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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I posted this link and the feedback is just incredible. It's disappointing to see "Hacker" News so much against hard work. I am sure the Gemini team has pretty much infinite demand for engineers to join, so if someone wants to leave for other teams or companies that should be fine for them.

This feedback indeed substantiate Sergey's point that such bare-minimum people really do destroy the morale for everyone else. I certainly would have felt that had I were at Google on a critical exciting project that the company deeply cared about to the degree that a founder was actively participating in.

If the ship sinks to irrelevance, it will sink for all Googlers. In fact, the top billionaire will be the least affected.

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If I’m given exciting work to do, and management reduces beurocracies and other blockers, I’ll work 60, 70, 80 hour weeks. If my job is as a glorified paper pusher because of bad procrssses/management I won’t.

It’s a leaders job to motivate people to work those hours, and create an environment where it is worthwhile, to just say “work more” sounds like he thinks management doesn’t have a role to play.

In fact almost definition ally, if you’re people aren’t working enough, that’s a management failure. So who is he telling?

Sure, but you start from somewhere. Part of that leadership and creating that environment is signaling and setting expectations. To let the people know what kind of team it is going to be and have them self-select, especially if the starting point is default Google rest-and-vest.

Look if they want us to work 60 hours a week pay us at least 1.5x as much.

But since over 40 hours is overtime, make it more like pay us 2x as much.

I'm sure some people would consider it then.

But until then stop asking for free work in return for nothing

What do you mean by "us"? Did you get that email? I'm sure you can argue that with your manager if you did and you feel your comp is not warranted. I'm confident the Gemini team is well compensated and they'll probably match their comp if they bring a competing offer.

P.S. I am quite confident if any of those people join OpenAI or Meta, they have to easily work at least 2x Google. At least.

Nobody is against hard work, but what's the point of working harder than you need to for a company that has shown that hard work is no defense against being laid off?

Well, don't; if you think that's the case. Last I checked people are still begging to work at Google and especially on AI stuff.

We have one life to live. Most people would rather not spend the bulk of that precious life being wage slaves whose hard work does little more than produce technology that is marginally beneficial to society and that primarily serves to massively enrich a few people off their hard labor.

If you find yourself aligning with billionaires making completely unreasonable demands, unless you are one of those billionaires yourself, I think you are fully drinking the kool aid and should seriously reevaluate your life .

There's a wide range between bare minimum and 60 hours per week work.

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