that is the media narrative but not at all what happened.
Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of people who will just rest and vest.
So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest & vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top google researchers said yes.
Yeah and they turned down some fat salaries to go work at OpenAI instead. They were some of the biggest names in the game when they turned down those Google offers.
I think Google lost the top researchers when they destroyed the culture. All the competitor companies are mainly led by ex-Google talent, and honestly who in their right mind would take a Google job today over OpenAI, Mistral, or even Meta (where you will be releasing models like Llama for the world to use).
Google killed the culture and is bleeding top talent. They have reduced themselves to digital landlord and sure they can extract rent, but that’s not what attracts people.
Yup. There was SOOOOOOOOO much bullshit work being done there that could ONLY be done because Google can afford so much top-notch talent to work on research, even if it reinvents the wheel. It was a big part of the reason why I left.
That being said, at least they didn't invest their dollars on loads of red tape, though to be fair it isn't like all of Google is incredibly regulated unlike many other multi-billion dollar companies
"A number of reasons:
1. Google had 600 employees and no revenue at the time (this was January 2002, before ads, gmail, etc). You can't really do real research at that stage. My job would have involved a lot of corporate strategy, technology development for products, management, etc. I wanted to refocus on basic research in ML, vision, robotics, and computational neuroscience.
2. The salary was low. Obviously, the stock option package would have ended up stratospheric. But we had teenage sons getting close to college and needed cash. Housing is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in New Jersey.
3. My family didn't want to move to California. You can't uproot teenagers without them hating you for it.
4. I had just left AT&T and joined the NEC Research Institute in Princeton. I thought I could work on ML/vision/robotics/neuroscience there. It turns out the place was quickly disintegrating into an applied research lab and I left for NYU after 18 months.
Had I joined, I think the research culture at Google would have been different. I might have made it a bit more open and a bit more ambitious a bit earlier.
Google created these jobs and deemed them important. Like I agree, if AI ethics researchers are doing their job correctly Google will be unhappy with them, but this is really what Google offered, lots of freedom.
You can be as cynical as you want but the fact Google fired them with little rhyme or reason and destroyed their team is BAD thing, we should be upset at Google for it.
Last comment about it since I spent too much time on this story. As a researcher in the field I feel bad people don't give Google more credit (I have no affiliation with Google). They created a research environment where researchers have freedom to work on their own interests and publish papers (they publish more than any other company). You don't find many environments like that outside of academia. I still remember Microsoft Research closing down their research lab in the west coast and sending a huge number of researchers home. I can tell you I always apply when there is an opening. So far without luck. If you're a Google Researcher don't forget how lucky you are.
In addition to that their corporate culture became too intense and naturally it resulted in some staff becoming deluded. Many people want to work for Google, but not everyone. Maybe not even the majority of engineers.
I don't find that story believable, you don't layoff then open backfill or let alone multiple roles on the team. The handful of Googlers I spoke to are now in smaller teams handling the same workload. If true it must've been some AI related team
The thing about Google's culture is that it was always dishonest from the start. And it was dishonest because they were deeply ashamed of how they made money. So from the very beginning the culture was built around being "Googley". It put the engineer on the pedestal. 20% time. Moonshots. Infantilizing the workplace (are there still ball pits and slides?). "Don't be evil".
All of that was to paper over the fact that fundamentally this was an ad-tech company and it's hard to get people to go work for one if that's what your brand is (Yahoo is a good example). They did 20 years of recruitment on this lie, and it's finally coming home to roost. The idealists that got brainwashed by this are understandably chafing at the changes happening as Google transitions into a typical big company with a McKinsey alum CEO.
Google (at least circa 2014 when I graduated) has slowly taken on the image of a “retirement home” (i.e. where you go to turn your brain off and clock in to get paid) in elite STEM undergrad programs. Oracle had solidified their spot, but at least at Google it used to be easy to find interesting teams if you knew people there to navigate the team matching process. Now it’s decline is in full swing, its sad but seems inevitable for behemoths of human capital.
That's actually more in reference to the situation from '07-10 (before the high-tech antitrust employee lawsuit, perhaps not coincidentally), although I think their reputation for massive perks & great working conditions also seemed to drop off around 2012ish.
For shitty working conditions + excellent pay, I'd think more in terms of algo trading or founding a startup (well, technically founding a startup gives you shitty pay too, but with the potential of a large windfall). Those are the alternatives that many Googlers with similar levels of education, intelligence, and ambition would consider, and Google didn't even try to compete with those compensation levels. In the packet included with my offer letter explaining why I should work for Google, they even said "Most Googlers do not work for Google to maximize financial gain."
It is interesting how much Google's reputation has been damaged by how they did layoffs despite being one of the best paying and highest ranked workplaces in the world. So much multi-year effort ruined in a few months.
People made this up because everyone needed a reason to put down the Google engineers who were suddenly getting better salaries and perks than the rest of the industry at the time. There was never any truth to the whole "employees stay at work all the time". Google has consistently had fantastic work life balance, as do most other similar large companies. It's the mid-tier ones that are sweatshops.
What actually happened is that, many months ago, Google announced it would start marking a larger portion of people per performance cycle as low performers. That’s it.
Only recently a bunch of news outlets are trying to spin it as a layoff and running away with their own narrative. It’s quite literally fake news
What is happening is that a lot of people want to hate Google so there’s a lot of demand for “Google bad” articles like this and all the inaccurate ones about RTO, truth be damned
Your last sentence sums it all up for me. Having come into Google through acquisition (and product then killed off) maybe biased me, but still. That's how I see it.
I worked at Google for 10 years and didn't have more than a few minutes of job satisfaction and jumped from team to team hoping to eventually find a place where I could fit in and maybe get promotion. But I never went for promotion ever. The whole process looked meant to demoralize. I was clearly not a "culture fit" -- as they call it -- but somehow I soldiered on and nobody cared.
Until eventually, after 10 years of L4, it became clear me I had wasted 10 years of potential career progression because the money was (at least) twice as good as what I would have gotten in a smaller local company where I would have more impact and creative input. The rest of the industry was off doing other stuff, and my friends moving into lead and management jobs, while I putzed around moving protobufs (with just the right comments, indentation and stylistic flourishes) around Google's walled garden. Any interesting work was snatched up by others faster than you could get it.
Promotion level at Google is only loosely corelated with programming or engineering talent. It's a measure of political skill and motivation, and your ability or desire to thrive in a large organization.
Don't get me wrong, the money was excellent and my priority was feeding my family. But it wasn't "retire early" money, not without a lot of severe financial discipline and restraint anyways.
Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads. Now Google hoovers up as much talent as they can in hopes that they'll strike it lucky and turn on a second or third revenue faucet. But spoiler alert: they never will. So they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.
I used to work there and this kind of thing is why I left. Google lost their moral compass years ago. The greed I saw from top to bottom was baffling. People earning $200k already, who spent all their time figuring out how to get the next promotion
(and thus inventing stupid unnecessary and uninteresting projects) rather than trying to find actually fulfilling-to-the-employee or useful-to-the-enterprise-or-the-user work.
You already make a ton of money and have a ton of status, why not enjoy it and find work that is actually fulfilling to you and/or useful to the user and/or failing that at least useful to the shareholders if nothing else. But no, they were conditioned to seek achievement blindly and without any moral or other introspection.
I could not stand it. I spent years regretting not holding my nose longer for the sake of being able to buy a house and so forth.... but I've made my peace with it. Since then I've had the opportunity to see how harmful Google's attempts to make money are to children (they are the new Joe Camel) and now I no longer have regrets at all. It's one thing to manipulate and exploit adults who should know better, but to target children is just the worst kind of low.
Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of people who will just rest and vest.
So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest & vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top google researchers said yes.
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