The author took a tangent so fast and so long into some theater that they didn't ever explain what his problem with AI is. I would love to hear more about it and specifically how Google changed in the last 3 years. I'd like to know what the outlook was 3 years ago and how it drifted.
He said "I am worried it might make my job much worse." He's a technical writer. Seems kind of obvious to me. Have the bot write documentation, or hire one technical writer to write docs for only bots to read: both seem like a worse job (really, no job) for highly compensated Google technical writers.
Generally speaking, 3 years ago there wasn’t as much paranoia as there is now. The paranoia stems from 2 things.
1) layoffs resulting in uncertainty which in turn results in people being less civil while jockeying for position.
2) open AI being first to market with a gen AI product that stuck. It feels a lot different working at a company that feels in the lead than one trying to catch up.
The culture changed drastically between 2020 and 2024.
AI being thought of - by the Parasite Class - as an effective replacement for many employees, thereby eliminating the employment that most people depend on in order to survive, all the while it wildly hallucinates entire industries straight into the dirt.
I mean, yes, the Parasite Class will get their comeuppance for their greed and arrogance and hubris and stupidity. But not before the majority of working-class people get driven into abject poverty and destitution from job loss. It will hurt the common man _long before_ it hurts those who truly deserve the pain, and if rolled out too fast and too far, may even trigger economic or societal collapse.
And while this is quite similar to your № 1, I feel it is materially different enough to stand separately: the paranoia here being that average working-class folk cannot turn aside this diesel locomotive because they have zero control over it, and the Parasite Class that does control it being so obsessed with obscene levels of profits that they are eagerly driving everyone off of a cliff just to get to it.
I've been at Google for about 10 years. Over the last three or so years I've seen the following frustrating changes.
A switch from a bottom up culture to a broken mix of bottom up and top down. I used to feel empowered to write up proposals for new ambitious projects and to seek funding for them, even if they didn't always get funded. Now, I barely try anything like this. VPs demand that work conforms to a vision that they cannot communicate and they can barely explain why any given project gets rejected. I'd be okay with an actually top down culture if leaders could actually lead - but instead you get the worst of both worlds. Since 2021, I don't think I have ever been in a meeting with a VP that I felt was useful.
This lack of vision goes all the way to the top. The execs cannot communicate a vision to the company.
Major process overhead and churn in these processes. Some of this stuff is indeed important (it makes sense to go through the trouble of making sure all of your systems are properly labeled for DMA compliance, for example). But a lot of it is bullshit. It feels like there is constantly some GRAD or OKR ritual that we have perform that nobody is actually looking at closely or getting value from. The old performance review process was involved, but it at least felt useful in a lot of ways.
Layoffs coupled with highest-ever profits. Google has literally never made more money than it is currently making. Layoffs are sudden, frustrating, and feel unmotivated when the company has more money than God. I get that Google needs to keep showing higher and higher profits to keep the line going up, but living in a world where "fuck, now we need to replan 2024" keeps happening while posting record numbers on earnings calls is dispiriting.
AI Mania. LLMs are clearly useful tools, but it doesn't feel (to me) like the company is seeking to apply them where they are most useful. It feels instead like the company is shouting "AI is the future" and demanding that it be shoved into everything. The effect on me is that I need to defend to my director and/or VP why my particular product isn't just going all in on Gemini.
All of the above has also caused a bunch of people who've been around for a long time and are deeply skilled, knowledgeable, and who exhibit the culture of 2016 Google to leave. They take some of that old culture with them.
Ultimately, I stay because I've got a remote position and high pay and my day to day work is pretty enjoyable and I'm planning on retiring in the not too distant future anyway.
I took a 50% paycut to quit working in advertising because I think it is a profoundly evil and useless industry. I have never regretted it, and you wouldn't have, either.
When I worked at Big Bank we had this junior kid, who finished both law school and made a CS degree. One of the smartest guys with whom I worked. Me and other lead made a huge effort to put him on a fast track and promote him to a senior role to match salary to his contributions.
Shortly after he decided to leave because, as he put it, he wasn't comfortable working for this evil company and decided to move to a NGO. We haven't spoke too much about it, but I feel it could be even more than 50%.
For a while I thought of him as my personal hero.
I too worked in ad, games, and ended up in big co.
He threw it all away for the greater good.
What a champ.
I've met him few years later, at a annual meetup of ex Bank workers and he was bascially begging for recomendations anywhere because he ran out of money.
I still don't make as much as I did in advertising - a decade ago - and I live perfectly comfortably, on my own, in a two bedroom apartment, in one of the most liveable cities in the world (Melbourne) and I work for a not for profit. I don't eat as much caviar as I used to, I guess.
I think there are plenty of people in the world who look upwards and consider themselves poor when they're on six figures. Maybe this kid wasn't as smart as you thought.
I think that's definitely how people who work for immoral industries frame their need to work there. In my experience, however, it isn't people working in AI who can't find another job that would allow them to pay rent.
If you're a minimum wage worker with no education and no other prospects working for an arms manufacturer - I forgive all sins.
I think experiences like this provide a framework for us to confront and then move on from problems we are avoiding. the same goes for tarot or self help books or religions or even any abstract processes.
we inscribe ourselves into the narrative and populate it (subconsciously?) with our biggest issues. The narrative plays out and provides us with solutions to our conundrum. I believe this is how religions, cults, management paradigms (and even computer science design patterns) and are born.
All of it is just a trick we play on ourselves to get out of analysis paralysis.
Why does it seem so uncommon to not look for personal fulfillment through one's employment?
What I work on is so boring, but I'm grateful for a paycheck of which I'm objectively well-paid. I put in an honest 8 hours of work per day, I get free food and workout one hour every day. Overall I'm pretty happy, even though my work is neither fulfilling or will make me rich. I have no desire to think I'm above getting a paycheck, I tried earning money on my own and it was so hard, I appreciate my paymasters very much.
Since she said she was in charge of Google Cloud's docs:
This was my recent experience when trying to use Google GCP to deploy a simple node docker application:
1. Google search, wade though SEO spam, 3 links on companies trying to sell me deployment products built on top of GCP, 2 paywalled Medium articles, and 3 out of date blog posts. Nothing I tried worked. -3 hours
2. Go to the GCP Developer documentation and feel like I'm opening up a course. Spent 2 hours looking around and reading, can't find the right commands, and the tutorial I found is out of date and doesn't work. -2 hours
3. Come back from lunch and decide to ask Google Gemini, who promptly replies with what looks like the answer but is really just made up. I correct it, and it even admits it made up an API and command line switch, only to give me more fake info. -30 min
4. Head to ChatGPT, which couldn't give me the right info (out of date from last year and obviously scraped from prior blog posts I read). -20 min
A management training course I took 20 years ago said when your personal values were out of step with the company then you had to leave for your own mental health. I've thought about that a lot since.
This had been eating at me for a while before I eventually got fired for essentially being burntout and unproductive. I thought I could persevere through it as the companies values changed to no longer match my own, but I couldn't.
It's better to leave as long as that option is available to you.
I think surely the implied bit is 'enough out of step', and then the whole 'draw the rest of the owl' thing is figuring out where that line is (and what constitutes 'values') and if it's been crossed?
There's so much I would do/have done differently if I had carte blanche, but it's not my startup, and no reason to think I would have done as well nevermind better, it's easy to judge from the position of not being bothered to go out on my own.
I'm certainly not going to be giving any seminars on mental health, but I don't think mine would have benefited from just abandoning anything I didn't completely agree with.
Not to suggest the actual advice you got and the way you mean it was as lacking nuance as that.
The advice went mainly to the command role. You have a duty of care up and down. If you find you're being asked to make command decisions to underlings, despite having advocated otherwise to above, you have to ask yourself if you're in a good place making others do things you don't believe in.
These are fair points. And, "leave" shouldn't be the first choice. The point I think was that some level of "against my better judgement" was tolerable but a sustained, ongoing "I do not align with this decision and I feel sick having to implement it" was not good for you as an individual.
I had to learn this the hard way, unfortunately. After years of my worldview being spat on and openly mocked I got to the point where my mental health plummeted. What made it strange was that management really liked me due to my status as an SME and having global impact. But the daily company culture was completely at odds with me.
So I had to make the decision to leave. Turns out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made so far my in career.
I learned this truth in the School of Hard Knocks, and now I live by it. It's why there's a lengthy list of companies that I will never be willing to work at, and it's also why I'm in favor of probationary periods: you often can't tell if a company is out of step with your values until you start working there.
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
What that management training course said is true only in a world without camaraderie, solidarity, and collegiality. I wonder if "out of step with the company" necessarily means your peers and colleagues, or shareholders and executives?
Leave. I’ve never known employees to override the company. More likely you are all a bunch of good guys committing war crimes together. Is that much better?
Leave. You can always hire them/work with them again later (chain hiring of teams is a very common thing even if you're not at a high level), but if you burn out while you're alongside them they might shift their opinion of you...
You should probably leave, because odds are good they're not thinking the same way you're thinking. The mutual aspect is critical; it's a Prisoner's Dilemma.
A society of constant, unthinking defectors, on the other hand, is unsustainable.
You can always hang out with them if you're all in the same area. My experience has been that as long as you filter for good work culture when applying for jobs you'll find a place with good coworkers.
They might be friends, but more often than not, coworkers are NPCs you’ll never hear from again after separating from the org. Certainly keep friends, but don’t sabotage yourself for some mistaken idea of collective and shared struggle. It’s just a job.
> NPCs you’ll never hear from again after separating from the org
Isn't this also on you to maintain those relationships if they're people you care about? And on the same note, if you care about those people you can find ways to keep in touch, like starting a regular group activity.
How much effort would you expect in the current macro? Absolutely, effort is required to maintain relationships, and one must evaluate who is and isn’t worth the investment of time and effort. Some are worth it, some are frankly not. Not from an ROI perspective, but meeting you half way in an adult relationship.
Not many people are willing to put the effort in, in my experience. YMMV. I wish others more favorable outcomes.
I mean good for the author if they find peace through this.
In practice, it looks like they went to a meditation / mindfulness kind of event, felt like their AI work is evil, were very impacted, and left.
It comes across as a bit of drama. The view that AI is evil is very common, and it's not like Google's AI efforts are particularly more leaning towards evil than any other AI effort.
I suspect the same would have been said about "tech" in general a couple of years ago and the same article could have been written.
The author declares to the audience that he works in "AI" and thus becomes the symbol of their fascination, when in fact he's merely a technical writer.
He seems to relish the attention. The whole article feels pretentious and performative.
If I can just repeat this back to you: A guy went to a performance he hadn't read anything about, run by a self-described clown, and your takeaway is that it was a "performative self-help group"? A clown.
It appears like the other people in the audience knew why they were there. Perhaps the person who suggested it to the OP figured they could benefit from it, but didn't want to tell them to seek out a therapist.
I don't think I would because it's quite vague and metaphorical. But it may not even happen to me, certainly not by Google because I'd never work for them. Hence my question...
In good faith, (as someone who's never made it into a FAANG, but who's severely burnt out before) I would speculate that one of the few ways an org could metaphorically do this, would be to threaten your ability to work for anyone else or in the country, which could take a variety of forms including holding your visa hostage or colluding with other companies to ensure you're unemployable.
Either way, being in this position would have massive hypothetical implications, especially if you have any dependents or real reason to fear for your life/future/health back in your home country.
In my past situations, I've used the comparison to being waterboarded—which would seem hyperbolic to anyone reading who's never experienced it, but feels pretty appropriate to me—since it wasn't quite as severe of an existential threat as having to leave the country, but it felt like I was metaphorically blindfolded and having buckets of water thrown in my face while I gasped for air, and the consequence of not just trying to keep breathing meant I'd likely spend the next year without an income and not be able to pay off long-standing debts that are ever-increasing with interest.
Edit: I meant to say that using waterboarding as a metaphor would seem hyperbolic to anyone who hasn't experienced their boss trying to metaphorically drown them, but not anyone who's actually been physically tortured in this way.
"When it happens to you"? Does this happen to all engineers, or even a majority? Isn't the percent who work at google under any circumstances much lower?
I've been there and it is a terrible place to be. unable to be productive where you are and simultaneously too exhausted mentally to extract yourself from it.
Hard to take this comment seriously since you won't even give a hint of what they did to you that was so bad. All you're telling us is you decided to stop working but still continue to collect a (presumably very very high) paycheck, as some well-deserved retribution.
What exactly is this point of this? Is it some form of virtue signaling or protest to deliberately waste both your and your employer's time? I don't think 1 person's temper tantrum, out of tens of thousands of engineers, "robs" Google of anything material.
So we agree that humans have the capacity to be evil. Presumably, it's their actions that make them evil. In that case, do you think it would be possible for an evil human to design a device that performed one of their evil actions for them, so that the device itself was also considered evil?
