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This guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000 ft. He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even

This guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000 ft. He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name. I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field let alone what kind of actual technical details he knows. As far as I have known these sort of people, they wear suits, memorize buzz words that their reports talk about and take credit of work done by their reports. Such “AI exec” hire is no-op in my book and it isn’t a surprise that Apple has to run PR articles to justify their purchase of a suit.

te_chris 9y ago
How is this the top comment?
- telltruth 9y ago
  To begin with, it shouldn’t be hard to see that this article is written by Apple PR and then handed over to journalists. This guy was never Google’s AI chief, that person - if there is one - is Jeff Dean. It’s strange to see Apple parading around a suit who basically managed hodge podge of projects at Google and calling him Google’s AI chief. Go ask around anyone who has anything to do with AI and drop his name and you will get blank stares.
  - hmm_really 9y ago
    Yep PR release, help keep shareholders happy. However I would argue hiring a 'suit' who was CTO for a reputable knowledge based AI company 8 years ago, and since been in a strategic position during Googles recent progress is more valuable to Apple at this time than a well published researcher.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  The mods were asleep.
gutnor 9y ago
That's funny to see the whole range of opinion about management on HN. It varies from this one, the very bottom, the leech living of his team of engineers, to Elon Musk, the engineering genius whose team(s) is acknowledged at best as an afterthought.
- bgroins 9y ago
  The irony being that Musk pushed the original engineers out of Tesla and took credit for their work.
DeusExMachina 9y ago
Some people on HN seem to constantly despise any manager in a company that is not a technical person. Whether it's a majority or not is hard to tell, but it's a conspicuous group of people for sure looking at upvoted comments of the sort. The theory seems to be that all these companies work only because of their engineers. Management is just useless. They are just "people with suits, that memorize buzz words take credit for the work of others". With all such incompetent people in high position, one has to wonder how these companies seem to survive for so long. Maybe, just maybe, they are not so incompetent and raise to those positions because of merits. Maybe engineering skils are not the only needed ones. It seems to me that this culture is just based on resentment for the people that are higher in a hierarchy. From this point of view, the only way to feel good is to disparage them and assume they are there only because of the "corruption of the system".
- telltruth 9y ago
  No, my friend. I have lived under and interacted with enough suits at big 5 that I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time. There have been suits who never actually tried out the product they supposedly owned and preached to outside world. I am not kidding you. They literally had no account in the system. Most suits had no clue where source code existed for their product and even never had read documentation that their customers had to suffer through. Their known contribution included setting up exec retreats were people are supposed to tell them about what needs to be done and then they go away with “blessing” the plan that got surfaced after their reports fought it out. Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners. Another was to do budgets and when things go red (or pressured to show profits), do hard decisions, aka, throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs. Their next contribution was to present works of their teams when it got done and credit it to their leadership and vision. I am talking about CVP+ levels, BTW. It’s easy to identify these suits. Go to the leaf level employees in their group and ask them about actual contributions of their CVPs in their product that made a difference. If they cannot mention anything concrete other than blanket buzz words like “leadership”, “vision” etc (in case they cannot honestly answer) then you know you have a suit at the top. These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.
matthewaveryusa 9y ago
Agreed but there's also nothing better than good management -- makes a huge difference
- telltruth 9y ago
  Define “good management” as relavent to products requiring creative work. Most frequent definitions I have came across included “good listeners” and “delegators”. Much of these can also be accomplished by a statue of a monkey god.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    So find me a company with a statue of a monkey god as its leader? Even religions have (human) leaders.
zimpenfish 9y ago
I'm not in "the field" but this article certainly makes him sound like he is involved with machine learning / smart assistants / etc. Is this really a "shallow view from 35,000ft"? http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/john-giannandrea-google-artificial-intelligence/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/john-giannandrea-google-artifi...
- telltruth 9y ago
  This is classic PR release. If you are a suit (CVP+ levels) at big company, you are entitled to 2-4 PR releases like this. Lowly VPs typically get only 1 PR release per year. Typically the job of PR release is to portray as leader and for that purpose all work done by their underlings including past successes gets attributed to them. Journalists have neck for amplifying such portrayals. Now that you know this, hopefully you can point out such hit jobs in future.
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    Ok but you haven't answered my question - does he really have a "shallow view from 35,000ft"? You said "He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name" but the article I linked to seems to clearly indicate he is in the field - can you reconcile the two? You also said "I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field" but the linked article does seem to cover this. Is it wrong?
    - telltruth 9y ago
      What contribution are you talking about that is in the article? In the article, he talks about StarTrek and HAL5000. Anyone can do that talk, especially the posers. It’s typical zero-information PR article written by suit, written for suits. People in the field can intelligently talk about details of recent advances, exactly what techniques enabled them, what are the disadvantages, what can be realistically done etc. People in the field typically have written a paper or been part of at least failed experiments with technical contributions. He happened to be suit managing smart speaker project. That’s an administrative job and doesn’t count as being in the field, let alone “AI chief”.
jonhendry18 9y ago
My impression is that he's very technical, but his background seems to be in search, not AI. Perhaps there's AI work in his background that isn't evident just looking at his LinkedIn page. Perhaps he doesn't have a long-term AI background but has come up to speed since getting AI put on his plate at Google. Or, at least come up to speed sufficiently to be able to distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit.

te_chris 9y ago

How is this the top comment?

telltruth 9y ago
To begin with, it shouldn’t be hard to see that this article is written by Apple PR and then handed over to journalists. This guy was never Google’s AI chief, that person - if there is one - is Jeff Dean. It’s strange to see Apple parading around a suit who basically managed hodge podge of projects at Google and calling him Google’s AI chief. Go ask around anyone who has anything to do with AI and drop his name and you will get blank stares.
- hmm_really 9y ago
  Yep PR release, help keep shareholders happy. However I would argue hiring a 'suit' who was CTO for a reputable knowledge based AI company 8 years ago, and since been in a strategic position during Googles recent progress is more valuable to Apple at this time than a well published researcher.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
The mods were asleep.

gutnor 9y ago

That's funny to see the whole range of opinion about management on HN. It varies from this one, the very bottom, the leech living of his team of engineers, to Elon Musk, the engineering genius whose team(s) is acknowledged at best as an afterthought.

bgroins 9y ago
The irony being that Musk pushed the original engineers out of Tesla and took credit for their work.

DeusExMachina 9y ago

Some people on HN seem to constantly despise any manager in a company that is not a technical person. Whether it's a majority or not is hard to tell, but it's a conspicuous group of people for sure looking at upvoted comments of the sort. The theory seems to be that all these companies work only because of their engineers. Management is just useless. They are just "people with suits, that memorize buzz words take credit for the work of others". With all such incompetent people in high position, one has to wonder how these companies seem to survive for so long. Maybe, just maybe, they are not so incompetent and raise to those positions because of merits. Maybe engineering skils are not the only needed ones. It seems to me that this culture is just based on resentment for the people that are higher in a hierarchy. From this point of view, the only way to feel good is to disparage them and assume they are there only because of the "corruption of the system".

telltruth 9y ago
No, my friend. I have lived under and interacted with enough suits at big 5 that I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time. There have been suits who never actually tried out the product they supposedly owned and preached to outside world. I am not kidding you. They literally had no account in the system. Most suits had no clue where source code existed for their product and even never had read documentation that their customers had to suffer through. Their known contribution included setting up exec retreats were people are supposed to tell them about what needs to be done and then they go away with “blessing” the plan that got surfaced after their reports fought it out. Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners. Another was to do budgets and when things go red (or pressured to show profits), do hard decisions, aka, throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs. Their next contribution was to present works of their teams when it got done and credit it to their leadership and vision. I am talking about CVP+ levels, BTW. It’s easy to identify these suits. Go to the leaf level employees in their group and ask them about actual contributions of their CVPs in their product that made a difference. If they cannot mention anything concrete other than blanket buzz words like “leadership”, “vision” etc (in case they cannot honestly answer) then you know you have a suit at the top. These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

matthewaveryusa 9y ago

Agreed but there's also nothing better than good management -- makes a huge difference

telltruth 9y ago
Define “good management” as relavent to products requiring creative work. Most frequent definitions I have came across included “good listeners” and “delegators”. Much of these can also be accomplished by a statue of a monkey god.
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  So find me a company with a statue of a monkey god as its leader? Even religions have (human) leaders.

zimpenfish 9y ago

I'm not in "the field" but this article certainly makes him sound like he is involved with machine learning / smart assistants / etc. Is this really a "shallow view from 35,000ft"? http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/john-giannandrea-google-artificial-intelligence/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/john-giannandrea-google-artifi...

telltruth 9y ago
This is classic PR release. If you are a suit (CVP+ levels) at big company, you are entitled to 2-4 PR releases like this. Lowly VPs typically get only 1 PR release per year. Typically the job of PR release is to portray as leader and for that purpose all work done by their underlings including past successes gets attributed to them. Journalists have neck for amplifying such portrayals. Now that you know this, hopefully you can point out such hit jobs in future.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  Ok but you haven't answered my question - does he really have a "shallow view from 35,000ft"? You said "He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name" but the article I linked to seems to clearly indicate he is in the field - can you reconcile the two? You also said "I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field" but the linked article does seem to cover this. Is it wrong?
  - telltruth 9y ago
    What contribution are you talking about that is in the article? In the article, he talks about StarTrek and HAL5000. Anyone can do that talk, especially the posers. It’s typical zero-information PR article written by suit, written for suits. People in the field can intelligently talk about details of recent advances, exactly what techniques enabled them, what are the disadvantages, what can be realistically done etc. People in the field typically have written a paper or been part of at least failed experiments with technical contributions. He happened to be suit managing smart speaker project. That’s an administrative job and doesn’t count as being in the field, let alone “AI chief”.

jonhendry18 9y ago

My impression is that he's very technical, but his background seems to be in search, not AI. Perhaps there's AI work in his background that isn't evident just looking at his LinkedIn page. Perhaps he doesn't have a long-term AI background but has come up to speed since getting AI put on his plate at Google. Or, at least come up to speed sufficiently to be able to distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit.