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Comment by telltruth | Hacker News Reader

They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.

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He also left DeepMind because of allegations of bullying employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman). Between that, what you just brought up, and the strange PR blitz he went on to promote his book, I kind of predicted Inflection would run into major trouble well before OpenAI and Anthropic

Some of the most damaging people I have met are people that you are absolutely enthralled with when you first get to know them.

True, and some of the most effective people I know haven’t been impressive when you first meet them.

I’m now extremely wary of blusteringly confident, glib talkers. Experienced a high correlation between these traits and sociopathy.

quite sure it's just unlucky ppl that got rewarded for acting like this

That would apply probably to most famous entrepreneurs. Whatever I have read about Jobs, Musk, Gates and others, they all are very willing to abuse people to achieve their goals.

A => B <> B => A though

First impressions is a sales skill

There’s a whole extremely famous book series on this very topic, you might have heard about it. The first volume’s title is ‘Paul is bad’ but it’s more widely known as ‘Dune’.

Dune is about worms.

This is a deep cut. And c’mon, you can’t blame people for thinking Paul’s the good guy. He’s badass. It’s a great story.

It’s when fiction becomes non-fiction that it’s a problem.

Why is Paul bad? I read the books years ago but don't remember him being especially malicious.

Well, as Paul Atreides himself explains in the sequel to Dune, his Fremen Jihad causes the death of over 60 billion people throughout the empire. You can safely guess that the vast majority of them are innocent ordinary people, but just not important enough to pause over on the path to grand prophetic dreams. Basically, from when he takes power again, he becomes a genocidal monster in charge of an army of murderous fanatics, and then he spreads this right across the empire, well beyond Arrakis itself where he already caused all kinds of chaos.

The story is a classic narrative of hoped-for ends being used to justify horrible actual means, but cloaked in space opera.

Hmm I see, thanks. Is this in the first book? I don't quite remember that.

No, it's in the second book actually, (spoiler alert) which covers the time in which Paul's rule has been firmly developed following his enormously bloody jihad across the Empire, and the time after his death, after which his son Leto succeeds hims and lets himself be symbiotically covered in baby sandworms to turn into the eventual god emperor of the Imperium, ruling for 3000 years. (If I remember correctly)

I actually found the portrayal of Paul in the Villeneuve films to be closer to what Frank Herbert described as his intent in interviews when compared to the book.

That is, sincere with terrible consequences for bystanders. Not bad per se, but not conducive to the common good.

I also felt that the books undermined the warnings of tyranny by leaning on prescience to provide an ends justify the means argument. Moreso with God Emperor where the Golden Path seemed to be the ultimate end justifying any act.

Mustafa wasn’t exactly on his best behavior at DeepMind, if the allegations are to be believed. It really is surprising that Microsoft would hire him.

It's crazy there's zero accountability for bad behavior in tech. I went through my own story at Google, and seeing them say it was vaguely bad before promoting him to VP mirrors exactly the "intervention" I saw.

The deck is completely stacked against you based on hierarchy. Behavior that a fast food manager would proactively solve in 30 seconds gets ignored in white collar tech. No one above you will even mention it - they know you can't win and they just hope you'll quietly give up.

If someone above you in the informal hierarchy is messing with you, there's massive confirmation bias if you complain. They'll spin it to whoever you complain to make you the bad guy. HR never helps - their job is to investigate, and then give the results to someone 2-3 steps above you to do something with.

The higher ups control the outcome, and they designed the power structure in the first place, their confirmation bias is accept the spin.

If you want to survive, avoid conflict 100% of the time. Let people blame you, fail reviews undeservedly.

My Google career ended from just doing exactly what I was supposed to do in order to get a 3 year delayed project done, that 4 separate VPs had been asking for all those years. I spent 6 months warning my manager fuckery was afoot. Didn't matter. TPM witnessed and defended me, didn't matter. Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.

Of course, 6 months later they delayed the project a 4th year because they could, documenting the only downside being a strained relationship with a less influential partner team. (my orgs managers didn't realize their...unvarnished...takes were in a doc shared with all of Google)

At the end of the day, HR will funnel you into taking mental health leave -- 6 months worth, exactly long enough that an EEOC complaint can no longer be filed. (took me 6 years to realize why "disgruntled Google employee" news articles always included a bit referencing leave/6 months off as if it was a bad thing. go/mh-leave if you're at Google. You don't actually need to talk to HR, and I don't recommend going to them ever. I didn't for this, but they wouldn't have helped.)

The whole system is broken.

>Guy who led it hired his unqualified childhood buddy to replace me. Didn't matter. All on me. Everyone wanted to do it, and gee whillakers, refulgentis went mad and dropped the ball completely for some reason.

How is that possible at Google, which should have a hiring committee? Managers aren't allowed to just hire rando person.

Did your director or VP not like you or something? I'm curious if there's more to this story.

There always is, things that mattered here:

Why didn't higher ups care? I didn't bother going up higher than skip. My core interlocutor was my skip's peer's report's report, I didn't expect my skip to go to war over slow-drip white collar bullying. Honestly, I was done and planning my exit once year 3.5 of "not this year" hit, going crying to VPs you see once a month / once a quarter felt insane & would have just devolved to he said/she said.

To your point re: seems like a lot. I worked with a couple counselors at same level as my skip over my last year there. (highly recommend G2G if anyone reading is at Google, kept me sane.) #1 said they dealt with less after kissing their VP's wife at an off-site - which is why I got #2, wasn't sure if that one was too skeezy at first.

What would I have done differently? I was honest the whole time, which didn't help because the fact I wasn't happy and it was escalating was clear. ex. with the hiring friend thing, told my manager that I was shocked and didn't expect that kind of thing at a startup.

How do you hire a friend without domain experience as a manager?

There's a core principle that once you've made it through Google interviews, domain doesn't matter, all Google SWEs will excel. Having loose rules with kind intent is awesome, but they're double-edged. That gives you rationale, and combined with moving recruiters into individual orgs., lets you put your thumb on the scale and bring in who you want. Also 2022 through June, Google was desperate to hire, this would have been justified as an awesome referral, and what's a friend, anyway?

> lets you put your thumb on the scale and bring in who you want. Also 2022 through June, Google was desperate to hire, this would have been justified as an awesome referral, and what's a friend, anyway?

Ok, I guess you're saying a manager brought in his friend, who was already hired by google (or passed HC), but they didn't get them hired at Google, right?

>#1 said they dealt with less after kissing their VP's wife at an off-site

Lol please tell me this is an official story I can find somewhere???

Anyway, I've heard Google is extremely slow with firing folks, even ones who are abusive. But I do see people get fired, though usually after many years of a pattern.

Sorry you had to deal with all that.

> Ok, I guess you're saying a manager brought in his friend, who was already hired by google (or passed HC), but they didn't get them hired at Google, right?

Exactly, you're right, they still went through interviews.

And thank you

Never underestimate the power of soft/social skills.

That’s where the real money is. Even the best technologists won’t make it very far if they don’t know how to play politics.

One person’s “politics” is another person’s “demonstrate basic empathy and understand that your point of view is not universal.”

Yes, there are creatures who have no real skills other than navigating political currents. But there are also creatures who can’t understand that technical brilliance is no excuse for utter social cluelessness.

I swear there needs to be an emotional maturity course or something in university

That's the secret of higher education! Forget about the coursework, forget about the social aspect, forget about exposure to ideas. The actual value of universities is that you keep kids busy during the time when they are potentially destructive, and when they pop out they are now magically older and can handle some basic adulthood-on-training-wheels expectations.

And yet a few hundred years ago we had 14-year-olds in the mines of Cornwall supporting whole families.

You seem to think that people are either good self promoters or socially total clueless. There are a lot of very good people who have normal social skills but aren't good at self promotion (or just don't want to do it). These people won't go very far in most organizations. Self promoters without real skills will win over them. Best is to have real skill and also be a good self promoter.

Of course there's a spectrum here. But when I read someone complain "I did great technical work but POLITICS," there are several possible scenarios:

1. The engineer is reasonable and the people they complain about are craven self-promoters with no real skills

2. The engineer is unreasonable and the people they complain about have normal, regular, business-normative expectations of engineer conduct.

3. Both - the engineer is bad and the self-promoting people are bad.

Your scenario lines up with #1, i think.

I see all three happening. I see many engineers who are gruff, entitled, lack the ability to talk about anything other than their own work, cultivate perceptions of technical status, and seem to actively want to make everyone avoid them. I also see social climbers (#2), but they are easy to spot and not that common in my environment (though others are of course different, including at previous companies).

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