Thread

1. GodelNumbering · 1785950655 · focus · HN ↗

   So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner

   And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL

   Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen

   1. frollogaston · 1785953588 · focus · HN ↗

      Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

      1. Cidan · 1785972523 · focus · HN ↗

         Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.

         1. arthurjj · 1786038825 · focus · HN ↗

            I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc.

            But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

            1. ragall · 1786051031 · focus · HN ↗

               > I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated.

               In 2015, the SRE org started project "Prod 2020", with the goal of unifying the SRE stacks and modernizing the web tools. It was quite successful.

               > But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.

               I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

               1. arthurjj · 1786055971 · focus · HN ↗

                  > I'm an SRE and I think it's quite likely the best infra language I've ever seen.

                  I only worked with 4-5 SREs and they all grudgingly tolerated it. What did you like about it, compared to other infra languages you've used professionally?

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.