[whimsicalism]

that is the media narrative but not at all what happened.

Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of people who will just rest and vest.

So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest & vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top google researchers said yes.

[sjwhevvvvvsj]

It’s not just media narrative. The culture was eroding for years, as you note, but the dam finally broke and they went full IBM/Kodak. Or in other words, “slowly at first, then all at once”.

[whimsicalism]

Most of the recent media coverage has been resting&vesting employee backlash against the fact that Google is making them do work again. This is a cultural shift, but not away from the culture that made Google great - the original culture was grad-school, not rest and vest, and that died years ago.

[camgunz]

Haven't one or two long-time Googlers left or gotten laid off and then written strong criticisms of Google? They don't sound like rest & vest (also should say I don't super agree w/ this term) to me, they sound like people who loved Google, were there a long time, and watched the culture decay.

[whimsicalism]

I’m not super invested in the term “rest&vest” so it is whatever.

But touché - many of the critiques are being written by super talented and impactful people. But I do not think those critiques are necessarily incompatible with what I am saying.

There is a very real and very frustrating (if you work there and want to be impactful) phenomenon in these tech companies of people resting on their laurels.

[camgunz]

I've given this a little thought and I definitely agree. But to bracket a little, I've worked in places that were super mission-driven, but also other places with a lot of "clock punchers". I don't judge anyone. I think people's motivations are super personal. Indeed who am I to say clock punching or resting and vesting is unethical or immoral or whatever. You can show me someone who's super dedicated to the cause, working extra hours, mentoring others, spearheading new projects, saving old projects, and I can show you someone who's effectively abandoned their family or mortgaged their future health. You can show me someone collecting a $500k/yr salary at FAANG and doing very little actual work, and I can show you someone with two parents in nursing homes and a partner with MS.

That said, the places I've worked where there was a shared belief in the importance of our work were exhilarating. But, the way they achieved that was essentially by getting rid of bullshit. You know, no one's building their own web framework or writing their own in-house query language (you know, unless you really have to). No one's spending an hour of everyone's time figuring out what to name this class.

I think we haven't figured out how to keep that energy once you build a company big enough that's got something to lose. Suddenly it totally feels worth it to have a meeting about changing the shade of blue in the logo from this to that, because what if revenue declines 0.1% and that's $40m and then layoffs? One of the amazing things about Google was that it somehow seemed to keep that energy well into becoming a tech behemoth; it felt like they defied gravity, like their commitment to not doing evil and open web standards--or maybe we thought the web itself had ended evil corporations like Microsoft forever and Google was its avatar--had allowed it to overcome this corporate version of Fermi's paradox.

Whatever. Maybe this is just a bunch of word salad haha. All I'm saying is it takes two to tango, and just like I'm sure there's a non-zero level of personal culpability responsible for this phenomenon, I'm sure there's a non-zero level of systemic and cultural cause too.

[myle]

Even if we assume that all of Google is based on ML algorithms (not true, given problems like serving, front end, data collection, ...), ML itself is 90% SWE work.

[whimsicalism]

I don't understand how your comment interacts with mine, but to be clear I was not saying that everyone who isnt in ML is not working or contributing value or anything like that.