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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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 :-)
>> This doesn’t seem to exist in this case, which may simply be the deal breaker.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. The reason tests are valuable in these scenarios is they are actually a kind of system spec. LLMs can look at them to figure out how a system should (and should not) behave, and use that to guide the implementation.
I don’t see why regular specs (e.g. markdown files) could not serve the same purpose. Of course, most GitHub projects don’t include such files, but maybe that will change as time goes on.
Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.
Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.
I think it's a lot more complicated than anti-work vs. pro-work. The author is cautioning people against defining themselves by their level of productivity.
>> So the first request takes like 5s or something.
I haven't worked with IIS in more than five years, but couldn't you change some setting to infinity so the thread never sleeps... or something like that? I remember the "5 second" thing being a problem with commercial IIS apps we deployed, and that's always how we avoided it.
This "pause" would only happen for the first request after uploading fresh source code. This is not like Heroku or AWS Lambda. The compilation results were stored in a temporary folder, so you could restart the server and you wouldn't see the issue.
The solution was just to compile the app before deploying, as grandparent did.
Even back then the general consensus was that "not compiling" was a bad idea.
This feature dated back to the .NET 1.1 days and was a " web site" project vs a "web app" project. It operated much like PBP, in the sense you could ftp raw code and it just worked, but it could also just blow up in your face because the whole site was never compiled in one go.
>> Often you will get a request, sometimes (or quite often) you have no idea what is driving it, like for example "reduce rate limiting for xyz service."
At my company, we do not allow tickets that prescribe a solution. A ticket can only describe a problem or a need. The engineer is then responsible for starting a conversation with the stakeholder(s) to discuss which solution might work better for them. They then implement that solution.
I know that larger companies have multiple teams that sometimes create tickets in each others' queues. I think this is a mistake. In multi-team environments, requests should go through some sort of custodian or gatekeeper who is responsible for making sure the problem or need are documented fully. This person can be a product manager or a scrum master. It should not be an engineer, though.
I don’t know the circumstances but this sounds very wrong. The moment you find a problem with the foundation, you call professionals. DIY has its value but your story is well beyond DIY.
Heh, so I oversimplified that part of the story in my original post, for the sake of brevity.
You're right, one shouldn't DIY the foundation of ones house, unless you really know what you're doing(and honestly, not even then: it's too much work!)
I'm not sure it was clear in my original comment, but the 1840 I wrote in there is the original construction year of the house. The technique my foundation was built with hasn't been used for a little over a century: Not a lot of construction firms around with experience in it! And it's not easy to replace a foundation, because, well, it's under the house! Luckily repairing turned out to be possible(simplifying again, sorry!), and not particularly difficult in technical terms. It just wasn't easy either, but in physical terms.
I did have a professional "building conservationist"(rough translation) over for consultation. Basically he looked over what was, I told him my plan, and then he told me what to do instead. (I actually wasn't far off - I had spent a lot of time reading up on it before he came - he just added a few (possibly vital) details I hadn't thought of)
The conservationist did have a construction firm and offered their services, but we had budgeted for a kitchen upgrade, and while we had some margins in the original plan, with the extra work we got surprised with, we were strained to afford the materials. Just the ground insulation material cost almost as much as the new IKEA kitchen furniture!
The good thing in all this is that the new construction should, in theory, according to the conservationist who actually does know these things, probably last a couple of centuries!
Not everyone has the means to call in a “professional” and pay the fully loaded price without trying to trim some fat. It sounds to me like they were taking the fat out of the foundation job by mining out a space for the repair. What he’s describing is probably between the mid five figures and the low six figures to get a professional to do. I don’t know many people who could come up with the down payment for a construction loan on that.
I also took on a remodel under similar conditions and I think that the decision they undertook was likely very reasonable at the time. The outcome, in retrospect, would be obvious as well. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and finish something.
Agree completely. The other aspect for me is that LLMs make me unafraid to take on initiatives in areas I know nothing about and/or am uninterested in pursuing due to discrepancy in effort vs reward. As a result I end up doing more and learning more.
Well, urban areas tend to be much more expensive to live in, especially in California. And most people don’t work in tech and enjoy relatively good job prospects.
Either that, or they don’t have money to throw at dumb bets.