When I joined google, the only way I could get hired was as a test engineer on an SRE team, which I then converted into an SRE via mission control and wrote docs and shared them internally with folks until the principal engineers read them, and then they gave me infinite resources (Google Exacycle) to do everything I described above. I used that to get promoted to Staff SWE, and used that to launch a product (Google Cloud Genomics) and do some interesting machine learning for drug discovery (BTW, at this point mny career was effectively complete- I had set out to do everything I wanted, and was interested in what to do next).
The above happened because (beyond a wide range of boosts provided by parents and country) I have an intense drive, wanted to work at Google more than anything, and exploited the internal structure of the company to maximize my power. I kept networking to meet more and more people, and by meeting those people I got more access and support. I helped build up a team- Google Accelerated Sciences- which does basically what I thought Google should be doing all along.
unfortunately, at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
> at that point Google politics and personalities intervened and I was kicked out of the cool kid's club.
It sounds like a power struggle gone the other way from reading this. And it certainly doesn't seem like either of the sides are more noble than the other.
But props for you for doing what you loved best, if only one day any of these can be decoupled from politics.
Never underestimate the power of imposter syndrome!
Deep learning, on the other hand, is so fraught with pitfalls and traps. Even if you can code up a model successfully, it's very easy to trick yourself that you're doing very well (see a previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27376839). In my opinion, most of the work should be spent on making sure that you're not tricking yourself.
MD?
Jeff had 2 options: pick a safe leader, or a corrosive person. Timnit has shown incredible tone-deafness and arrogance; just view her Twitter exchange with Yann LeCun. She was clearly out of her league, and doubling down every day with newer and newer antics. She needed to go.
Btw plenty of us ex Googlers think Jeff Dean's reputation was enhanced still further by that move. Gebru was acting in crazy ways, she really should have been fired much earlier, but taking the opportunity when she so helpfully presented it seems like a no brainer. Sad that the rest of Google lacks that approach.
I agree, she should have been fired earlier. However, she was just promoted, which meant she must have had several quarters of excellent perf.
I think one thing that would be truly excellent, but won't happen, would be to have Megan Kacholia defend herself by explaining her actions to the wider Google community. In particular:
Why was Megan, a person with effectively no research experience, a VP in Google Research and making decisions about research papers being withdrawn? Her lack of experience in the area seems to have led to an exacerbation of tensions.
Why did Megan convert an offer to have a discussion about a resignation into an interpretation that Timnit resigned voluntarily, coupled with an accelerated departure (immediate, with termination of all Google services)?
Why was Megan pushing so hard to have the paper withdrawn, given that the paper wouldn't be that impactful on Google's reputation, made some useful (if obvious and a bit overstated) points, and wasn't being published in a prominent venue?
To Jeff and Megan: to what extent did Jeff support Megan's decision to fire Timnit over a refusal to withdraw a paper, or did his support come after learning Megan had fired Timnit? To what extent did Timnit's previous tweets calling out her employees and mentioning confidential Google Research activities play a role in her firing? Was her discouraging email really a reasonable justification for accelerating her termination?
My guess about all of this is that Megan and Jeff decided to fire timnit when timnit posted several negative tweets attacking Jeff and google Research, and used the paper and the email (and vague offer to resign) to justify the firing and they didn't think through the implications of firing a twitterati like Timnit in a roughshod manner. This seems most consistent with all the evidence I've seen.
The moment an employee says "Do this or I quit", and the company refuses to "do this", then the company is correct in assuming that the "I quit" part will apply.
Gebru said "do this or I resign". The company accepted her resignation. She then attempted to "unresign" by claiming her statement she would resign wasn't an actual resignation. Clearly you support this kind of meritless word games from her.
As for Megan, why is a non engineer running YouTube? Why did someone at lightweight as Gebru end up being paid as a researcher at all given that her research had no real validity? Why was she allowed to behave in such toxic ways for so long? Google is neck deep in identity politics, that's why.
From what has been put outside, don't you think Timnit's mail to employees as a manager was out of line for someone in her role.
Even to me who doesn't have intimate knowledge of the whole thing, that didn't look appropriate.
To resign at Google you tell your manager you're resigning and then fill out a form (that's the process that makes it an official resignation). What Megan did to Timnit was immediate termination, combined with an advanced exit date, which only happens if you're truly and deeply violating Google rules or your country's laws.
When I brought up the Timnit firing situation my VP literally said: "It takes me a year and a half to fire a bad employee, I don't know how Megan did it so fast".
What? I could understand 6 months, but how the hell do you add a year to that?
Also, managers/directors/etc often have to overcome the issue of reversing momentum on past praise or ratings given to these individuals.
In the Google perf (performance review) process, many individuals that probably should have gotten PIPs and/or counseled out also got high performance ratings in past reviews (for other reasons) from the very same managers and directors.
Generally to initiate a PIP, there needs to be a rating to justify the action (i.e. "Needs Improvement" - lowest rating). Giving a rating two levels or more above or below the last rating also requires justification in the rating process.
Google also cancelled/deferred its mid-year perf cycle during 2020 due to WFH/COVID challenges, which delayed opportunities for managers to give such ratings or feedback through the formal process. (for context: Google traditionally does "perf" twice per year, which are the formal opportunities for employees to receive performance ratings as well as nominations for promotion); this may or may not be correlated with interesting product launches or changes you might see as an end user during the year).
I really don't care. I've never wanted to work there anyway.
Even to my socialist EU mind this sounds untrue and pretty crazy.
There are other things you can do to make it clear they need to move on but it's usually way easier and more efficient to just directly negotiate a severance and have them resign.
i'm talking about employees who are in good standing, like Timnit was at the time. She had just been previously promoted. A person like this, even if they are annoying many coworkers through emails or papers, can't just be terminated because the manager doesn't like them (huge liability risk). Instead, Google (or IBM, or whomever) wants a paper record showing that somebody is unable to do their job, is put on a performance improvement program, cannot improve performance. At that point, Google can terminate the employee and if there is a lawsuit or mediation, Google has the paperwork required.
Instead, the problems of the to-be-fired employee needs to be abundantly clear to everyone nearby, so that when that person is fired, it doesn't have deep social impacts.
Combine that with desiring to fire someone when a replacement is trained up (often many months), and at the end of a big project (sometimes a year), and not just as management is reshuffling... And suddenly a firing takes 1.5 years.
1. Google wanted her gone, ranging from good reasons (she was too abrasive) to possibly suspect (in this instance she was being abrasive about a paper with ethical questions on Google's practices being stopped from publication with no explanation given)
2. Her ultimatum email can reasonably be construed as a resignation. It roughly said "Do this or I'm quiting", and Google responded with roughly "We're not doing that, thanks for telling us you quit, we accept".
3. This does not follow the typical resignation process used at Google, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid resignation. It's unreasonable to assume a lawyer didn't look this over before they went ahead with it. The lack of Timnit suing Google for wrongful termination (from what I've seen) agrees with this.
4. Googlers were angry about this situation, because they disagreed with leadership's actions.
5. The leadership's response is legally bound to stick strictly to saying she resigned. This only inflamed #4 more.
6. They were ethically bound to not disclose all details of a situation involving an employee (where as Timnit could paint whatever story she wanted). Even if Timnit gave a full go-head, there were others involved and doxing is a real threat when names are exposed.
7. They were bound by business interests (at its root legal and ethical obligation to the shareholders) to not expose all of the details of the paper, the objection to the paper, and the processes involved.
So was Google in the right here? The situation obviously wasn't handled well. There were clear problems with Timnit, and she did give an ultimatum. However there are reasonable concerns related to "our ethics person gave an ultimatum and we called them on it" - but without the details it's hard to form a nuanced opinion.
Other takes welcome.
I don't know if a lawyer didn't look at the firing, but Megan has a tight relationship with HR, and if she told HR to resignate the employee because they were damaging to the company, it would be done immediately as a special-case override. I'm 100% certain Megan has had to terminate employees for cause in the past (think: ads engineer who threatens to steal money from google) so I think she has an expedited path.
Timnit’s goal is likely closer to that of effecting reform. A lawsuit isn’t necessarily the best tool for that unless it’s so big it establishes new precedent. Even the Andy Rubin / breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit was largely ineffective.. While Timnit has a strong case here, it’s not really as strong as the evidence of the General Counsel of Google openly engaging in and protecting the sexual misconduct of himself and others.
I personally think Timnit shouldn't have been hired in the first place, but if they were going to fire her, they needed to follow the path, which takes about 1-2 years, of establishing that she was not a good employee for Google.
Here is more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386
At the time I joined it seemed like it would be pretty easy given that Larry Page greenlit Google Health (a terrible idea).
I'm curious why you think Google Health was a terrible idea. I'm not disagreeing, just wondering your opinions on the matter from a more inside point of view.
Thank you.
That's not how health records work in the US where Google tried to start the product. HRs are effectively owned by the companies that provide health care, while patients have access to the records. There is a multibillion industry dedicated to keeping things that way (Cerner, Epic, the hospitals themselves) and even with Google's ostensible ability to change the world (at that time), they would never have been able to build a product that sustained itself because there wasn't a market for the product.
In short Google tried to compete with EPIC and Cerner without a market for their alternative product.
Individuals in the US (present company excepted) aren't interested in owning and managing their own health records; they want their HRs to be managed conveniently for them.
Today, Google (and AWS and Azure) makes deals with EPIC and the Hospitals (to host infra in their cloud) and also makes research deals (to help build their health research projects). This is a much more realistic approach given the constraints.
In the case above, it was really about a pivot of Google Cloud Genomics- my market research suggested that people wanted to store large amounts of BAM files cheaply and access them via an API, when they really wanted Spark for Genomics. I brought that up with our leadership and they declined to make that pivot early.
Here's what the Cloud Genomics product eventually evolved into, which actually is pretty good: https://verily.com/solutions/terra/ (I was the person who set up the original Google/Broad relationship that led to all of this).
This seems to be a fairly common thing at Google. I hear Google "hoards" a lot of PhDs who are just "refactoring APIs and doing migrations". Is this not seen as a problem there wrt retaining talent?
Ah, taking a page out of IBM's recent playbook.
Would you care to elaborate or link to an article that explores this view?
It shouldn't really be surprising that an article about Google (a company with 145K full-time-employees) might attract a few people who know people. Isn't that why we read HN?
And yet they were still more motivating than Sundar, who is so flat he sounds like he's bored to death, even when he's talking about super cool tech like AI and quantum computing.
Page wasn't polished, but he could energize teams about building the future in a way Sundar hasn't been able to.
I also got to meet people like Urs Hoezle and Luiz Barroso who are responsible for Google's technical position in computing today; they were both also great leaders who really deserve to have their own sub-company to run (TI and Core).
I was truly lucky to be able to have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat almost every morning for a year, which led to some great research collaborations. I was extremely disappointed to see Jeff defend Megan Kacholia's firing of Timnit (yes, I read the paper) and call it a resignation. That pretty much killed the reputation of Google Research's leader.