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Comment by tired_and_awake | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a little bizarre? Didn't Google just layoff the entire EDR team? And then brain publishes an article on their work and credits the team that was shut down?

Am I missing something or is this incredibly tone deaf?

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It's probably better to have the paper come out with your name on it so you can point to it in your cv and be able to talk about it publicly. Not that it takes away much of the pain of being laid off, mind you.

Welcome to the jungle, baby.

Companies seem to get a perverse joy out of laying off the team that built a product and keeping the salesteam. So they're out there selling new copies of a tool that's a few CERT advisories away from being DOA.

I don't understand how that rationalization works. Some sort of interpretation of Fake It Til You Make It? But there is a lot of it out there.

From what I understand EDR team was absorbed internally, with most of them going to Brain. So technically they just shutdown EDR without really laying off the small team. I could be wrong though.

Edit: Looks like I was wrong. My interactions were only with a few folks on the research side which may not be representative of the entire EDR team.

> I could be wrong though.

Yep, you are.

A small percentage of the EDR team (and mainly contractors) were absorbed by Google Research - the vast majority of the team was let go.

EDR: "we got hundreds of people working frantically on the design, programming, production, and testing of a general-purpose, environment-sensing and acting, learning robot. Hardware is hard."

R@G: "K we're taking over. We can hire, like, 5 of you"

EDR people: "lol ok good luck with that, bye!"

When I was there the team was roughly 50% contractors (as many as they could have). I wonder how they fared. Right when it happened I spoke to a couple of friends. One mentioned they might be laid off or might move to another team. I suspect there is some mix of layoffs and team changes.

Isn't it a little bizarre just how much time, money, and brainpower Google puts into projects that have no hope of replacing established businesses (who are often doing production versions of the Google research already)? \

This is AI research, not product development. The project’s goal was to apply deep reinforcement learning to a complex and varied real world task. Google has no desire to sell trash sorting robots.

Google is cutting unnecessary spending across the company (including firing long-term, high-productivity employees) to save money. If Google doesn't want to sell trash robots, why fund this (expensive) work? Why not just shut down this division and instead, keep your programmers who work on ads, search, gmail, and other projects that bring money to google?

EDR = Everyday Robots, in case anyone was wondering.

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