It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer?

When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.

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cycomanic 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive

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cmrdporcupine 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

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11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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pstuart 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away.

Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate.

Just an armchair observation here.

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fidotron 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.

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trimbo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

Did you sell all of your stock?

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cmrdporcupine 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.

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trimbo 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You should be commended for being principled and sticking with what you believe. Thanks for your candor.

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Imustaskforhelp 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.

Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something

Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-...

So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.

I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.

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cmrdporcupine 10 hours ago | parent [-]

That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.

But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.

I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.

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Imustaskforhelp 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.

I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha

> It was a weird place to work

What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?

> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

For context, can you please talk more about it :p

> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though

What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?

Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?

	▲	cmrdporcupine 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google. Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations. > What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it? I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads. And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place. I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)

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christophilus 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.

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cmrdporcupine 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different.

"AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.

And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point.

BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.

	▲	luckylion 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good. Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.