Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

It’s so disingenuous for Google to brand these efforts as “democratizing AI.” It is precisely the opposite.

This is classic commoditization of your complement. On one hand, Google is pushing to centralize the integration, data management and computing platforms for machine learning, so that these things become as much of a commodity as possible.

On the other side, they are offering massive compensation packages or acqui-hiring as much AI talent as they can, not really because they have useful work for these folks to do, but to artificially reduce the supply of statistical algorithm talent, making their consulting and pre-packaged AI solutions go up in value in a manner that is pretty much the same as De Beers pushing silos full of diamonds to keep diamond prices artificially high.

This is very much the opposite of democratization, and my advice to anyone considering services like this or like Amazon’s out of the box models, don’t do it!

If you think it’s going to save you money over paying competitively to get your own in-house machine learning staff, you’re wrong, and you’re going to waste probably hundreds of thousands of dollars before you learn you’re wrong.

  >> It’s so disingenuous for Google to brand 
  >> these efforts as “democratizing AI.”

Exactly. NVIDIA building fast consumer GPUs and CUDA/cuDNN is "democratizing AI". FB (and Google) releasing open source deep learning toolkits is "democratizing AI". People releasing reproducible research code and datasets are "democratizing AI".

Cloud vendor lock-in and proprietary hardware, software, _and_ datasets is not in any way "democratizing" anything.

  >> not really because they have useful work for these folks to do

This, however, is where your argument flies off the rails, IMO. They offer this much because there's very limited supply of people who can do both research and development at the same time. Meaning, they don't just write papers, but also can code pretty well. It's usually one or the other, and hardly ever both. And the total in this case is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I agree with you that the supply of those workers is low (I am one of them! And hiring more is extremely hard!) ... but it doesn’t mean Google / FB / etc have meaningful work for them. A friend of mine was hired as a senior ML person at Facebook and ended up working solely on cartoon avatars and page responsiveness / latency optimization (not using ML).

When he raised the issue to managers that he wasn’t working on anything related to his specialization (deep learning for NLP) and this made him unhappy, the response was essentially, “Get in line.” I’ve heard similar stories about Google from a former boss who had been a long time manager in Google.

You essentially get paid super well to be put out to pasture so that your skill isn’t being used by other companies (leading to more demand for Google’s managed AI solutions).

In order to get career-developing work, you have to play political games or get hired in a non-standard way, like acqui-hire or poached, where you can negotiate your projects as part of your hiring conditions. Eventhen it will probably only be respected for a short time while it’s convenient for Google, and they’ll find a way to manage you out of that situation when they want to.

There are some tremendously talented AI engineers in places like Google. Some of them create awesome products and tools. A bunch of others sit around and atrophy working on dumb shit locked in golden handcuffs just to ensure they’re not on the market and able to help a company build things in-house more cheaply / more optimally than if they needed to buy it through some managed services through Google.

As an ex-Googler, that's not how you're supposed to operate at those companies. You find something you like to do, talk to the team, ensure the other team has open spots and would like to take you on, and move your shit from one desk to the other. Done. You're working on your specialization, if that's what you like to do.

Discussing stuff with your manager is utterly pointless because your interests aren't really aligned. You want to do something else. Your manager wants you to do whatever you're doing now because finding a replacement for you is a bit of a pain in the ass. She gets no brownie points if you leave.

It is true that Google has a ton of PhDs who just copy one protobuffer into another and browse memegen all day while earning half a million dollars a year. But they also have a ton of PhDs who do meaningful work, too. It's not really Google's problem that someone can't be bothered to look around and find something meaningful for themselves to do. Or to be more exact, it is a problem _for_ Google, because there are a lot of people who can be deployed in higher leverage occupations, but not one that Google itself can solve, because one of the main tenets of how they operate is _nobody tells you what to do_. You're supposed to figure it out on your own. A lot of people can't deal with that.

That might be how Valve works, but I’m quite sure it’s not how Apple / Facebook / Google do.

Just move your shit to another desk and join whatever team you want with out talking to your manager or hr or updating your goals?

Yeah... nah.

Well yeah, you have to tell your manager of course, but _they can't stop you_ from moving to another team.

Don't know about Apple or Amazon but Google/FB are like that. If you're very senior, a few months (no more than 6 no matter how senior) delay might be imposed so that you hand off your stuff, if you're less senior, a few weeks is usually enough. It is also expected (at Google, don't know about FB) that you'll stay on each team for at least a year, and that you'll wind down your obligations in an orderly fashion, which I think you'll agree is not unreasonable.

But _nobody_ will force you to do work you really don't like to do. In contrast, at most other companies it's easier to get a job _at another company_ than to move to another team.

There are many ways at Google to stop people from moving teams. For me it was a code yellow. I am hazy, but it was either referred to as indentured servitude or more politely stated as such by our senior director who expected 3 year stints. This was at MTV, probably a toxic environment due to CxO visibility.

Code yellow is by its very nature a finite-duration thing. I've never been a part of one that was longer than a month. It's reasonable to not allow transfers for the duration, if it helps to resolve the code yellow IMO.

We had 4-6 month cyclical code yellows. It's not unlike the game where 20% projects could only be within the same team without significant blowback. Things are only reasonable when used as designed, which is not how all of Google operates for everyone. You can talk in the general sense, but you cannot speak definitively especially when such actions are blessed by the executive team.

It's certainly been my experience. I mean not exactly that level, but yeah. I told my manager the work I was doing was boring, and that I'd consider switching teams, and he worked to find work that was more interesting to me.

Then I also started working with one of the other teams I find interesting, and I now spend (more than) 20% of my time working with that team on various things.

Googler here. This is how it works. If you find a team with an open position you want to work on, and you and the teams hiring manager agrees it's a good fit, your manager can't do anything to stop it.

I did something like this myself. I found the team I liked, talked to the team a bit about the work I'd be doing, and at my next one on one with my manager I told him I'd be leaving the team in two weeks.

There’s a difference between an orderly discussion leading to change of team/focus in a timely manner and just doing whatever you want whenever you want, which is the point I was making.

You can certainly find yourself a better team fit and organise to move to it proactively, that’s true of any organisation, with greater or lesser degrees of red tape.

...but the parent assertion was basically, if you don’t like your job, just get up and walk off and drop your stuff on some other interesting teams table. Job done!

Don’t do that.

Nah dear HN reader, don't move the goalposts now. That's not what I said at all. And it's not true of _any_ organization. It's actually _not_ true of most companies I worked for.

I just want to say that if this describes anyone that's reading this, then please join us at AWS. We're doing a ton of ML, and your talents won't be wasted.

Sitting around and stagnating your career for a nice salary is a profoundly short-sighted thing to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com