act strategically and optimize for their own benefit - which might include putting up with misbehaving management to remain employed under them - and that the public has a strong interest in knowing when management, especially senior management, is being bad at their jobs.
We have so many people who have been abusing people in so much worse of ways than "write me a report on Russia" and they have little to no accountability.
The public doesn't care about how a company is managed - they care about the share price going up so they make their money.
Thats like saying you don’t care about the fridge temperature of a restaurant, you care how quickly they get you your chicken Kiev.
> I don’t think there is much alignment…
Considering the fact that deepmind spends a significant amount on AI safety, a misalignment between their leadership and human values seems pretty concerning.
I mean this is what it boils down to. Does your self assessment of your value align with your bosses assessment, and if not, then who's wrong?
I've been guilty of assigning tasks to employees just to keep their hands off of another area of a project.
At that point in time, their best value to me was being busy with something else.
This is ridiculous. Jobs have pretty clear, if arbitrary at times, functions. You wouldn’t ask a chef to brief you on Russian political history, a field of itself that is vastly nuanced just as much as AI itself, nor would you ask a data scientist. It isn’t because job function can’t change it’s because people have careers and an AI researches is not likely to be able to actually brief one on Russian political history without doing a deep dive and learning the field itself.
My response would be to ask about the employer's continuing education program. I could see myself taking a Russian studies program and get that report back in 2-3 years if tuition and time was 100% covered by the employer.
If it really ends up being a useful task and not pointless, your boss should be willing to expend additional resources in addition to your time. You take it seriously, which requires additional resources if it's outside the scope of your job or knowledge.
And they should be happy to provide those resources if the task needs to be done.
In large organisations, yes. If you work for yourself or for a startup, though, you're typically just doing whatever needs to be done.
Because when you're as large as Google, you don't ask your underlings to write book reports on things that are of strategic business importance. You go through the proper channels and get them to hire qualified people to cut through the bullshit.
Of course you do, that's exactly how it works.
Usually the 'underlings' do the research or collect information, and then the people higher up synthesise that information into a strategic decision.
If you want to serve a really high-quality meal and are willing to wait a few days or weeks to get the omelette then you would probably wait for a chef from the omelette department, or hire in an external consulting chef. Note that a single omelette will take a long time to get this way, as you will probably also have to get authorisation to hire/spend money/use another teams resources.
If you needed food now, and if eggs in a pan now are better than omelettes in a few weeks, you would probably just find someone from your team to do it and you would have an omelette within the hour. It won't be as good, but it's better than waiting if you are hungry.
If you weren't cooking an omelette, and were writing a report trying to assess if the omelette team should be rolled into the frittata, you probably wouldn't ask the omelette team to write this report. Sure, they might have the most knowledge of how the team works and their capabilities, but asking the omelette team to write this report might have a pro-omelette bias because there is a conflict-of-interest in terms of job preservation.
2. In the article linked in the comment above, this is given as a single example of a pattern of behavior of asking people to do things unrelated to their jobs. Surely we can understand that even if there were many examples, in this article only one could be mentioned due to space reasons. One might contrive a situation in which any single example, removed from its context, could be arguably a valid request. But if someone who worked with him observed this as a pattern rather than a single incident, doesn't that have to be taken seriously? Esp in combination with the "I crush people" and the assertion that he would humiliate people in front of their colleagues? Between the possibilities of "maybe there was a secret plan to work in Russia" and "maybe he asked for things out of personal interest disregarding people's actual roles" or "maybe he had a dysfunctional need to demonstrate power over others by having them do bullshit 'work'", I think the latter two are seem pretty plausible.
> Suleyman would also sometimes ask employees to carry out tasks unrelated to their jobs or DeepMind's work, two former employees said.
> "He would ask us to do personal things for him," one of these people said. "He said, 'I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.' We knew it was absurd. We knew it was a waste of time. We had absolutely no work in Russia."
Edit: Absolutely baffled by the downvotes. Do we really, truly, factually know all sides of the story? What's the disagreement here?
I agree with you on success often being in spite of, or regardless of negative traits. That said, there are quite a lot of arseholes at the top... or maybe being at the top allows arseholes to indulge.
Jobs, by most accounts, was a real arsehole. Musk, by some reports, at least at time. Gates too, had a reputation for nastiness. Lots of professors are known for bullying and meanness. Film directors, rock stars.... In fact, most people have encountered areshole bosses at some point.
I'm not saying that arseholery isn't a problem. There's just sense of willful ignorance here. No one wants to admit that they tolerate arseholes in positions of power, but most everyone has them. Creating an environment of no tolerance would be novel, probably hard.
To elaborate; To me, being an asshole means being mean spirited or verdictive without a purpose for the heck of it. On the other hand telling someone directly that their work isn't acceptable or that something needs to be fixed may feel harsh but it is absolutely necessary to cultivating a functional high performing organization. One of the biggest problems with large bureaucratic organizations is that no one is ever willing to say anything uncomfortable and thus none of the problems are ever dealt with effectively and they devolve into swamps of mediocrity.
Directness and honesty are often missing, and I agree that this can be insulting and perceived as arseholery. Equally, people who are being arseholes at work also confuse their arseholery for directness and honesty.
This isn't a court of law, there is no "burden of proof." And if there were, you're clearly not willing to carry it yourself.
I am not the court, and I don't expect to know the fine details, but I need to the know the high-level points. I do not find these.
This is not Soviet-era Russia. If your going to be public about a person's guilt, you gotta give high-level evidence.
That's exactly the problem with news publications like this; they are extrajudicial. They throw away the right to due process. And make no mistake: The consequences for the accused are very tangible.
There are also important second order effects from legitimizing this rhetoric. A democracy cannot exist without a rule of law. When we violate those basic legal principles, we risk destabilizing our society at large.
In some jurisdictions, defamation is illegal irrespective of the claims' veracity in order to ensure the right to due process and avoid non-sactioned punishments. I cannot help but feel legalization in other countries, including the US and UK, have not yet caught up with the forces enabled by today's social media climate.
A promotion and a raise? The horror.
> democracy cannot exist without a rule of law. When we violate those basic legal principles, we risk destabilizing our society at large.
It's weird, Hacker News is usually extreme in its defense of absolute freedom of speech and the press, especially the freedom of the press to report negatively on people in positions of power. But when someone writes an article on a Google employee that they don't like, it's "destabilizing our society at large" and violates "basic legal principles."
Where did all the Friends of Voltaire go, I wonder? Where was all of this sympathy and assumption of good faith for Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell? Why does HN only ever go to the mat for sociopaths, bigots and assholes?
>In some jurisdictions, defamation is illegal irrespective of the claims' veracity in order to ensure the right to due process and avoid non-sactioned punishments.
What defamation?
What punishment? He got a promotion. He was punished with money and power and being in line for CEO.
> cannot help but feel legalization in other countries, including the US and UK, have not yet caught up with the forces enabled by today's social media climate.
Are you trying to make this "cancel culture" now? This has nothing to do with "today's social media climate." There was no Twitter mob calling for Mustafa Suleyman's head, there were internal complaints made by employees.
For example, you mention:
> Where did all the Friends of Voltaire go, I wonder? Where was all of this sympathy and assumption of good faith for Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell? Why does HN only ever go to the mat for sociopaths, bigots and assholes?
But lots of people went to the mat for Gebru and Mitchell! And many more were willing to provide an assumption of good faith without necessarily taking their side. You're condemning people who argue against you here, not because of anything they said, but because of your assumptions about what position they might have taken in a different controversy about different people. The article has tricked you into getting angry at phantoms and guesswork.
Can you prove this beyond a reasonable doubt? Should you have to?
This is not an argument in good faith. I'm referring to the consequences of attacking a person's character publicly. We have yet to see what those consequences will be in the case of Mustafa Suleyman.
> It's weird, Hacker News is usually extreme in its defense of absolute freedom of speech and the press, especially the freedom of the press to report negatively on people in positions of power. But when someone writes an article on a Google employee that they don't like, it's "destabilizing our society at large" and violates "basic legal principles."
I cannot say anything about the opinion of HN, and, indeed, I'm the one being downvoted here. My position is that, in order to protect the freedom of the individual, some freedom of speech must be sacrificed. Unlimited freedom of speech risks violating people's right to privacy and due process, which ultimately limits their freedom and promotes conformity. Defamation laws and well-functioning legal systems combat this outcome.
> Where was all of this sympathy and assumption of good faith for Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell? Why does HN only ever go to the mat for sociopaths, bigots and assholes?
I know as little of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell as I do of Mustafa Suleyman. If they were unlawfully terminated, I support their cause. My comment was not tied specifically to the case at hand.
> Are you trying to make this "cancel culture" now? This has nothing to do with "today's social media climate."
The consequences of being publicly shamed have never been greater than they are today. This is largely a result of the rise of the information economy and the current design of social media. My point is that many lawmakers have yet to catch up with this development.
> There was no Twitter mob calling for Mustafa Suleyman's head, there were internal complaints made by employees.
Again, I don't think we have seen all the consequences yet. As long as complaints are internal, I have no problem with them.
> "Employees said Suleyman encouraged them to use private chat groups on Signal and Telegram for work conversations, some of which were set up to automatically delete messages after a set period. Employees were also on occasion asked to delete messages from their phones, a former employee said. They were also told to notify the group once they had done so."
The burden of proof is on the claimant, sure. But if your boss forces you to delete the evidence, the stakes are that much higher.
In fact, I would be upset if I had a sheep for an exec. I want a exec who is kind, and who can lead and is firm. Not screaming, but almost there.
It is possible that what's been acceptable for a long time is no longer okay. At the very least, I'd say tantrum are unprofessional; After all, if the exec is losing their shit over something minor, how can I trust them to keep a level head if things really get challenging? But maybe some people respond better to the stick than to the carrot, or to a reasoned explanation of why the cart needs to go to market.
It’s low EQ.
That said, I’ve definitely seen people say someone was screaming at them when nothing of the sort even remotely happened. So your mileage may vary.
In the UK this is called anti social behavior.
What?! I've worked with executives most of my career. Screaming was definitely not common place. I can only recall 2 examples, and neither lasted long or had any business being in a position of power. And what even is "involuntary screaming"? Has the executive just broken their leg or something? If so OK. But if they're just yelling at an employee about work, it's not "involuntary".
> cannot be called abusive.
It can. I'm calling it abusive to scream at an employee.
> In fact, I would be upset if I had a sheep for an exec. I want a exec who is kind, and who can lead and is firm. Not screaming, but almost there.
I don't want an exec whose almost screaming. I want an exec who is in control. Screaming is the antithesis of that.
But, there is no mention that he frequently screamed. Screaming once or twice, out of stress perhaps, is not "abusive". Definitely, one should make amends / be regretful of that.
I've somehow gone 10 years without screaming at an employee, and it's not something I'd tolerate from any of my managers. Definitely not from an executive. The higher your rise the more responsibility you have to model proper behavior. If you can't handle the stress of being an executive and control yourself you have no business being one.
Barring maybe some safety issue (screaming at an employee to stop before to they drive into a ditch), there is no good reason to scream at an employee. If firing is justified you do it calmly and dispassionately. If it's just behavior that needs corrected, you do it calmly and firmly. Screaming weakens your message and makes you seem erratic and out of control.
You see, screaming happens on a spectrum. It really isn't black and white. I wish there was a quantitative scale, but there isn't. And it actually does depend on a person's natural demeanor, some people literally scream when they're even being nice or happy! Is raising your voice without being negative called "screaming". I don't think so.
Perhaps true "screaming" is that which is coupled with negative words / profanity / putting someone down.
Assuming calmly and firmly hasn't worked.
Most of us are probably fortunate enough to have mature and cooperative coworkers, but that isn't always the case. Honest question.
Good question! I'm going to say no (except for lecturing, which I'd say is different than the others) for a few reasons.
First I'm going to claim if your actually being clear this situation doesn't exist. Being clear means making it clear how serious the issue is and spelling out the consequences if the behavior doesn't change. Imagine Fred has been filing his TPS reports late every week, and in our industry late TPS reports are a serious liability. I've had multiple conversations, starting with "Hey Fred, your TPS reports were late this week. It's actually really important that those are filed on time." To more serious conversations where I've invited him into my office given him a chance to explain what the situation is, and made it clear why it's so important and that this must be done. And his TPS reports were late this week. Fred's on his last chance.
The way to deal with this now is to make it clear, this is it. "Fred, we've had multiple conversations about your TPS reports. When I asked you why they were always late you said you kept getting busy during the week and it was hard to get them done. I made it clear they were higher priority than your other work because not having them puts us at risk for X, and told you to prioritize them, and come to me if you need something taken of your plate to get them done. You haven't done that. This is a serious situation Fred. I'm going to be paying attention to make sure you file on time from here on out. If your reports are late again, you will be fired. Do you understand?". Then listen to Fred's response and drive home the point if necessary that he will lose his job if this doesn't change.
On the other hand I could drag him into my office (or just do it at his cube) and scream something like "Fred what is wrong with you?! I need your TPS reports! How hard is that? If you do it again your fired!" Really imagine someone screaming it for a moment. See how unhinged they look? In the first example it's clear to Fred that he's going to be fired if it happens again precisely because I'm in control and calm (not calm does not mean not being firm). In the second Fred's not sure if that firing threat is real or if I've just lost my temper.
But let's say for a moment Fred's not normal and really does just respond better to screaming than clear communication. You need to fire Fred. You can't have someone on your staff who you have to scream at every time you need to get a point across, and if he's like this with you, he's going to be difficult for others to communicate with too. I assure you, you can find someone just as good as Fred who isn't this difficult to talk to.
But Fred is weird in that he responds best to screaming AND he's a savant at his job? You really don't think you can find someone who can do the job as well? I doubt it, but even accepting that as true... Fred's gotta go. Up till now, we've just focused on the impacts to Fred, but the rest of your employees will be paying attention too. They'll see how Fred's treated and that's what they'll expect from you. If your screaming at Fred, they're going to be constantly afraid that if they make a mistake they'll get the same treatment. This may result for example in them attempting to cover up a mistake instead of working with you to resolve it. This same effect is why it's important to manage people out compassionately. You might think that it's fine to tell Fred to "pack up his shit and get out, he's done", or maybe just let him discover his key-card doesn't work one day, after all, Fred's going right? What's the point in being nice about it? But your other employees will be paying attention and they probably won't see the line of disciplinary discussions or issues that you haven't advertised leading up to this action, so it's important to handle the situation with as much grace as possible for their sake if not for Fred's.
If anyone is still reading this I'll also note I separated out lecturing. Depending on how you choose to define it, lecturing may be appropriate. By that I mean explaining why it is so vital in our industry it's so vital that TPS reports get done on time, so that the employee understands that this isn't an arbitrary requirement. As much as possible you should try to avoid making it a lecture where you talk and their eyes glaze over and keep it an interactive conversation, but one could easily imagine an employee then reporting "I got lectured on the importance of TPS reports", and that interpretation may be unavoidable.
I mean, I'm sure it happens, but it's ultimately a sign that that manager's manager is not doing a good job.
Perhaps the abuse is the thin skin. Perhaps the abuse is the lack of forgiveness. Perhaps the abuse is the failure to recognize we all have flaws.
I don't care if you "like" screaming. There are lots of things I like to do that aren't appropriate in the workplace. If you want to go to a "scream club" and scream your heart out you do you. In the workplace as a corporate executive act like an adult.
> and in some cultures a lot of screaming is common place
By all means enlighten me as to in what cultures it's common place for your boss to scream at you and not considered dysfunctional?
> Perhaps the abuse is the thin skin.
No.
> Perhaps the abuse is the lack of forgiveness. Perhaps the abuse is the failure to recognize we all have flaws.
People have flaws. People can be forgiven for them. "Forgiveness" doesn't mean all consequences go away. If you can't do your job as a executive properly, I can forgive. I can't let you keep abusing employees.
Im willing to bet the same is true for israel, croatia, and serbia
> Perhaps the abuse is the thin skin. Perhaps the abuse is the lack of forgiveness. Perhaps the abuse is the failure to recognize we all have flaws.
Out of all the comments supporting abuse in this thread, this is the most damning one of all.
So let's talk about the effectiveness and efficacy of screaming. What is the point? To compete for attention? Won't that just lead to louder and louder screaming and the drowning out of voices of people who have the decency not to scream?
To intimidate a coworker or a subordinate?
To express anger?
I can't think of one reason screaming could be beneficial to the workplace, but I can think of many that make it intolerable. Intimidated, stressed subordinates. A culture where the loudest person (not the most competent) gets the most attention. And acceptance of a practice that can easily turn abusive and lead to a toxic workplace.
Having worked almost ny entire professional life outside of the States I have never, not once, heard of this happening. And it would absolutely not be tolerated in any professional organisation that I’ve been part of.
Or have I just been lucky not to have come across this type of behaviour?
I really pitied the juniors who learned to model this as what "good" looked like, I suspect it has genuinely harmed their long term life prospects.
In response to complaints it was always, "he's a Southern European, they're passionate," that came as the response.
So not unusual at all.
After about 30 years in the industry, I suggest you reconsider your experience. The only place I've worked that had any kind of executive screaming was IBM, which was completely disfunctional.
Someone who involuntarily screams at a coworker is someone who needs help.
It was abusive, and everyone knew it.
Eh, sorry, no. I mean, maybe if you drop a book on their foot or something, but if it's just screaming at employees as part of their work, then they should probably be looking for a less demanding job.
There is no situation where screaming at employees is okay unless they're actively endangering lives.
If somebody loses their shit and flies off the handle, then calms down and apologizes and doesn't do it again, that's forgivable. That doesn't mean it was acceptable to do it in the first place.
There's also an unwillingness to either consider the concept of "bullying" as real, because it's not easily quantified and/or defined in such a way that you could spot it in a single-page flowchart. Or a learnt defense to immediately show solidarity with any bully so as to avoid being targeted.
There might be hints of what's sometimes referred to as "toxic masculinity" in there, as well. This exec's mistake, resulting in less than overwhelming support here, was not to get accused of sexual harassment.
I think "zero sum" is itself rooted in envy and pride. I.e., when people that lack humility know, or at least sense, suspect, or believe, that they lack some quality that someone else has, they are prone to believing the zero-sum distribution of qualities because it gratifies their egos. They also tend to view these qualities as fungible (at least in a manner that benefits their calculus of self-worth), which they are not. Of course, envy, like all vices, warps one's perception of reality. I wish more people understood that unrepented vice leads to rationalization of the vice which leads to the subsequent corruption of knowledge and wisdom. Breaking free of this pathology is difficult.
> There might be hints of what's sometimes referred to as "toxic masculinity" in there, as well.
Sadly, that term is entirely ambiguous, but I would say that both absence of masculinity in men as well as the "the brute" are two extremes that ought to be avoided. Masculinity is neither about domineering behavior nor subservience. Masculinity finds its fulfillment in the readiness for self-sacrifice. Leaderships is service. The difference between leadership and tyranny is that in the second case, the "leader" exploits those he is suppose to be leading in some capacity for the common good of the group. Abusive behavior is especially egregious when done by those in positions of leadership.
Humans are all deeply flawed and if you were to pick enough sound bites about someone across a long enough period of time you could paint them as monsters. This current climate of holier than thou rhetoric is becoming increasingly poisonous.
You and I have no idea of the context unless we are actually there. It's frankly none of our business. All these journalists and keyboard sycophants live to pull something down and destroy.
You've either got power or don't, there's not much to being high-up if you're decisions don't carry much weight.
If I call out that successful persons immoral behavior, I can potentially be placing my future self in a morally compromised position when I encounter such a situation that may lead me to take immoral actions. No one want's to fantasize themselves being a hypocrite.
If they didn't deserve it, that would imply 1) the system is not fair and 2) we can't ever get what they have even if we become deserving.
Thus, we defend their credibility & merits so that we can go on believing in the meritocracy.
Your path describe the naive people that would rather believe that the world is a meritocracy rather than a free for all with a thin veneer of meritocracy and will defend that facade until they are personally affected.
There is yet another path which is people that figure out the game and embrace it and say that anyone that doesn't play the game gets what's coming to them. I'd say that this guy is probably in this camp.
Some people in tech like to believe that it takes a real asshole to get things done.
There are people in this world who actually care. They want to make a positive impact. Then leeches join their team and want to do the minimum. And when they get called out, it's "bullying." That's bullshit.
Nobody believes this. You are blinded by your politics.
I'm automatically suspicious of people playing word-association games like that.
Sounds like the guy has poor emotional control and is only in his position due to right place, right time. Fortune passes everywhere.
This might be the origin to libel laws. One might think they exist exclusively to protect those accused unfairly, but it might be to also protect society in general from feeling uncertainty about people being attacked.
So, imagine I ask my developer or even my accountant on a one-off, rare occasion: "write me a critique of this new UX design". He replies "How dare you ask me about UX design!". What a strange answer.
Yeah I’ll go ahead and ask my dog walker to write me an analysis of the potential outcomes if Britain had joined against the US during the Trent affair. If they refuse I’ll fire them and write horrible reviews about them because obviously they don’t take their job seriously /s
You’ve got to be kidding or seriously biased here.
Are you really comparing a "dog walker" to somebody who creates IP (nothing against dog walkers).
Yes. Why wouldn’t I? These are examples of people who were hired from completely different fields than what is requested of them in the scenario. Why would an AI researcher be a better Russian political history analyst than a dog walker? Neither is a polsci major.
Seems to imply a lack of business value, so you don’t have to be that astonished. No one reading this has enough information about whether the business value of that actually existed or not, but at that statement should explain to you why people are upset at this.
Secondly, the degree to which a task is close to the domain the employee was hired for also matters. For example, hiring a software engineer to do misc tasks like this clearly shows a lack of proper management. You either do it yourself as a manager or hire the headcount to get these kinds of misc tasks done. E.g. executive assistants/ secretary etc.
Asking someone for their opinion on UX design is very different from asking someone to prepare a brief on Russian history.
This person actually isn't your employer, your employer is the company, so if your manager starts to ask you to do tasks that should normally fall to them, they're asking you to do their job and taking the credit, that's neither good for the employer nor for you.
Calling it a promotion is pure spin.
It's easy to paint bad managers as bad workers (or even bad people) - but sometimes, they're just bad at managing. In such cases, it's better to shift them into roles they're more suited for than to fire them and hire new people for those roles - existing employees already know the company's procedures and products. Plus, it'll likely be cheaper salary-wise - in our industry, new employees have a much better negotiating position than existing ones.
I worked there 11 1/2 years, and by the way was not fired. However, I saw many people fired. There were probably many more placed on a Performance Improvement Plan who subsequently quit rather than get fired.
To clarify: I mean in the rank and file software engineering. If you make legal's job hard or give the company a public black eye, that can be a short path to dismissal.
(It's a big company, so I wouldn't be surprised if, perhaps, it also varies from department to department. I have no idea if the YouTube piece and the ads piece have the same policies).
Not a guarantee, but in my experience changing the formal power dynamic can have very unexpected (both positive and negative) effects
Why are you so intent in employing them?
Every skill of a good manager - having good working relationships and pleasant interpersonal relations, understanding conflicting needs from different teams, building trust, being able to schedule and prioritize work, etc. - is also a skill of a good architect. If you're off in a corner developing things by yourself, you're not an architect, you're an individual-contributor team of one (or if they're not getting implemented at all, you're just wasting the company's money). If you're actually designing architectures that other people will be following or implementing, you need to be able to work with people.
The balance of work is different, of course: for instance, architects will less often (but not never!) need to have difficult one-on-one conversations. I can understand someone preferring one role or the other, of course. I can't really understand how you can be a good architect, not just a mediocre one, if you're a bad manager, not just a mediocre one.
An architect may have the occasional difficult meeting with other stakeholders from time to time, but their regular role is not managing people.
Architects should architect. There are some social skills requirement that come with any collaborative position within a company, but I see no reason why an architect should be expected to have managerial-level social skills, vs. senior-developer-level ones. There's nothing in the actual job of architecting software systems that requires it.
But to be explicit about my original point: managing is a completely different type of job than writing code or architecting systems. It's a whole specialty on its own. Not everyone has the necessary organizational and social skill set. It's learnable to a large degree, but that takes time. Just because someone sucks as a manager doesn't mean they're a bad employee or a bad human in general - it only means they don't have the specialized skills necessary for that particular role.
Out of the frying pan in to the fire.
I’d hazard a guess if you ask at an interview if they have any bullies working there they’re either going to lie and / or you’re not going to get the job.
I used to work on Wall St, and it’s a rite of passage there for senior people to send juniors to fetch cigars or lunchboxes. I’ve seen execs angrily bang on glass walls of their cabins so hard, hundreds on the open-floor outside would notice.
Two quotes from Camille Paglia:
“There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack-the-Ripper.”
You have to tolerate deviance if you want to accommodate world-class talent. Mozart himself would’ve been cancelled by today’s standards for being a boor and a creep.
“If civilization was left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass huts.”
I hope the adults in the business world can step up and stem this tide, or else we are on our way back to grass huts.
I am Muslim, so Richard Dawkins is someone I do not espouse at all. But it was upsetting (even a little funny) to see him being cancelled by the humanist society. And him a chief supporter of humanism! See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SsHhgeAAhM
I'd say you're using misogyny to justify what sounds like very typical toxic masculinity.
> "Mustafa was super paranoid about Google spying on him, so he didn't want to use corporate apps, even though we were doing corporate work," one former employee said.
Interesting but I can't wrap my head around its implications.
(Note these apply specifically to managers communicating with their teams. I'm not including ICs who just prefer to not use company comms)
1) Leadership has developed a reputation for routinely reading people's private communications. Specifically, not just for investigating specific events like harassment claims, but just to surveil people as lazy way of seeing how things are going instead of doing the hard work of actually talking to employees to see what's going on.
or
2) The person is behaving in a way that would be very incriminating, so they force the team to use communication channels that won't leave a record behind. I can think of one manager who was exceptionally kind and caring in company e-mails and Slack messages, but would constantly berate people from his personal Skype account. If you were on his team, you had to be available in both Slack and Skype, and you could usually guess the tone of the communications based on which app pinged you.
I'm glad I don't work in such an abusive environment with my current employment/manager but things change...
> Interesting but I can't wrap my head around its implications.
It's not paranoia when you're on the inside. It's like saying Snowden is paranoid for typing his password with a hood over his fingers.
The article doesn’t research whether he’s reformed or still a bully. Or whether the position is important or not. These are important details.
Maybe the position is BS and doesn’t have much authority. Maybe he’s learned the error of his ways.
Without useful information this article is lame as it seems to link the suspension with the promotion.
An adult man being a bully in a professional environment?
No one should care about him. Fire him and let him try and find a job somewhere else.
Labeling someone a "bully" has become the easy way to bring a person down. There could be personal vendetta. I've read the accusations against him, and they cannot be called "bullying". Need definitive proof.
I don't really understand people attempting to tie prosperity to morality.
This article is so frustrating and the author is a bit lazy, I think.
So just because there’s nobody between me and my skip I got promoted? That’s the most dumb rationale I have ever read.
This guy was already the head of a prominent Alphabet division. If you move him around the executive structure he could have ended up one or two skips below the CEO without that meaning absolute shit .
At that level of organizational hierarchy that’s far from a promotion. He is now the VP of some random AI program that’s way more obtuse and irrelevant than DeepMind.
The only clear public signal of a promotion at executive levels is being a VP and becoming a Chief or a SVP. That’s it. At companies like Google and Facebook changing titles doesn't mean that you got promoted. A promotion is going from one level to the next one. This guys was probably an L10 and is still an L10.
Blows my mind that they arrived to this conclusion based on such a weak signal.
- If I make more money, it is a promotion. If I didn't, it is a demotion.
- If the number of reports increases, it is a promotion. If it decreases, it is a demotion.
- If I have more areas reporting to me, it is a promotion. If I have fewer areas, then it is a demotion.
- If I have greenfield projects under my direction, it is a promotion. If I have maintenance projects, it is a demotion.
This is kind of in jest and just a rough measure. Like if your salary went up 100x this doesn’t capture that. Positive and negative measures tend to be correlated though (I suspect that this looks more like 3 bell curves instead of one). Would be wonderful there was an industry database of this to invalidate or validate guesses.
Extremely bad indicators
- Having no reports
- No longer presenting in company meetings
- No longer being invited to meetings where decisions are made
- Bad seating location
Extremely positive indicators
- In regular staff meetings
- Introduced to VIP guests
- Sit near CEO
Against, this is partly in jest, Dilbert style Just some things I have noticed…
This one's particularly dubious. Maintenance is important. Depending on your industry, it may be the most important thing.
These are the environments I’ve been in where it has been very common for people to scream at each other, both loudly and often:
- banking - venture - consulting
These are the environments where I have not seen this behavior:
- academia - tech - an operating company
I’ll tell you what makes it tolerable and normal versus abusive: if a subordinate is “allowed” to yell back.
Surely this is the norm, and screaming is the outlier?
Screaming was seen as a "negotiating tactic" for quite a lot of the 1970's and 1980's in American "business". I suspect there was more screaming when you worked for one company for life because you had to defend your company position more jealously. Now, you leave and get a raise.
I would also argue that it is more of a tactic outside of tech. Businesses that like to pride themselves on being "high-stress environments" probably have more of it.
In addition, different parts of the world have different ideas as to what conflict in the "superior/subordinate" relationship looks like. Some expect extreme deference; others expect you to squawk.
One of the best places I worked at occasionally one guy would completely throw a tantrum - but then at the end of the day would have a few beers with the guy he was arguing with and make up. People just learned how he was. Ideally tantrums aren't the best way to do it, but some proper communication would be good.
Plenty of people have learned the art of being professional in the workplace without yelling or holding back for the sake of being polite. It’s actually very refreshing to work at companies where management isn’t afraid to tell people they’re coming up short of expectations but can do so with tact but without yelling.
A brief 200-word blurb is gossip, even if she provides links. The fact that she couldn't be bothered to write any more is indicative of how little she cares about whether her criticism is legitimate or not, whether there's important context left out, or whether the statements are supportable by concrete evidence and not just rumor.
We need to take stuff like this more seriously, and not just take the words of some random gossip writer at face value.
"A DeepMind representative said, 'Our records do not show settlements based on his behavior.' "
In fact, that statement would even allow for a settlement based on something else, where "based on his behavior" is in dispute. Maybe there was a settlement about his speech, and they claim that wasn't "based on his behavior."
Looks like a standard issue corporate climber who demands work from his subordinates that he himself cannot deliver.
> Looks like a standard issue corporate climber who demands work from his subordinates that he himself cannot deliver.
The people I've seen like this had machine learning PHDs and lots of publications, while some of the most productive had no such pedigree. I'd be careful judging based on "technical credentials".
You want to judge the founders of the top AI group in the universe?
I am at loss for words.
FYI: Keynes is considered to be the most influential economist of the 20th century, and he had about a year’s worth of training in economics.
Maybe the article is a hit piece with questionable factual credibility. So this isn’t a statement about the person itself but the behavior described by the article.
People in this thread seem to be confusing disagreeability and a relentless focus on achieving a goal vs being drunk with power.
Both of these things may manifest a similar kind of harshness but they are very different. The kind of behavior described in this article is of someone who uses their (probably undeserved) power to protect their own position. These kinds of people should be removed from an organization as they without exception harm the organization more than they contribute to it.
Disciplinary matters are secretive and highly individual. Cases from the outside may look different from the inside. Unless there is a pattern to look the other way I’m inclined to give Google the benefit of doubt.
Suleyman is a sociopath who makes Google money - that's why he was promoted and rewarded for his sociopathy.
I’m sure you invest your personal portfolio in companies that make less money (lower return) when higher return alternatives are available?
Could you expand on this a bit? How, specifically, does DeepMind make Google money?
He dropped out of his degree at Oxford and then founded a telephone helpline for Muslim youths. Then got a job with Ken Livingstone, the politician.
This early history seems strange to me. Who drops out of Oxford unless it’s to start a business? You’d almost think he was an intelligence asset of something.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/full-version-fa...
Not at all like America where only 1/3 graduate.
Typo?
Lots of US 4 year colleges have terrible graduation rates. It’s not just community colleges.
The UK also doesn’t have a culture of “drop out and start your own company.”
And yes, it's not just community colleges. But those are the worst part.
"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012."
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
(There is some amount of skew based on this definition for students who transferred to a different institution and then completed on time, but it's hard to find numbers on students who transferred from one four-year institution to another, as opposed to all transfers who predominantly come from 2-year community colleges.)
Most UK universities are heavily selected. Indeed, Oxbridge moreso and as such you'd expect the dropout to be lower which it is. Hence OPs response.
This whole subthread was in context of the question of how often people drop out from Oxford and for what reasons. My point is that it's 310 people every year or few years (depending on how they count that 24000 number) - it's a number big enough to admit a variety of reasons and characters.
Let me explain again slower: you implied that him being cofounder conferred some level of competence to him. I’m saying that he’s not really a cofounder in the traditional sense of the word, and so maybe that title doesn’t carry as much weight here.
A lot of people don't deal very well with this, especially young students.
He was not the cofounder of Deepmind while he was a student. That happened afterwards.
Not to say this guy is stupid, I just don't see why you'd associate founding a company with intellect?
I think you've been smoking too much weed my friend.
Yes it’s a lot of work. What do you think all the billions spent by intelligence agencies goes towards? The people who work in the three letter agencies are some of the hardest working people on the planet.
The horror...
I want my place of work to be a safe pace and I'm not ashamed to admit it. If I want to confront somebody's tamper tantrum I'd... do exactly what I'm doing right now, really.
I did read what you wrote, I meant to reply to the commenter below. As for your point, clearly the higher ups at Google disagree.
It's really illuminating to see what kind of behaviors people take the effort to defend and support. I wish I could say I was surprised but I've seen people speak out in favor of hurting other people far too often.
Unless he was actually committing a crime and Google somehow shielded him from criminal responsibility, this is a nothingburger. When you are responsible for a significant step in AI progress you get promoted.
I swear to God, the SV woker-than-thou crowd will be trying to cancel Babbage for "sexual harassment" of Ada Lovelace soon.
Social media will take any news and dishonestly spin it to their own agenda.
If he committed a crime, the evidence should be presented. If he did not, then tarring him with terms like "misconduct" and suggesting that Google should take retributive action against him are anathema to a fair society.
For those who disagree, let me pose a question: what, exactly, does bullying constitute if it doesn't also constitute an assault or criminal harassment? and with regard to whatever residual scope of the term remains, why does that justify denying a promotion to someone behind a project as ambitious and successful as DeepMind?
For this statement to be true, you would have to be asserting that all children that do this are also guilty of criminal harassment or assault.
This is such a clearly absurd position that asserting it in the first place demonstrates an absolute lack of understanding of what bullying is. I'd even go so far as to say that it is a defense of wielding power in socially negative way that frays relationships and degrades social environments.
While I find your personal attack on me interesting from a sociological standpoint, would you mind answering the question?
You can call it a personal attack if you wish. That doesn't make it true.
> would you mind answering the question?
I won't because as I pointed out already, your question comes from a flawed premise.
I am asking what the delta between set B (bullying) and set C (criminal activity) is. What false premise is there? If you don't think there's a delta, then you agree with me ab initio. If you do think there's a delta, then how can you say that asking what the delta is relies on a false premise?
Do you believe that bullying between students in K-12 is criminal activity. That's what I'm getting from you asking that question. Either that or you don't believe bullying is even a real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_bullying#Typology_of... and below
All this leads to a (despicable to me) culture of always-smiling emotional liars. If something I did is shit, say "it is shit". Make an unhappy face. Don't smile, praise my performance when cooking coffee and on the side mention that my last project "made some people somewhat happy".
But I'm not sure if that answered your question, I didn't fully understand it.
What evidence do you see of that?
(edit: the previous part of this disparaged those on the spectrum and I am sorry)
What I was trying to get at is that all this hero worship of sociopathic myopic founders and 100x engineers who "get results" that somehow gives them license to be assholes, we've transcended that.
Conversely, can we also not imply that being an asshole is excusable by being "on the spectrum"?
On the other hand, being an asshole and [taking credit for other’s work, stepping on others to climb the corporate ladder, throwing others under the bus, other sociopathic behavior…] seem pretty correlated.
I'd imagine that being an asshole likely also involves ignoring the way things are supposed to be done, and/or a bit of (differently applied) hubris.
Not to mention, this man has innovated nothing. His career is entirely management.
I see a hint of underlying logic in this part, though the theory needs more thought put into it. Two comments:
1. Try to quantify the harm to people that get "shit all over". Some portion suffer personally and professionally, which leads to the organization who is 'next in line' having to carry some of that burden.
2. Try to quantify the value in the "insider" knowledge being shared here according to such a theory. Some might be technical, fair enough. But a lot of it is likely related to how much of a jerk that boss was... Remember, not all information has a net positive value for a given time scale. For example, information about a previous toxic workplace may increase anxiety and hurt trust -- and in many cases, such information is often not net positive.
> It's a good thing for the world to have leaders be this way.
No. Not broadly (since there is no mention of harm) and not even in a narrow sense.
Consider the kinds of leaders who help their employees grow so that:
(a) knowledge is shared far and wide internally
(b) employees grow into new roles, some outside of the company
On the other hand, if our ability to "reach new plateaus" relied solely on promoting people with personality issues, we have much bigger problems.
No, it's probably correlated with a lack of accountability for his behavior. What is his track record of innovation? He has no technical background, dropped out of college and apparently does not know how to manage people.
He worked as a political aide, a consultant, is somehow very close to Demis Hassabis (who is an actual innovator), which I assume got him his position. Looking at his bio his only innovation is how to network yourself up the ladder