I wish I had more elaboration on this paragraph. It seems like a real change happened of which Ian took notice.
"Please add Gemini to the go compiler errors, or take a hike."
I've seen things with more impressive results, but then interlaced with garbage results. Far less reliable is the outcome.
Whether it's the now horrible pixel camera app, search results, or really anything else, it's all garbage
Meanwhile, yay!, let's use a billion times the compute.
But hey we got a few pretty pictures and funny videos along the way!
I don't think it's wrong per se to suggest that Google should not be in the business of "Go" e.g. but presumably there are many other areas where similar technical expertise can be used in this size of company.
That said I've seen good people get stuck in large companies. They are put in a certain bucket and find it very hard to change. Sometimes leaving is the correct answer.
As someone who switched to Go in its early days (from C++) and had some interaction with the community (bugs, conventions etc.) it's a little sad but I think also just the way things go.
Ian recently had a really pleasant error handling proposal that nonetheless wasn’t going to change the core philosophy of error handling, or memory arenas are another area where the current tradeoffs are fine and not worth reengineering, etc.
IMHO Go is in excellent shape as far as hitting needs when it’s a good technical fit - it’s supposed to be a really stable language - and paradoxically this also may mean not everyone who’s been involved would have the same job description in the future.
That’s fine. A lot of really excellent Go team members have come and gone over the years. Russ and Ian may be some of the late leavers in a sense, so I really, really appreciate their dedication and followthrough. The culture they stewarded has payed off for the community and the kinds of upcoming things that look promising are less about the core language, more about improving and maintaining the standard library.
And that's likely the problem. (Note: my speculation. I haven't read his internal goodbye and wouldn't make it public if I had). An L6 with a good L8 for air cover can kinda hide behind the SI rating, and because they never have direct contact with VPs, they can continue doing the necessary-but-not-glamorous part of keeping Google going. An L8/L9 has that direct contact with VPs, so there's nowhere to hide.
Anti-trust trouble.
Poor leadership selling out the company for short term gains.
Palpable shift from a technology company that was unrivaled for a long time to yet another Microsoft/IBM clone.
No longer a leader in the industry and simply following trends and riding the waves (the AI trend…)
Bending the knee to governments with questionable history and supporting projects with implication of death of citizens.
"Do no evil", my ass.
Bro was fed up with the constant smoke that was blown up his ass. And lies pushed down his throat. Probably timed this exit with vesting/options maturity.
While they missed out on the first major commercialization of LLMs, they invented transformers and now have the leading LLM for coding and second best or potentially best training hardware in the world, designed in house, which they started working on before the current boom and kept improving.
What is there to elaborate is what the author really thinks. "Well documented in public" is such nonsense. First of all, what you mean by that is purely subjective. Second, you still don't know what the author really thinks.