Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
Easy peasy!
A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
All those engineers making 20M a year at Anthropic and OpenAI are going to back down to normal super high comp of 700k a year after their starter grants run out, and yes many will quit but the people who stay aren't moving the needle on their finances that much.
Maybe Noam measures status differently.