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Ah yes Google, the place where as possibly the world's first or second (full-time) CUDA programmer, with 14 filed patents, and the world's fastest implementatio
by scottlegrand2 8y ago
Ah yes Google, the place where as possibly the world's first or second (full-time) CUDA programmer, with 14 filed patents, and the world's fastest implementations of molecular Dynamics (CUDA ports of Folding@Home and AMBER), I was thrown into blind allocation by Amit Singhal and I was told point-blank by Jeff Dean that GPUs would never serve a role at Google because the Intel processor roadmap was just about to steamroll them out of existence. Yep that's exactly how it played out, right?
Anyway, they have PIPs too. My slapstick comedy of 4 months there was nothing compared to the horror shows others endured there. That's how I ended up at Amazon in the first place and my first four years there were actually pretty good. It wasn't until the New York times article that things started going downhill there in my opinion.
- nilkn 8y agoI don't understand what your point is. Yes, they have PIPs. No, that's not at all the same thing as forced attrition. I don't know about this personal drama with two particular programmers. I'm not sure it's relevant.
- mabbo 8y ago> It wasn't until the New York times article that things started going downhill there in my opinion +1 to this. The reaction to that article was, in my personal view, the wrong one.
- eppsilon 8y agoDo you mean Amazon management reacted incorrectly to it? How so?
- mabbo 8y agoAs an Amazonian, I think some of the criticism was entirely valid- just not most of it. But the reaction, the changes that occurred, made things worse (again, imho), not better.
- Yhippa 8y agoWhat got worse? In terms of reaction to the article by Amazon I'd think positive actions or inaction were more likely than negative actions.
- pinewurst 8y agoWhy did the NYT article have a negative impact?
- Jweb_Guru 8y agoI heard horror stories about Amazon many years before the NYT article. The idea that Amazon suddenly went downhill afterwards is ludicrous.
- nindalf 8y agoYour response to "companies can thrive without forced attrition" is "Jeff Dean was wrong about a thing once". Does that make sense to you?
- scottlegrand2 8y agoI wasn't responding to those exact points but rather to the hagiography and idealization of Google as a place without forced attrition. Google has great food and great perks, but it was one of my worst employment experiences of my entire professional career. Amazon, warts-and-all, was far better to me and for me. And I haven't even mentioned the time in 2014 when the manager of Android Store recommendations asked to speak with me and so I showed up on the googleplex, only to have him walk me out of the building to the swamp behind the googleplex to tell me that yes I'm on some sort of blacklist and he would make an exception to bring me in if I were willing to work on these recommendations. Now this is really interesting and nearly industrial espionage because I was secretly working on Amazon product recommendations at the time and he should not have known I had any such experience because we had just won our first web lab. It all ended when I asked him if I could use GPUs for this and he said no. So my point is just because they don't have forced attrition doesn't make them a great employer across the board because WTF was that about?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]