Hacker News Reader

Comment by manningthegoose | Hacker News Reader

It's possible that this project was created as a sort of L8+ engineer/manager retention program. There's been some reporting that high level execs have been leaving GAMMA companies for blockchain/crypto projects with high payout potential[1]. I wonder if Google is heading in this direction to toss these people a bone with the hopes they'll stay.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley...

View on HN

Doesn't really make sense. People leave for cryptocurrency projects because they’re promised a huge portion of the tokens or pre-mined coins. The idea is that they just need to make the project work well enough to hype enough people into buying the coins, at which point they can unload them at huge returns and then move on to the next crypto project to repeat the process.

It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects without the same asymmetric upside potential, all to keep them from going to companies that weren’t even competitors in the first place.

This is silly. There are many, many true believers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140393

That's just a comment to yourself without many commenters in it.

/S?

It links to this course syllabus from the top algorithmic game theorist in the world:

https://timroughgarden.github.io/fob21/l/l1.pdf

I doubt roughgarden is excited about blockchains just because he has some tokens

Not exactly.

You mentioned that there are true believers, so i thought you referred to the commenters on the topic, since you linked to the HN topic and not the pdf associated with that topic.

Which is a bit confusing tbh :p

Definitely since you both submitted it, have the top comment on it and I don't know him.

> It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects

It might. This keeps these people out of the job market.

I'm all for a huge premine and short vesting period, but Google is competing with Meta.

Google is Web 2.0 "get off my lawn" Mecca, they ignored this space until Meta.

People go there because they just caught on to the compensation packages and are going to catch on to Web3 compensation packages just as late. They already work on overly complicated stacks for useless cogs on useless products that Google shuts down randomly.

Have you seen what "backend" competency entails these days? Its absurd!

But why keep them if they are going to be doing useless work? In the hopes they get bored and move internally to different project?

It’s not entirely useless. It costs big companies little to make this type of investments to avoid a potential big miss longer term (think of IBM, Nokia, etc.) Big companies are paranoid about missing the next big thing, so it makes sense to invest in a lot of things.

Sometimes having someone do useless work for you is better than having them do useful work for a competitors.

Is GAMMA the new FAANG?

* Google

* Amazon

* Microsoft

* ???

* Apple