Deliberately Leaving Details Out Of A Piece Of Writing Is Called __________.

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.

Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.

This is what people seem to forget. A company that doesn't grow for all intents and purposes is a dead company. Or in the M&A world we call it "distressed". It doesn't matter how profitable you are if you don't get grow there are serious implications - employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services, etc.

I don't see how employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services are related to the need for unyielding year on year growth. There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

Without growth, the only way to get promoted is to get a spot of some higher-up who left the company (or retired/died). Whereas, in growing companies, there are new senior/management positions created all the time, to account for the growth - so, getting promoted is easier. Ambitious, hard working people like promotions, so they gravitate towards growing companies and not stale companies.

> Ambitious, hard working people like promotions Ambitious maybe (though that's nearly the definition of ambitious). Hardworking, not necessarily. I know a cement guy that you have never in your life worked a harder day than who has never received a promotion nor even sought one.

Ambition and hard work are hardly the same thing. Many people work hard at their job, are paid a good wage, and are satisfied with their job, rather than constantly seeking a promotion. Constant promotion seeking isn't admirable, it's just greed.

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like how pyramid schemes work?

So is there anything to be done about it? How to avoid companies being compelled to seek growth always, to the detriment of their internal functioning/culture?

> There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high. Companies that aren't growing? I meet A LOT of companies (about ~50 or so a year) and I can tell you there is massive difference between the distressed ones and the ones who are growing. btw - even 2~5% growth is fine, it doesn't need to be 25% google scale growth...but flat or declining is bad.

There are plenty of small private companies that more or less plod along year after year--small consultancies and the like. You're not going to have the level of compensation and opportunities you have at a large profitable growing public firm but you may be OK with that. Obviously declines are bad and, in any case, compensation will probably be a fraction of Google etc.

I hate how hn top threads usually degenerate into something totally unrelated to the original posts.

It's about stock price and bonuses, in public companies. The only metric that a board of directors can use is stockholder welfare. That's their primary fiduciary duty, according to law these days. So, what to bonus the CEO on? Stock price appreciation. Stock price valuation loves growth. So even though a flat business throwing off 10% profit is a very nice business to be in, the only way you can increase stock price is to grow margin, which is really hard and attracts competition. Ergo, CEO is going to try to grow the company to boost the stock price. That's one reason dubious mergers are pursued, as it at least will goose revenue and profit. Wise investors might use return on equity or capital as well, but the market in general biases towards the revenue and profit metrics. Stock goes up, CEO gets their bonus. For a private company, slow or flat growth with a nice profit margin is great, and without having to favor growth at all costs for pesky stockholders and analysts, you can pick and choose when a good opportunity comes along, and grow a bit anyway.

This seems like a popular and reflective comment, but this is a very cultural idea in my amateur opinion. It seems like this -needs- to be so, and many do so because of that belief. But in reality it is a self perpetuating hamster wheel of burn out bliss a company is setting itself up for.

It's not cultural at all -- it's economics. Businesses are valued based on discounted cash flows (DCF). If you're profitable and not growing, your cash flows are very stable & easy to evaluate -- you get a low P/E or P/E/G ratio. But if you're growing quickly with sane unit economics, most of the DCF value is in future years... which then results in much higher multiples relative to today's revenues & earnings.

So? Who needs that? Not the company, unless selling stock to raise cash. Not the employees, if paid in cash instead of funny money. Nobody needs that. It's cultural.

Politician wins election by promising lower taxes by assuming greater investment returns hence requiring less money to be set aside for defined benefit pensions. People see other people's wealth growing quicker because their investments grew more, increasing demand for higher growth investments. Population growth inherently leads to economic growth assuming a sufficiently stable society and access to resources. All of these create an environment where people expect certain ROI and make plans according to those ROI.

So is there anything to be done about this? It seems from this thread that the conclusion is that companies cannot avoid constantly seeking growth, and yet that growth ultimately destroys internal social mechanics / culture.

It can only not avoid it because that's how the deck is stacked. Different rulesets would give different outcomes. Just because we are riding one certain economic theory, does not mean its the only way of value creation.

> Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. This assertion presumes that it is impossible to propose any form of compensation that's enticing without involving stock. This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

You could pay them in other means, but there were constraints there are obvious constraints that I did not spell out. We are assuming a non-growing company that now needs to pay extra cash to you top up employee comp with cash. Your margin will start to shrink, and so does your earnings (the premise was no growth, remember), continuing the downward trend of your stock. Plus, your competitors are not sitting still. People will go work for the more exciting companies even if you pay them equal amounts anyway (to vary their type of work and grow their careers) rather than staying and watching the thing die and doing the same thing for 30 years.

> This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent. Which one?

Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Every other large tech company has generous stock grants, and as you pass a couple years of experience your stock will generally be larger than your cash compensation.

> Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Netflix is also 20% of FAANG companies, so that's not as lonely as it sounds.

In the context of this discussion, it is more useful for FAANG to mean any tech company or tech adjacent company employing a lot of software engineers with comparatively high pay, in the form of cash or cash + stock.

Right, but they're a strange company that just happens to be in FAANG. Pretty much every other large company, in the FAANG acronym or not, will give you equity.

They could achieve good multiples by paying dividends. The question is whether they're wasting as much money trying to grow as they are saving by keeping their profits offshore (and not paying tax on them). I don't know, but at some point the answer may become obvious.

Owners do not want dividends. I do not want dividends from my tech stocks if I'm simply going to turn around and reinvest in them. That is just paying extra short term capital gains taxes when you do not have to.

Qualified dividends (which represent the vast majority of them) are taxed as long-term capital gains to avoid this concern.

True, but it does not seem like investors are clamoring for dividends either way. Personally, I would just take the dividend money and reinvest it so it's all the same to me.

If the stock price went down, they would just pay employees in cash, which is a slightly less tax-advantaged solution.

The award is taxed at the same rate, but theoretically (in the States, at least) you can hold them for a year after they vest and only pay the much lower long term tax on the appreciation of their value. In order to easily compare apples to apples this assumes that in the alternative to getting RSU's that you would actually get compensated more income instead in proportion to the value increase of the company. An equivalent would probably be to compare a cash bonus that is directly tied to the value of the stock vs the equivalent gain in RSU. All else being equal, the RSU gain is more tax advantageous if you have held the RSU for a year or longer before liquidating the position.

That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains. Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.

While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards. Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company. Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests after 1 year. Let's say I'm in the highest bracket, $523,601 or more in income. The tax rate for that bracket for 2021 is 37%. After 1 year, the stock price goes up 100%. In Scenario A, I have vested RSU's worth $20,000. If I sell $10,000 of that (the gains only), I pay short term capital gains equivalent to my tax bracket, or $3700. If I hold that stock for 1 year after vesting and the stock price stays exact same for the next year, I pay the long term rate of the highest bracket which is currently 20%, or $2,000. In Scenario B, I get a bonus of $10,000 just the same, but there is no situation where I'm not stuck with paying $3,700 on that $10,000 gain. In Scenario A, I can save almost 50% of the tax bill by holding it for a year.

RSUs are cash equivalent from tax purposes. They are taxed at market rate at vest time. If you sell at that moment and buy other stock it has the exact same LTCG treatment. It's also the same as if you are compensated in all cash and go buy stock with that.

It's like cash if you got more when the share price is higher. It can also be a cash flow problem if you have to cover quarterly estimated tax in between trading windows. My day job sells and withholds 22% of my vesting RSUs, because that's the statutory rate for supplemental wages, but I always owe about 10% more.

This isn't how things work - you pay income taxes on RSUs when they vest, not when you sell, and their cost basis is the price at the time of vesting. So it's entirely irrelevant from a tax perspective whether they come in cash or stock. If you want cash, you can sell the stock and if you want stock, you can buy - the tax consequences are exactly the same.

There is no tax advantage for the employer or the employee. Your scenario A is incorrect because you pay income tax at time of vesting, as the other comments pointed out.

You're right. 63 billion dollars of net profit per year is a better metric.

> and no market is really a "winner takes it all" Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or BeOS or something else on our PCs.

> OSes for PCs (not Macs) If you slice the market thin enough anything can be a monopoly. This particular distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me.

You could buy a computer with MacOS installed. You almost couldn't buy a computer with OS/2 or BeOS installed, because Microsoft would threaten your OEM with a punitive price hike for Windows licenses the majority expect.

I agree but even if you throw Macs in there, the Windows marketshare is probably still over 90%. Maybe a bit lower if you include Chromebooks too.

>most business in the world survive While this may be the case for capital-intensive businesses (oil, consumer goods, energy), this is usually not the case for intangible-asset businesses (media, tech). In the former, the assets will generate cashflow, whereas in the latter it's a people-centric model What was the last time you chose yahoo over google or altavista over google? Google was always greedy, but when it was small it was cool to be the disruptor. Now it's perceived as only greedy. This is typically the case for any successful company (from HP, IBM, to the new 'big tech'). Good (related) book recommendation btw: capitalism without capital

According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.

> Maintaining existing services Everything a capitalist market teaches us is against this, if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't. FAANGS companies aren't at fault for when they're winning a game which is rigged from the start.

> if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't And if they do fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built? - The companies who take their place service the customers/clients they used to have - The workforce either coast along or move to the (presumably growing) new big boys - The investors should spot the decline and trade away The only downside is the company - the brand - slowly dies off. For most of us that is fine; the only parties to all this who will actually lose out are the ultimate beneficiaries/owners, and I can live with that. And presumably they've extracted masses from the company by then anyway. Its both cultural and economics, but the economics only affect the masters and not the minions (who find alternatives) and the cultural aspect is misguided - individual companies/brands are ephemeral and irrelevant so we the minions should not be invested in protecting them at the destructive (to society) costs of scale.

> No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. No such thing. In capitalism you are either growing or dying. Stagnation means others will grow around you, and relative to them you are shrinking in the same market. Thus, stagnating == dying.

Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions. [1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6

I thought the tech companies we are talking about do do some very hefty R&D, at least compared to other companies. For example, Amazon plowing all revenue back into expanding for 2 decades, Apple obviously invests quite a bit and just came out with a leap in processors, Google with its many services including Maps and self driving cars, Facebook and VR, etc.

Keeping up with the competition, if you're talking about quality of product/service, isn't the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn't seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

// See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.

There are family owned businesses where others try to beat them, but those businesses are so tied to their space that it is hard for others to step in and as these companies don't try to expand too much, they are free to cooperate with anybody, which gives them a beneficial network. However that is heavily industry specific and in tech, where scales are very different only works for very small niches.

There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.

These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it's essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.

The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock? I thought it was for the total value exchanged?

The owners of public companies are irrelevant to the large public company's continued existence. Owners for them come and go and pay their own taxes, but the company never has to pay the estate taxes itself, hence the advantage against those who must.

or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do. that's why we have public benefit corporations.

Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.

This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe's leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.

I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. Indeed as one of the richest countries, with global climate change, the responsibility is to lower consumption (which many would see as reduce the standard of living). But maybe the analogy doesn't stretch that far.

>I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. If it was common, then they would not have gotten to be the richest country in the world in the first place. The same game plays out over and over in nature where the one that fights for resources gets more of it, and while they can choose to stop fighting for it, in the long run they will not be the survivors. Cooperation works best if the goal is maximizing the average return over all participants in the game, but inevitably, tribes will split off and start prioritizing their own populations over others. On a global, national, and even familial scale.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.

That's my dream too, but unfortunately the Google that took that path would have died long ago after being choked off by other large ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple, etc. First Chrome, then Android were critical, life-or-death maneuvers for Google. Without paving their own path straight to users' eyeballs, Google would have never survived. But succeeding in that path also required an entire ecosystem to back it up. Google also does a lot of frivolous stuff to explore, but all of the major expansions are required just to protect their Search and Ad products.

But Google could also have licensed search technology to other companies interested in making the top-to-bottom ecosystem play. I mean, they even tried that, they were just trying to do it in a market that wasn't ready to take search seriously. Anyway, I'm not saying it's what they should have done. What they have done has obviously been wildly successful. But they could have done this and still given hundreds of people full-career employment and generational wealth.

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees. Besides, junior developers / interns are supposed to do what exactly if there is no increasing revenue at a company and no one leaves above them? Just hang out until someone quits even though they're not going to? Retraining a junior developer is costly. Advancing them is as well, but less costly than constantly cycling in new junior developers and interns to do the HTML/CSS + ETL script jobs no one likes doing. Growth is natural and important towards keeping your staff happy and moving up. Both Basecamp and Valve were growing massively, so I don't think those are good examples.

Besides, you run the real existential risk of getting your margin cannibalized by another startup or Amazon if you don't grow enough. In a world where you pay everyone a lot of money, the product is awesome, and there's no growth, there's a lot of margin in your product that someone is going to target - some subset of customers you aren't serving, or customers who aren't that loyal and willing to switch for 20-50% lower costs. I'm not saying VC funding is a good thing; I largely think what we are seeing due to massive QE is malinvestment on a grand scale and is why you see dumb shit like Juicero. But natural, bootstrapped growth is a good thing - and necessary, if you want to survive. Trending sideways is waiting for death on many fronts - your labor force being the largest one.

If your workforce is improving, you might have a kind of natural growth where they either deliver better products or more efficient services and you can acquire more customers (or charge more) without expanding your operations. Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there. It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.

> Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there. How does this work when your competitor is offering half of compensation via RSUs skyrocketing in value? >It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years. This describes no one I know that earns a lot of income. I imagine a person that expects little change over 10 to 20 years will probably not be in position to grab opportunities when they present themselves.

I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

And after whoever started the project gets their promotion, the product will be killed off and Google will chase another shiny thing. How much does anyone trust totally new Google things these days?

Didn't Craigslist did basically that? I'm not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.

Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.

Yeah, that was my point - they chose to stay small (this is both in focus of the company as well as number of employees). I'd personally probably be happier in a small company than in one that is eternally chasing infinite growth (both in goals and in number of employees).

I worked for a very small company for a number of years and it was a pretty good run for the most part. That said, I'm in a significantly better place financially having worked for a reasonably big public company for about the past decade.

Valve doesn't have as many employees but they definitely grow in both revenue and product line (vr, deck, they had other hardware products before - steam itself was a "side project" to distribute half life 2!)

Everyone knows that valve mostly care about steam nowadays, and at most one other core gaming product. They largely abandoned dota 2, and CS is mostly plowing without any sign of major changes. If steam were not this successful, it would have to hire more to grow revenue. It was just that steam as a platform is so efficient in utilizing manpower, it makes it less hungry on hiring. Most organization aspiring growth has to find a way. It could be the market is growing, or better tech, or more employee, or more often, a mix of 2 or more of these or other unmentioned factors.

The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy. Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.

Is there anything significant about a trillion dollars in 2021? Was it not $10B+ in the 1980s and $100B in the 2000s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0 I do not know what you mean by sympathy, I am just opining on the economic reasons for why successful businesses keep trying to expand, and that is if they do not, then they risk falling behind.

That's only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.

There are countless examples of companies who used to be at the head of the pack and seemingly not under threat. Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Xerox, etc. A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.

It is not necessarily evil, but corporate interest led. When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features. Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient. After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost. Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require. So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.

> And scale is simply because greed. This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6. Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do. My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that? Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc. What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn? This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.

> This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die. How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.

The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business. In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effects and relevance, as the rest of the market dwarfs you. As long as you keep growing, you can keep relevant. If facebook had a $1tn ad business and Google still had $200bn, would Google's business actually be the same as it is now? Would they still be able to hire the cream of graduates? Would they find it as easy to replace lost business from natural attrition with new clients? Would they find it as easy to launch new ad products and get attention for them?

Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?

It's basic math. If you are 20% of the industry right now and stay the same size while the industry grows 10x, you become 2% of the industry and a essentially a non-factor. You've yahoo'd yourself.

Basic math right, so if you're 20% of the industry, earning 20% of the industry profits at that scale, and the industry grows 10x, then you have a smaller piece of the industry but your earnings remain the same as the profits grew as well.

I don't have statistics but it's, frankly, blindingly obvious. In a rapidly growing market, staying still as a business isn't a static situation because the landscape around you is changing. You're shrinking in relevance to customers. Even if your margins stay the same, your competitors margins are going down as they scale up, which means they will undercut you on price and you won't be able to do anything about it. The premise of this discussion is static revenue, but you can't assume that. You'll have to work harder and harder just to stand still, until it becomes unsustainable. You might be able top sustain a business by focusing on a niche specialist market segment, but at that point you're not recognisably Google anymore. As for greed, that's an incredibly naïve way to view it. Nobody creates a long term business plan that aims for irrelevance.

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private. This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

There're private in a sense that there isn't internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

> From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US Right, if you look from very far away and put "all large US company" in the same bag. Otherwise, if you zoom on "Silicon Valley Tech Companies" then Apple and Google's perf process and associated incentives look quite radically different in many aspects.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What's your hypothesis?

> Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What's your hypothesis? Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.

> Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Watch and AirPods are literally the most popular and profitable products in their market. The iPad dominates, too.

Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.

Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.

If that's all it is, why isn't everyone doing it? And to the extent that they are doing the same sort of things, why are Apple taking on the order of 90% of the profits in multiple market segments? Clearly they are doing something different.

By that logic, the M1 was just packaging an ARM CPU in a laptop and the iPhone was just stuffing a SIM card in a PDA.

Can you please list some technologies or products that you think were innovations in the last 15 years?

My recollection of the time window is wrong, but I'd say microprocessors, then smartphones were fundamental. Chips ate both minicomputers and mainframes, and the smartphone totally altered how people interact with computers. Tablets are just big phones and watches are just smaller subsets. Software wise, the web. The net is old but it took the web to make it explode. What am I missing?

Google has no problems innovating on their ad backend and infrastructure you just don't get to see it bc you're not a customer - you're just part of their product

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it's too late for you to learn how the "rest of the world" does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG. Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?

In my recent interviewing cycle I got dinged in most interviews for not being a React expert. Every panel knew going in that my React experience was recent and limited. I have 4+ years of relevant domain experience at a FAANG on my resume. I laughed with interviewers about how every few years the de facto tech stack changes and every team I've ever joined required me to learn completely new (to me) frameworks. Still got dinged. I wish what you're saying was the truth but I think it's very much the minority.

HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

> We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane. The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.

Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google's product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.

"Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical" In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond "asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn't seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they're on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background. I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too. Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans. That said, there sure are jerks at Google like any other company but I've realized most these dramatic stories regurgitated by the media is BS

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

She was not fired, she quit. She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google. She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'. It's galling how many people (and their supporters) think that they have a right to be employed by a company and then publicly criticize them with misleading information, unmitigated or reviewed by the company.

That's true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?

No - the foundation of your question is a bit misaligned. The major difference is that as much as corporate research likes to pretend they're academics, they're not. In corporate research you're not after some unalienable absolute truth that benefits society - you're doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary. Sometimes those two align and that's great. But anyone that thinks that an experienced researcher at a corporation will have the seem freedom as a tenured professor is missing something. In exchange for this tradeoff you get a lot better salary and don't have to feel like all of your time is spent chasing grants.

> you're doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary So you are doing research within a slightly more defined scope. If you still call it research then the results are completely separate from your affiliation. If not, it's not research, it's just propaganda.

I'm not privy to the full details so idk but I provided my perspective based on what I'd witnessed which makes me believe she was fired/forced resigned because of how she approached issues at work (giving ultimatums / looking for identities of her reviewers, harassing LeCun on Twitter, etc)

> Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.

First of all it's still there if you haven't checked for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ Second, if you were wearing "I'm a good guy" badge on your shirt and later on decided to go rogue and work for the enemy, would you then remove that badge right away? Of course not unless you're truly incompetent at being bad. I'd understand it if they got rid of the wording because of how much headache it creates for them. Btw, that's basically why government and business officials often resort to saying the least informative statements. Because every word and sound bite will be used against them.

> After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans. Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612) Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.

Um - she wasn't fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn't be able to work there. It's pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective. Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

This is the common story, yes. But it evaporates when you dig into the details, which I've posted below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965631 I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events. Corporations have an astronomical amount of power and influence. Aren't you at least a little curious whether it's true? And if there was nothing wrong with her paper, that raises the question of why an anonymous reviewer was grilling her about it.

It very much does not evaporate. Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn't time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand. Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don't need revisions, but this one did, and there's no excuse for how she handled it. I've had papers rejected from my company's internal review process. It sucks, but it's not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don't go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

(The subthread below contains the refutations, so I won't copy them here. I left a reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966286, but you might want to climb it upwards to see why this is mistaken. Suffice to say, her paper passed the internal review, and was subjected to a second review that wasn't policy at the time.)

Nothing I said above was refuted or mistaken. You claim that her paper was internally reviewed twice and you chose to ignore evidence to the contrary. And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit's own responsibility in the situation.

Can a private company not accept a letter of resignation? Would that be a violation of the 13th amendment?

If it's in violation of your contract they can reject your resignation, but most people are At Will employees which means either side can terminate employment.

This is generally false. You can't be forced to work and a specific performance judgement is unlikely. If you resign and had a contract you can't work elsewhere, may need to pay damages. But slavery, indentures etc mostly illegal these days

If the terms of the resignation contradict terms in the employment agreement, I would think so. As long as the employment agreement is legal itself.

> I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens. She's a disgrace to the research community.

I had some sympathies with her when the initial story broke out. But the continous flaming on Twitter, harping and retweeting her supportive followers and the performative activism for a select set of racial topic makes me feel she cares only about her own set of interests.

From what I read at the time, she wasn't fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don't expressly criticize the employer's work. That's an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny. Regardless, being upset because you didn't get your way doesn't give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can't say "Give me X or I quit" and not assume there's a chance your bluff will be called (especially when "X" is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).

But her paper passed the internal review. It failed some additional internal review that wasn't policy at the time.

No, there was only one internal review. It didn't pass, and it was too late for her to make revisions because it was past the conference deadline.

You're factually wrong. I was literally able to view her paper, and it's approved status, in the internal tool where papers are approved for publication.

This directly contradicts what Jeff Dean wrote: "A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn't meet our bar for publication" (emphasis mine).

Which makes it more likely to be the truth, not less likely. It would be very foolish to write that if it were demonstrably false, as was claimed above. And I have to assume their lawyers aren't very foolish. But this is all another deflection. Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn't condone her actions that followed.

> Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn't condone her actions that followed This is where we'll have to agree to disagree. As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. Someone confirmed to you that this is the case, and you're still arguing that her subsequent behavior was unjustifiable. I think her subsequent behavior was a result of the unfair treatment. I'm not sure how I would've reacted in her place, and I have a lot of empathy for a scientist who is being scrutinized outside of normal policies. Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published. And I think you keep saying that it's okay for a research department to stop publication of scientific work regardless of whether the paper was mistaken or not. You've said that it needs revisions. I work in ML. It seemed not to need any revisions, as far as I could tell. Google's reaction seemed far out of proportion for what the paper claimed. You can say "Well, that's life. Google didn't do anything wrong." The former is true, but I'm skeptical of the latter.

"As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. S" This is not true. The fact that she may or may not have had extra scrutiny than others, within regular policy or not is completely besides the point. If a company, for whatever reason, wants to have 'another review' of the paper, it's completely within their purview. "Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published." Our view of whether it was notable or not is irrelevant. If the company wanted to put the brakes on it, especially because it related to Google, then that's their choice. It's hugely arrogant for her to make the claims she did - let alone publicly (!) - by all right she should have been fired for that, she was luckily the conditions enabled her to even try to establish the premise of her own resignation.

A company being legally allowed to do something doesn't implicitly make that thing fair or ethical. You can simultaneously believe that Google has the right to quash any paper, and believe that doing so arbitrarily is unfair. So yes, she was treated unfairly. And that's absolutely relevant to people's decision making. Like, what do you think it's irrelevant in relation to? Its not clear what you mean by publicly, nothing was done outside of Google until after she was fired.

Because he wrote it it's the truth? How are we supposed to take that any more seriously than her own claims?

Which ones? Specifically. After the, (my words), harrasment of Lacun on Twitter, the sort of belittling of the internal award she was given (you'd have to really think they were evil to give her an award just to gaslight her), plus the short notice ultimatum to a very senior person (one level down from Jeff Dean right?)....no offense but from the outside she seems exhausting to manage. The abstract came out, and honestly the paper was so so. Obviously it went against googles business model, but it'd be a wayyyy bigger scandal if they burried it. Maybe Jeff Dean is a liar, but his comment was the paper missed incorporating significant recent research. As head of the group, and just out of respect towards the institution and to science, pondering it for more than 48 hours before bouncing on vacation or heaven forbid presenting at the next conference would have been reasonable. Biased external view though. YRMV.

Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but another engineer doing the same thing might not be fine and the second gets investigated, is that unfair? We can't tell, there isn't enough information here.

Why do we have to take Google's word and not hers? (Especially in light of corroborating witnesses who say that what she did was completely normal)

Because plenty of other researchers working at Google regularly publish papers critical of Google and are just fine? Even Timnit had already done that many times, she just got into trouble this time but all the other papers she published was fine. If Google really cared about these researchers publishing critical pieces then Google would have shut down that entire group rather than just firing her.

Right but the claim is that Google instituted a new policy, and applied it inconsistently without telling people, until it blew up in their faces when she was fired. Only after that did they formalize the policy, and saying that she was fired for circumventing and then questioning a policy that ostensibly didn't exist when she was fired doesn't have the same ring to it.

But you claim she was fired for being critical of Google. Maybe what you are saying here is right and she was just the first person fired since nobody followed the new guidelines and at some point they will face consequences, it could just as well have been anyone else. But I don't see how that would make Google look bad, it is normal to fire one of the offenders as an example when a group refuses to follow new guidelines, either you do that or you fire everyone. And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy. What Google might have been wrong about here is if they reported this as her voluntarily leaving, even if you could argue it is Google firing her. But nobody really cares about that that detail, it isn't important and the story wouldn't blow up if that was the only thing they claimed Google did wrong.

> And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy. The policy seemed to be made up specifically for her paper. Her paper already passed the standard internal review, and she alerted them months before the conference that her paper was going to be submitted.

This discussion over whether she was treated differently with respect to review is irrelevant. If Google, for whatever reason, wanted to have the paper undergo a bit of extra scrutiny, it's entirely within their purview.

I have a feeling her continuous rants on Twitter is because her overall demands and feeling of entitlement were stood down. She demanded things which would have been just another kind of shit show and targeted harassment. A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.

I have mentioned this long time ago and would do so again: No matter how righteous be the cause, threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well. Both sides could have done better. Both sides includes Timnit's subsequent conduct as well.

> threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well. That sounds to me like what strikes do. Sometimes they do go down well, sometimes they don't.

I interpreted "with fellow employees" as in cooperation with fellow employees, so that wouldn't be a one-person strike. Although I guess it could be interpreted as against fellow employees.

In this case, I think the initial ultimatum delivered to management was in the vein of "I will quit if you don't do X" (not "we will quit"), but she was also trying to collaborate/mobilize with others in the company to pressure management. So a bit of both?

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet. Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people who worked on BERT generated more CO2 commuting to work than they did training the model. It seems like a drop in the bucket.

Could you explain in detail why the power consumption calculations were mistaken? It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.

Consider this paragraph "We first consider environmental risks. Echoing a line of recent work outlining the environmental and financial costs of deep learn- ing systems [129], we encourage the research community to priori- tize these impacts. One way this can be done is by reporting costs and evaluating works based on the amount of resources they con- sume [57]. As we outline in §3, increasing the environmental and financial costs of these models doubly punishes marginalized com- munities that are least likely to benefit from the progress achieved by large LMs and most likely to be harmed by negative environ- mental consequences of its resource consumption. At the scale we are discussing (outlined in §2), the first consideration should be the environmental cost." This whole paragraph is such a reach, and so absurd that it seems like a parody. Are we supposed to believe that marginalized communities are being harmed by Google training NLP models using green energy? Or will they benefit from better translation from English language content into marginalized languages? Timnit has zero interest in what actually benefits marginalized communities. She uses them as a prop to build a career in high paying AI field where, apparently, the sub field of ai fairness has a low bar for publication.

Yes, I never said that the power consumption calculations were wrong. The paper wasn't about power consumption, but CO2 emissions leading to global warming. She compared the power consumption of model training to jet fuel exhaust and used jet fuel exhaust to tie the power consumption to CO2 emissions. Of course, she didn't mention that Google is carbon neutral and its data centers are primarily powered by green energy. I have not seen a more dishonest paper in CS. Electricity from the grid can come from green sources, and in the particular case if Google, it actually does. Comparing electricity consumption for a one time training with jet fuel usage is absurd. Moreover, the paper doesn't mention any possible benefit of building such nlp models. Increased accessibility of web content across languages and for disabled people. Google, simply through its search, maps and navigation saves a lot of wasted carbon. Complaining about the power consumption of ML models is absolutely ridiculous. Her paper reeked of desperation to find something, anything within the AI space that could be posted as an ethical dilemma. Reading that paper convinced me that Timnit could bring absolutely no value to AI as a field, in terms of ethics or otherwise.

"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.

That's not how economics of scale work. This is zero sum thinking. Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now. If I go solar today with my home, it is not a negative action that displaces someone else. It actually expands the solar industry and enables cheaper solar in the future. Without early customers, green energy would never have taken off.

> Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. The marginal cost of puchasing more energy might go down (or it might go up if you are pushing up the demand). But not the total expenditure on energy. > Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now. Thermal coal prices are at all time record highs right now. It's 4x the price it was a few years ago when we were all hearing about how solar has become cheaper than coal. It's not that solar generation suddenly became far more expensive for some supernatural reason. It's that demand for electricity outweighs the installed capacity of renewables.

How is the price of thermal coal spiking and solar prices collapsing not a good thing?! Are you sure that if the situation were inverted you wouldn't still be complaining? Damned if you, damned if you don't.

Coal prices are high because there is a lot of electricity demand not being met by existing renewables. Because everybody bought the green electricity. Which is not only making the green electricity more expensive, it's causing more coal to be burnt to keep up.

Like I said before, that's not how economies of scale work in the long run. Following your recommendations will reduce green energy prices in the short run and promote CO2 emissions in the long run. The negative externalities of CO2 are long term and not short term. So your complaints are counter productive.

The fact that there is a learning effect doesn't mean it's good to consume more electricity. If you want to argue positive sum, you would need to show a the consumed green electricity displaces more than the equivalent amount of fossil electricity plus co2 fp of measures used to handle variability of renewables vs nearly flat demand from data centers. Which seems hard.

I mean we might as well shut down electricity to all of our homes if we want to make this argument. And we could argue with each other over snail mail. But I suspect that will actually be worse from CO2 emissions perspective.

That's strawman, some electricity use is needed because we depend on it for survival and the rest is various levels of nice to have. But its use has environmental costs and we are in big trouble with climate change. As long as there is fossil made electricity flowing in the grid, marginal changes in demand can be viewed as contributing to its production, because electricity is fungible (modulo transmission considerations).

That's a fat big POV that very few will take seriously. Being carbon neutral absolutely incentivizes green energy. Making up a wall of insurmountable demands that very few people in this world, except hunter gatherers, can possibly meet does not help but hurts efforts towards CO2 reduction. Carbon neutrality works by subsidizing the costs of reducing carbon emissions at source. Trying to shit on that makes you regressive, not progressive.

Let's not get too emotional about things and keep to the HN guidelines. I do understand and somewhat agree with the "perfect is the enemy of good" thinking, but it's still good to be aware and keep outselves honest about the difference between them. The marginal CO2 perspective is in fact an establilished thing in the industry, see eg [1] [2]. Regarding "insurmountable demands", not sure what you're referring to here, the discussion was about whether there are significant indirect co2 & environmental costs to "carbon neutral" electricity as defined by Google, which I argued there are. [1] https://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/marginal-carbon-dioxide-pro... [2] https://www.tmrow.com/blog/marginal-carbon-intensity-of-elec...

You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal. The point is that electricity can have a green source, liquid carbon fuel can't. You absolutely cannot compare the two. FWIW, Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.

> Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy. But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral (which they originally accomplished with certificates). Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'. Google also uses a large amount of resources besides electrical energy, so claiming to be neutral is a scam unless they actually sequester co2 permanently. > You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal. It's not the same argument. But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral.

> Google also uses a large amount of resources besides electrical energy, so claiming to be neutral is a scam unless they actually sequester co2 permanently. I am going to have to ask for a citation for this. They claim to be carbon neutral, not that they don't use any resources at all. >> > Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy. > But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral Nobody has made this claim > Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'. Which is true. > But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral. That is obvious

If the now died down Timnit reporting did not convince you that Timnit didn't apply the right tactic, if we agree to set aside the legitimacy of her cause in the first place (which itself was and still is under intense debate), then there does not seem any good way to unify our views.

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. (She told Jeff Dean and others that she was doing so in an email made public). That triggers Legal to retaliate and look for a reason to fire the employee, immediately. Jeff Dean let the conflict drag out 6+ months because he thought he had control of the situation (and he was wrong). Without Jeff Dean's persistence, Dr. Gebru would probably have been retaliated upon as swiftly as those in the Alphabet Workers Union. That's how Legal and HR work—- they retaliate if litigation looks imminent. (Levandowski lasted so long because he was dealing with not Jeff Dean but Larry Page). Google handled Dr Gebru's exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow's huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn't have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed. A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru's case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn't COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.

> Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation. Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack. https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both. Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.

The email about the lawyers is months before the "ultimatum." The reason Dr Gebru's case is so divisive in tech (especially in this thread) is because so many are agnostic or ignorant of the role of ethics in tech; and almost every employee is ignorant of how Legal/HR execute retaliation. Anthony Levandowski is a literal criminal and yet is still enjoying tens of millions of dollars of Google's money. Same with Andy Rubin. Even Michael Church is rich. If one percent of the energy spent fighting Dr Gebru was put into fighting the real scumbags in tech… you'd have something more like Google before it got greedy with scale.

What does this have to do with attack Jeff Dean personally on twitter? Please note that this was months before she left. The 3 names you mentioned have nothing to do with Jeff Dean. Handling those 3 people has nothing to do with supporting Gebru or Jeff Dean. This has nothing to do with Gebru being a toxic person.

Is there any reason to think Michael Church earned more than Dr. Gebru? Michael Church only worked at Google for 6 months, so I would guess none of his stock vested.

Can you explain why you think dragging a low level IC who worked at the company less than year over 10 years ago and afaik never really did anyone any harm into this is appropriate?

Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working? Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer? Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn't meet her demands?

She said we was consulting a lawyer about discrimination in the workplace. That's all you need to say to trigger Legal to retaliate. If you're Anthony Levandowski bartering with Larry Page, though, Legal takes a back seat. It doesn't even matter when Levandowski instigated a collision on the 101.

I think it's interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: "…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment." I haven't worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they're elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you're really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There's exceptions of course.

I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time. In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel. I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimizing what I did for the horrific perf process, and going through constant re-orgs so that I had no consistent manager, and no chance of promotion (this is a big deal at Google). Joining in 2005 was the best thing I've done for my career, and leaving in 2013 was again the best thing I've done for my career. I value the time there, but the Google that I remember no longer exists.

I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric. Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it. I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.

I've found the sweet spot to be around 50-200. I've always worked at smaller companies, and the 10-person company I worked at was the only terrible experience of the bunch. It sounds weird to say, but... I'm really glad to have an HR department again. I'm sure it varies widely. I just feel like a tiny company leaves too much room for unhealthy and unprofessional dynamics, even though I'm sure it can be perfectly fine in other cases. Just depends on the people.

At my craziest startup, the charismatic CEO would occasionally yell "under 50 employees, no one has any rights!". It was a joke, but was it really? Part of the small startup life is that most job don't last. Both because startups die young, but also because they can be crazy. My first dying startup was a disaster. I adapted my expectations, and now I see them as unplanned vacations. I quit the crazy company above on my 1 year vesting day.

Mirrors my experience. 50-200 is a sweet spot of possibly knowing just about everyone in the company while also having many perks of BigCo, and the sub-10 person startup folded the week I joined.

This is eerily similar to my experience at Amazon including how I feel when I look back. Even the years are same :-). I somehow feel joining and leaving Amazon when I did (2005-2012) was the best thing to have happened. What makes it more special was the stellar team that I got to be a part of with whom I'm still in touch with. It's like being part of a secret club. The only thing we used to discuss among colleagues most of the time was solving some hairy interesting engineering problem. That changed as years wore on, it became more gossip and internal politics and who got promoted how and when etc.

The funny thing (to me) is that 4000 people already seems unwieldy to me - I run a company of 5 and can imagine managing maybe 20-30 people, 100 at a stretch but I have no idea how to run a company with anywhere close to 4000 employees (nor what would so many people work on).

The perf process sounds good on paper. It's just like peer reviews in the academia they said. However its outcome in practice can't be any worse. To this day, people "cook up" a project that doesn't need to exist and won't share the credit or their territory with anyone (or else the committee will doubt their ownership) and abandon the project less than six months after their promotion and switch to a new team.

Google is somewhat famous for downleveling so I'm really not sure that this is actually true.

They can't downlevel someone from Facebook that easily. They have to match the compensation at least and Facebook pays pretty well at L5 level.

It's been a while since I've considered Google a pinnacle of anything. I think the executives of google might be a bit delusional about how far that propaganda is effective.

It's still a major selling point if you're raising money for your company. "Ex-Google engineer" somehow still makes rich people want to throw money at you, deservedly or not.

I think this speaks to the credulity of VCs more than anything else. Google is huge, a decent chunk of us are ex google pure as a function of the numbers. Never mind how many ex googlers were doing something unique to Google and not something other higher grade tech firms are doing.

There are teams at Google and other big tech companies that are working on groundbreaking things. Working at these companies gives you a chance to do very "impactful" things. Is that sense of purpose sometimes abused to exploit workers? Sure. But there are some really smart folks doing amazing things that they'd never have a chance to do working anywhere else. Do you have to be elite to work there? In some roles you absolutely do. In other roles you just need to do the work. You're often working alongside people who care a great deal(and some unknowingly toxic people whose self-worth seems to come solely from their career achievements), and that can raise the bar for what you and/or the company expect from yourself. The "toxic" thing in my experience often just comes from rapid, unmanaged growth. The company is literally morphing into something new with every passing day. People are being sucked up the management chain without merit. Systems aren't yet in place to deal with the changes. New employees are flooding in faster than they can assimilate the old culture. I'm not saying I love the valley or anything, but I'm glad I got to spend a couple years of my life here and contribute 0.0001% to some of the greatest discoveries in the last few decades. I hope more engineers get a chance to have that feeling.

> ...selling you on the idea that they're elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job Also true of Ivy League Schools, movie studios, and certain neighborhoods. Prestige is weird, and if you value it, that's totally fine, but it's probably better the separate the myth from the real-world entity that's made up of people doing stuff.

It's kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.

They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control. They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases. Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.

I really like this optimistic sentiment. And I think it's true. I work for a company that's a unicorn this year. About five years ago it didn't exist until Amazon decided to drop customer support for their warehouse robots, forcing a warehouse company to build its own replacements. There is still plenty of room for new players to emerge.

This is the best time to be alive, because we can leverage their platforms (ex. google search, YT) to learn anything and everything to ultimately destroy them by building something different. Just excited to live in a time where we (anyone with basic internet access pretty much) can execute runtime hacks on capitalism by changing the inputs a bit while still creating value where it matters to us.

Given the history of Facebook's acquisitions, I think this is a little optimistic. The sheer disgusting amount of money that FAANGs have allows them to buy or undercut any competitor that looks to gain steam.

Why sell though? One can always ignore being acquired if that's aligned with their mission. Money is so plentiful these days, from personal experience you can just work for a FAANG/eqv. for max 4 years and amass at least 500k to a million bucks easily. That's plenty money to bootstrap your company, and in some cases more than enough to cut out needing vulture- sorry I mean venture- capital for a good while or ever. Also, you can leverage free resources (like YC's videos, since we're on this site) and find VC related podcasts to understand how they work, so you can learn strategies on how to grow and completely avoid them. Not to mention, 4 years will give you access to competent like-minded people (networking), a deeper understanding of how these companies operate and what to avoid/adopt, and if you're in a technical position you will most likely level up like crazy to the point you feel confident on learning any new tech and doing everything yourself. Don't know design? Attend some design workshops. Don't understand product marketing? Attend the workshop with the dude who wrote a book on how to do exactly that, and ask him questions. What does operational strategy mean? Attend that workshop. These companies also have conferences and events where they bring leaders to speak and share their expertise- go to these and learn as much as you can. The only resource that truly matters is time, so while you're alive, do execute. Just my 2 cents.

Wasn't the same true 20-30 years ago? I feel like you can just choose not to sell or IPO, right?

Yeah, that's a fair point. It's hard to evaluate such a decision without being in the spot. The only way I see of resisting such tempation would be to be fulfilled with working on your vision and have substantial amounts of money. I haven't done any of those things so it's hard to empathize and answer honestly. At least we have warning examples such as Notch's situation. After making probably the most successful game of all time and selling it for billions, his life is (or was, has been, idk) reportedly pretty depressing. I could say that it's better to not have depression than to have billions, but in reality it's not a zero sum game and you can probably have both. In the end, as always, it all depends on the person and their circumstances.

The old companies were pushed over by technological or organizational disruptions. A major disruption was paying significant premium money for premium talent, often more than twice the market rate for a given experience level and do that to everyone and not just to poach hires. All of the biggest tech companies do that today, but 20 years ago that was a huge disruption and caused many giants to fall from grace since they could no longer source quality talent. So unless a new similar disruption occurs there wont be something that pushes Google or Microsoft etc from their current positions.

I think it low-key already happening first now talent markets are global so I bet there is companies that are willing to pay premium for premium remote talent. Then there is companies like uniswap which are unicorns and there is like 20 people working that kinda opens situation where they can outbid even google for premium talent.

Yeah you might be. But they also have way more resources for you to build your talents. There's still a lot there if you have realistic expectations.

Deliberately Leaving Details Out Of A Piece Of Writing Is Called __________.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965282

Posted by: volpesether90.blogspot.com

Share this post