Hierarchy aside, I am surprised the literal author and maintainer of the project, on Google’s payroll no less, was not consulted on such a decision. Seems borderline arrogant.

> ... was not consulted on such a decision ...

What Francois wrote suggests he was overruled.

Google being arrogant? Say it isn’t so!

The leadership of tensorflow (which was a political football) at the time was not particularly wise, or introspective, and certainly was not interested in hearing the opinions of the large number of talented junior and senior engineers. They were trying to thread the needle of growing a large external open source project while also satisfying the internal (very advanced) needs of researchers and product teams.

This was a common pattern at the time and it's part of the reason TF 2.0 became a debacle and jax was made as a side product that matured on its own before the directors got their hands on it.

Affecting leadership's decisions at Google became gradually more difficult over time. The L8s often were quite experienced in some area, but assumed their abilities generalized (for example, storage experts trying to design network distributed strategies for HPC).

Fortunately, with the exception of a few valuable datasets and some resources, effectively everything important about machine learning has been exported from Google into the literature and open source and it remains to be seen if google will ever recover from the exodus of the highly talented but mostly ignored junior and senior engineers who made it so productive in the past.

at certain levels in the corporate ladder, it's all about who or whom you glaze to get to that next level.

actual hard skills are irrelevant

It takes a while to get promoted, but he certainly did not leave as L5

Down leveling is a pretty common strategy larger companies use to retain engineers.

Could you elaborate on this? how does being down-leveled make an engineer less likely to leave?

It’s gaslighting to make you work harder to achieve the promo.

Google in particular often downlevelled incoming engineers by one level from what their "natural" level should be- IE, a person who should have been an L6 would often be hired at L5 and then have to "prove themself" before getting that promo.