14 ms·

Google's top quantum scientist explains why he resigned

225 points by jonbaer 7y ago

mturmon 7y ago
What an interesting and apparently frank interview. Martinis was the UCSB professor whose lab setup was basically purchased by Google. Apparently he and Hartmut Neven, another somewhat legendary figure, had “creative differences” and Martinis has left Google. But they also talk about Google’s big plans for quantum. Thanks for posting this!
ohazi 7y ago
> But Hartmut didn’t back me up and wanted to go ahead and try both. This seems very Google, and not in a good way. I'm reminded of when they tried to launch Allo and Duo on the same day, causing both to flop. Google is the poster-child of the company that has the resources to try everything, but that lacks the conviction or the leadership to actually make a decision.
- B-Con 7y ago
  Allo and Duo were complimentary apps, their simultaneous release was necessary and had nothing to do with their adaption rate.
  - downerending 7y ago
    Meh. They both passed into my brain, confused me for 60s, and were immediately lost from my consciousness. I think Duo might be a failed Zoom competitor, except that it also seems to be a sketch two-factor product. Anyway, I'm waiting for Allo+, whatever that might be.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    Were they? Their screwed up the launch if that were the case...
  - ohazi 7y ago
    Sure, that's the official Google line. Meanwhile, everybody who actually tried to follow the launch was confused about why there were two, which ones did what, why there was no interoperability, why wasn't hangouts being replaced, "Mobile-first? More like mobile-only," and "Should we even bother? They're going to kill them both off in three years anyway." It absolutely did hurt the adoption rate -- It would have gone much better if Google management had announced one communication platform and committed to making it their bet going forward. They were hedging, and it was obvious. Nobody wants to pay switching costs to use a new thing if the creator isn't even confident in their new thing.
    - flattone 7y ago
      Exactly. I think most employees were even confused mid cheers. Really when we say google today we are 100% not talking about the place we are remembering.
    - netsharc 7y ago
      As far as I understood, they had 2 teams making the 2 communication apps. The simultaneous release date would explain that they were competing with each other, and they didn't want the other team to get the head start on the market. It was probably left to the PR department to sort the problem out and make a press release that made the company look sane. Imagine if Microsoft had an Excel team and a "Spreadsheetr" team...
      - JorgeGT 7y ago
        I for one can imagine a Microsoft that has Skype, Skype for Business, Teams chat, Yammer, Kaizala...
        bathtub365 7y ago
        Live Meeting, MSN Messenger, Lync, Office Communicator
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        > Imagine if Microsoft had an Excel team and a "Spreadsheetr" team... You mean as in a "Microsoft Office" team and a "Microsoft Works" team? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
  - gjvc 7y ago
    Freudian slip here... I expect the "adaption rate" was indeed as low as the "adoption rate" :-)
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  did the other guys wiring end up working tho?
olau 7y ago
The pattern seems familiar, take a succesful, self-propelled creative inventor, typically an engineer kind of person, put that person in a group where they need to submit to ideas of others, and things eventually go wrong. It's not that unusual to see a founder get excluded even if that person was arguably the primary driver, the deteriorating relations don't allow the situation to continue and the alternative is blowing up the organization.
- npunt 7y ago
  This just as easily applies to artists, its definitely not inherent to engineering.
  - HPsquared 7y ago
    In a way, engineers are a type of artist.
    - lisper 7y ago
      Yes, but management wants them to be assembly-line workers. A lot of organizational tension in tech companies can be traced back to botched attempts to force-fit artistic pegs into assembly-line holes.
      - emeraldd 7y ago
        Honestly, this is probably a big part of the reason I've really come to dislike things like Scrum and what Agile looks like now. My experience has been that these methodologies tend to treat devs as fungible cogs which fits very much with the idea of engineers/developers as assembly line workers.
        lisper 7y ago
        Exactly this. Management wants every part of the production process to be easily replaceable, including the people. This is why management loves, e.g., Java. Java gives you a lot of the benefits of Lisp (GC, objects, exceptions) but without any of the features that facilitate writing beautiful elegant code. So Java code is ugly and festooned with boilerplate and using it is an incredibly painful experience (for a Lisp programmer). But if I'm a manager and I have a Java programmer working for me and one day I don't like the cut of his jib, I can fire him and instantly replace him with another Java programmer, because they are a dime a dozen and one is as good as another. As a manager, that one feature dominates all the cruft and the horror, because I don't have to deal with the cruft, I hire you to deal with it for me. And your replacability gives me power over you. So you type boilerplate while I play golf. It would be a pretty good deal if I enjoyed golf as much as I enjoy writing Lisp code.
s9w 7y ago
Nice that they actually published the transcript.
ncmncm 7y ago
Great, but it didn't actually tell us much of anything. What would have been so bad about trying his way and also somebody else's way? How does no longer being equipped to try his way make anything better? If the other way won't work, how can Google's project make any progress?
voxl 7y ago
Reading the transcript, he comes off as a shitty boss that refuses to give people independence in this group to try new things. It's his way or the highway. He hides this behind him being a "rare" kind of optimist when really he seems to just ignore the important social factors in being a leader.
- high_derivative 7y ago
  This is not my reading at all. If you have ever spent time in a FAANG research org - it can be incredibly frustrating to see so much lack of focus. Everybody does what they want. This is not an issue for most e.g. ML research (my org) because there is so much money to go around, and researchers will leave if they are too constrained. For hardware/critical projects or customer retention, this is very much an issue. Just look at how the TF ecosystem developed API wise. There can literally be a project with enormous importance for an ecosystem where multiple teams under one VP do the same thing slightly differently. VPs do nothing and have no opinion on the details. Internal and external users get frustrated because there is no clarity. If you do a project where you have resources for just one shot in a given timespan, this simply won't cut it.
  - pricechild 7y ago
    TF?
    - reverendbyte 7y ago
      Possibly TensorFlow
    - DSingularity 7y ago
      TensorFlow. The API is outrageous.
      - cossray 7y ago
        I'm not quite a dev, but I have always felt there's something awful with the TF ecosystem. I thought I was the only one 'struggling' with it and that probably there was some fundamental insight I was missing.
_236436532 7y ago
I almost joined his lab around 2014 as a PostDoc (without knowing about the Google deal, which was not yet official I think) but eventually I stopped the application process because I wanted to pursue my own startup instead. Today I kind of regret not having stayed in quantum computing as my startup was only modestly successful and as I would probably have been much better off working for Google, in retrospect. I'm working on my next startup now but I keep wondering if I should go back to quantum computing eventually, I'm not sure though if I'm still relevant as my PhD dates back to 2013 already (I had good results though and did it in a renowed QC group on superconducting qubits).
- troelsSteegin 7y ago
  An observer can't tell if you are successful or not. But are not Schrödinger's cat questions typical in quantum computing?
  - _236436532 7y ago
    I guess :) Just interesting sometimes to wonder where one would be if one would have chosen differently at a given point in life.
- _8091149529 7y ago
  As someone who started off in "quantum" in similar conditions around the same time, but decided to stay on the academic researcher track: A great deal of the recent progress has been on honing, parallelizing, and automating the same processes one used to do by hand/at small scale in 2013. You'll probably instantly recognize most of the things going on in the lab, and could become productive on a short schedule. However, I'd be wary of the medium-term prospects of the field: The discord between the perceived and actual capabilities of the hardware remains as big as ever. You could consider re-entering the field if you're happy contributing to incremental technological advances relevant to other researchers. Progress with meaningful societal or economic impact is probably much further off.
  - _236436532 7y ago
cletus 7y ago
Let me guess: before anyone asked about his employment status he was both working and not working at Google?
McTossOut 7y ago
John Martinis speaking at a conference on "Google AI Quantum" last quarter. https://youtu.be/K_H_mbSH45s https://youtu.be/K_H_mbSH45s
ykevinator 7y ago
I still don't know why he resigned
seemslegit 7y ago
> Yes, that's right. I was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and we had government funding and were doing quite well. Google got interested and my group and I came over to work at Google, basically because we both wanted to build a useful quantum computer. So basically US taxpayers were involuntary seed investors who funded the highest initial risk to achieve validation and proceeded to be wiped out at Round A by Google.
- rapsey 7y ago
  Yes that is how it works and it works well. Government should fund pie in the sky research projects and private industry should take that and make products. It is the history of Silicon Valley and it produced quite a bit of wealth don't you think?
- papeda 7y ago
  What would you prefer? That anyone who receives government research funding be barred from entering the private sector later?
  - seemslegit 7y ago
    That the public maintains its share in the upside ? For example by having Google put in money back into the NSF budget
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      This is called taxes. Maybe not as high as they should be, but such things exist.
    - jerome-jh 7y ago
      USCB probably applied for patents that will bring money back once products are actually on the market.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  No, this is exactly why Universities exist. As idea machines that occasionally turn out something that changes the world. As well as educating our (elite) children.
909832 7y ago
Can anyone describe what the research scientist interviews are like in a FAANG company? How are they similar or different than the SWE interviews?
- high_derivative 7y ago
  (FAANG researcher): The first few tech rounds tend to be the same. Then there is a set of research interviews and usually a research job talk. The main observation is that hiring researchers, after passing basic tech rounds, is much more about taste and how people subjectively rate someone's research. It's insanely competitive, but in a sense it is also easier than pure SWE because there are not as many whiteboard hurdles to pass. You just can't really leetcode your way into the role, without a good track record with really interesting research most teams will not be interested.
  - 909832 7y ago
    Do interviews tend to include system design, if the applicant doesn't have industry experience? Been curious about this too: do FAANG companies hire, say, professors with strong research records, but poor coding skills? I always wondered if everyone on these sort of team were all solid coders, or if there were people there that are exceptions. Based on your experience do FAANG companies tend to be invested in basic research, or more product focused research?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - high_derivative 7y ago
      System design is not a typical part of a research interview. Yes, they do. The rule of thumb is: The higher the level you are hired, the more wiggle room is there. A random PhD grad will need to pass the normal coding screens which are carried out by SWEs who do not know anything about the candidate. Last q depends on the FAANG org, everything exists. MS research is very pure, Amazon/Apple very applied, everything in between.
tibyat 7y ago
So he read a Thiel book recently and it now pervades his every answer to this interview? And his team had problems with his hyper-focusing? Funny coincidence. Honestly there's pretty much nothing being said in this interview. People don't get along sometimes.
- dawg- 7y ago
  >So he read a Thiel book recently and it now pervades his every answer to this interview? Yeah that was kind of annoying. Amazing how even a certifiable genius can fall so completely for such meaningless self-help bullshit
DeathArrow 7y ago
What I find weird is that a technology advances because public money are funding much of the research and innovation. And there comes a private company and gets whole teams and even patents and projects. Wouldn't it be fair that tax payers also get something in return of their funding?
- gcb0 7y ago
  That's a very reasonable and old idea, comrade.
- testaccount22 7y ago
  we get the technology
  - seamyb88 7y ago
    Which would be completely impossible to obtain without giving the profits to the rich. It wasn't science or engineering that built the modern world, it was privatisation. (end of sarcasm)We won't get the technology we want, we will get the technology Google wants us to have. We will get decades of fighting Google over their abuse of the technology. We will get an Edward Snowden releasing files to show how Google allowed Governments to spy on their own people, with the technology. Or just live in your bubble, whatever.
  - emsy 7y ago
    Oh yeah behind patents and embedded in corporate secrecy that is almost guaranteed to be irrecoverable once the people that created the technology leave or die. I don’t think cooperations are bad and they should be reimbursed for their expenses, but our current way of handling these things leaves a lot of room for improvement if our goal is to advance the cooperative future of humanity (which it should be).
    - 627467 7y ago
      The point of patents is to incentivize disclosure of knowledge in exchange for limited protection. I personally think that public institutions funding research that leads to patents should share benefits of said patents. I believe most operators of those public funds (ie. Universities) actually benefit from this most of the time. At least in major public European universities
stevespang 7y ago
Non paywalled access: https://outline.com/CnEsTN https://outline.com/CnEsTN
ckemere 7y ago
I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD and postdoc in a complex field are not hoping about being a cog in someone else's machine. In academia, I've observed that the sign that that a trainee is ready to move on to independence is that they begin to have disagreements with their mentor that don't reflect misunderstandings of fact, but rather proper, interesting diverging hypotheses. In this story, the wiring incident reminding me of this. The problem is that solving these sorts of hard problems require both leaders and workers. In this case, and many others, there is not an educational path for training people to be technicians with equivalent knowledge as a PhD (which is why they poached an academic lab to do this). Moreover, if there was a path, history has shown that the people that accept the follower role (rather than wanting intellectual leadership) are highly dispensable. (See, e.g., the optics industry moving laser fab to Malaysia.) It's also a problem in medicine - physicians resist loss of diagnostic or treatment control. Though in medicine, there are NPs and PAs, but they're generally treated with much less respect. I think it's interesting that he talks about how "he" Martinis was doing the wiring. Was he? I suspect he had a team working very hard with substantial responsibility, but...
- throwaway6734 7y ago
  Thank you for writing this!
- Matthias247 7y ago
  > I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD and postdoc in a complex field are not hoping about being a cog in someone else's machine. That's not limited to academia. In the industry (and even outside of tech) people who will have a sufficient understanding of how something works will at some point in time no longer purely want to follow orders, but want to drive things and innovate on their own. In this situations both sides - the current leaders and someone who wants more responsibility - need make some compromises in order to try to accomodate this interests.
leff_f 7y ago
I'm studying psychology and team dynamics and this is such a great example of conflict destroying the relationship. Want to share couple of thoughts on how we can avoid sacrificing the relationship. -I'm 'The responsible'. Yes, as leaders, we are responsible for the results, at the same time there are people above us who is responsible for the results more than us. The responsibility is never on the shoulders of a single person in the company. When higher-ups support anti-leaders (as in this case), they take on some of our responsibility, and the honest discussion about their expectations is required. There could be lots of reasons for them being not confident in me driving the team, and it would be very beneficial to get their feedback before proceeding. Our assumptions and using formal understanding of the roles is only helping to fuel the conflict. -The 'I know' trap. We really believe in our understanding of the future, it is always linear and always clear. At the same time, future we understand consists of 2 things: all the bad stuff happened to me before and all the good stuff happened to me before and depending on our feelings right now, we are projecting the mix of those 2 into the future. The question here is where is that 3rd category of all the thing that never happened to me? Where are the things I've never experienced? What if I don't know how this will play out? To me, creativity is something not known and something haven't been done before. Allowing ourselves to not know exactly how it will play out, helps us to keep an open mind and learn from the new experiences. In other words we are never 100% responsible for controlling everything around us and the world is a bit more complicated than we want to believe. Hoping this was useful! Happy Friday!
- ripsawridge 7y ago
  It was useful, thanks! I've definitely seen this in tech, esp. the latter case, which I've seen make smart people who deserve better miserable.
mleonhard 7y ago
> The Google plan is roughly to build a million-qubit system in about ten years, with sufficiently low errors to do error correction. Then at that point you will have enough error-corrected logical qubits that you can run useful, powerful algorithms that you now can't solve on a classical supercomputer. And maybe even at a few hundred qubits, with lower errors, it may be possible to do something special purpose. Can an expert please explain the applications of this? Specifically, are they expecting to break Bitcoin, forge signatures (break SHA), and decrypt old TLS traffic (break Diffie-Hellman) in 5-10 years?

225 points by jonbaer 7y ago

What an interesting and apparently frank interview. Martinis was the UCSB professor whose lab setup was basically purchased by Google. Apparently he and Hartmut Neven, another somewhat legendary figure, had “creative differences” and Martinis has left Google. But they also talk about Google’s big plans for quantum. Thanks for posting this!

ohazi 7y ago

> But Hartmut didn’t back me up and wanted to go ahead and try both. This seems very Google, and not in a good way. I'm reminded of when they tried to launch Allo and Duo on the same day, causing both to flop. Google is the poster-child of the company that has the resources to try everything, but that lacks the conviction or the leadership to actually make a decision.

B-Con 7y ago
Allo and Duo were complimentary apps, their simultaneous release was necessary and had nothing to do with their adaption rate.
- downerending 7y ago
  Meh. They both passed into my brain, confused me for 60s, and were immediately lost from my consciousness. I think Duo might be a failed Zoom competitor, except that it also seems to be a sketch two-factor product. Anyway, I'm waiting for Allo+, whatever that might be.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  Were they? Their screwed up the launch if that were the case...
- ohazi 7y ago
  Sure, that's the official Google line. Meanwhile, everybody who actually tried to follow the launch was confused about why there were two, which ones did what, why there was no interoperability, why wasn't hangouts being replaced, "Mobile-first? More like mobile-only," and "Should we even bother? They're going to kill them both off in three years anyway." It absolutely did hurt the adoption rate -- It would have gone much better if Google management had announced one communication platform and committed to making it their bet going forward. They were hedging, and it was obvious. Nobody wants to pay switching costs to use a new thing if the creator isn't even confident in their new thing.
  - flattone 7y ago
    Exactly. I think most employees were even confused mid cheers. Really when we say google today we are 100% not talking about the place we are remembering.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    As far as I understood, they had 2 teams making the 2 communication apps. The simultaneous release date would explain that they were competing with each other, and they didn't want the other team to get the head start on the market. It was probably left to the PR department to sort the problem out and make a press release that made the company look sane. Imagine if Microsoft had an Excel team and a "Spreadsheetr" team...
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      I for one can imagine a Microsoft that has Skype, Skype for Business, Teams chat, Yammer, Kaizala...
      - bathtub365 7y ago
        Live Meeting, MSN Messenger, Lync, Office Communicator
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      > Imagine if Microsoft had an Excel team and a "Spreadsheetr" team... You mean as in a "Microsoft Office" team and a "Microsoft Works" team? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
- gjvc 7y ago
  Freudian slip here... I expect the "adaption rate" was indeed as low as the "adoption rate" :-)
gameswithgo 7y ago
did the other guys wiring end up working tho?

olau 7y ago

The pattern seems familiar, take a succesful, self-propelled creative inventor, typically an engineer kind of person, put that person in a group where they need to submit to ideas of others, and things eventually go wrong. It's not that unusual to see a founder get excluded even if that person was arguably the primary driver, the deteriorating relations don't allow the situation to continue and the alternative is blowing up the organization.

npunt 7y ago
This just as easily applies to artists, its definitely not inherent to engineering.
- HPsquared 7y ago
  In a way, engineers are a type of artist.
  - lisper 7y ago
    Yes, but management wants them to be assembly-line workers. A lot of organizational tension in tech companies can be traced back to botched attempts to force-fit artistic pegs into assembly-line holes.
    - emeraldd 7y ago
      Honestly, this is probably a big part of the reason I've really come to dislike things like Scrum and what Agile looks like now. My experience has been that these methodologies tend to treat devs as fungible cogs which fits very much with the idea of engineers/developers as assembly line workers.
      - lisper 7y ago
        Exactly this. Management wants every part of the production process to be easily replaceable, including the people. This is why management loves, e.g., Java. Java gives you a lot of the benefits of Lisp (GC, objects, exceptions) but without any of the features that facilitate writing beautiful elegant code. So Java code is ugly and festooned with boilerplate and using it is an incredibly painful experience (for a Lisp programmer). But if I'm a manager and I have a Java programmer working for me and one day I don't like the cut of his jib, I can fire him and instantly replace him with another Java programmer, because they are a dime a dozen and one is as good as another. As a manager, that one feature dominates all the cruft and the horror, because I don't have to deal with the cruft, I hire you to deal with it for me. And your replacability gives me power over you. So you type boilerplate while I play golf. It would be a pretty good deal if I enjoyed golf as much as I enjoy writing Lisp code.

s9w 7y ago

Nice that they actually published the transcript.

ncmncm 7y ago

Great, but it didn't actually tell us much of anything. What would have been so bad about trying his way and also somebody else's way? How does no longer being equipped to try his way make anything better? If the other way won't work, how can Google's project make any progress?

voxl 7y ago

Reading the transcript, he comes off as a shitty boss that refuses to give people independence in this group to try new things. It's his way or the highway. He hides this behind him being a "rare" kind of optimist when really he seems to just ignore the important social factors in being a leader.

high_derivative 7y ago
This is not my reading at all. If you have ever spent time in a FAANG research org - it can be incredibly frustrating to see so much lack of focus. Everybody does what they want. This is not an issue for most e.g. ML research (my org) because there is so much money to go around, and researchers will leave if they are too constrained. For hardware/critical projects or customer retention, this is very much an issue. Just look at how the TF ecosystem developed API wise. There can literally be a project with enormous importance for an ecosystem where multiple teams under one VP do the same thing slightly differently. VPs do nothing and have no opinion on the details. Internal and external users get frustrated because there is no clarity. If you do a project where you have resources for just one shot in a given timespan, this simply won't cut it.
- pricechild 7y ago
  TF?
  - reverendbyte 7y ago
    Possibly TensorFlow
  - DSingularity 7y ago
    TensorFlow. The API is outrageous.
    - cossray 7y ago
      I'm not quite a dev, but I have always felt there's something awful with the TF ecosystem. I thought I was the only one 'struggling' with it and that probably there was some fundamental insight I was missing.

_236436532 7y ago

I almost joined his lab around 2014 as a PostDoc (without knowing about the Google deal, which was not yet official I think) but eventually I stopped the application process because I wanted to pursue my own startup instead. Today I kind of regret not having stayed in quantum computing as my startup was only modestly successful and as I would probably have been much better off working for Google, in retrospect. I'm working on my next startup now but I keep wondering if I should go back to quantum computing eventually, I'm not sure though if I'm still relevant as my PhD dates back to 2013 already (I had good results though and did it in a renowed QC group on superconducting qubits).

troelsSteegin 7y ago
An observer can't tell if you are successful or not. But are not Schrödinger's cat questions typical in quantum computing?
- _236436532 7y ago
  I guess :) Just interesting sometimes to wonder where one would be if one would have chosen differently at a given point in life.
_8091149529 7y ago
As someone who started off in "quantum" in similar conditions around the same time, but decided to stay on the academic researcher track: A great deal of the recent progress has been on honing, parallelizing, and automating the same processes one used to do by hand/at small scale in 2013. You'll probably instantly recognize most of the things going on in the lab, and could become productive on a short schedule. However, I'd be wary of the medium-term prospects of the field: The discord between the perceived and actual capabilities of the hardware remains as big as ever. You could consider re-entering the field if you're happy contributing to incremental technological advances relevant to other researchers. Progress with meaningful societal or economic impact is probably much further off.
- _236436532 7y ago

cletus 7y ago

Let me guess: before anyone asked about his employment status he was both working and not working at Google?

McTossOut 7y ago

John Martinis speaking at a conference on "Google AI Quantum" last quarter. https://youtu.be/K_H_mbSH45s https://youtu.be/K_H_mbSH45s

ykevinator 7y ago

I still don't know why he resigned

seemslegit 7y ago

> Yes, that's right. I was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and we had government funding and were doing quite well. Google got interested and my group and I came over to work at Google, basically because we both wanted to build a useful quantum computer. So basically US taxpayers were involuntary seed investors who funded the highest initial risk to achieve validation and proceeded to be wiped out at Round A by Google.

rapsey 7y ago
Yes that is how it works and it works well. Government should fund pie in the sky research projects and private industry should take that and make products. It is the history of Silicon Valley and it produced quite a bit of wealth don't you think?
papeda 7y ago
What would you prefer? That anyone who receives government research funding be barred from entering the private sector later?
- seemslegit 7y ago
  That the public maintains its share in the upside ? For example by having Google put in money back into the NSF budget
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    This is called taxes. Maybe not as high as they should be, but such things exist.
  - jerome-jh 7y ago
    USCB probably applied for patents that will bring money back once products are actually on the market.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
No, this is exactly why Universities exist. As idea machines that occasionally turn out something that changes the world. As well as educating our (elite) children.

909832 7y ago

Can anyone describe what the research scientist interviews are like in a FAANG company? How are they similar or different than the SWE interviews?

high_derivative 7y ago
(FAANG researcher): The first few tech rounds tend to be the same. Then there is a set of research interviews and usually a research job talk. The main observation is that hiring researchers, after passing basic tech rounds, is much more about taste and how people subjectively rate someone's research. It's insanely competitive, but in a sense it is also easier than pure SWE because there are not as many whiteboard hurdles to pass. You just can't really leetcode your way into the role, without a good track record with really interesting research most teams will not be interested.
- 909832 7y ago
  Do interviews tend to include system design, if the applicant doesn't have industry experience? Been curious about this too: do FAANG companies hire, say, professors with strong research records, but poor coding skills? I always wondered if everyone on these sort of team were all solid coders, or if there were people there that are exceptions. Based on your experience do FAANG companies tend to be invested in basic research, or more product focused research?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - high_derivative 7y ago
    System design is not a typical part of a research interview. Yes, they do. The rule of thumb is: The higher the level you are hired, the more wiggle room is there. A random PhD grad will need to pass the normal coding screens which are carried out by SWEs who do not know anything about the candidate. Last q depends on the FAANG org, everything exists. MS research is very pure, Amazon/Apple very applied, everything in between.

tibyat 7y ago

So he read a Thiel book recently and it now pervades his every answer to this interview? And his team had problems with his hyper-focusing? Funny coincidence. Honestly there's pretty much nothing being said in this interview. People don't get along sometimes.

dawg- 7y ago
>So he read a Thiel book recently and it now pervades his every answer to this interview? Yeah that was kind of annoying. Amazing how even a certifiable genius can fall so completely for such meaningless self-help bullshit

DeathArrow 7y ago

What I find weird is that a technology advances because public money are funding much of the research and innovation. And there comes a private company and gets whole teams and even patents and projects. Wouldn't it be fair that tax payers also get something in return of their funding?

gcb0 7y ago
That's a very reasonable and old idea, comrade.
testaccount22 7y ago
we get the technology
- seamyb88 7y ago
  Which would be completely impossible to obtain without giving the profits to the rich. It wasn't science or engineering that built the modern world, it was privatisation. (end of sarcasm)We won't get the technology we want, we will get the technology Google wants us to have. We will get decades of fighting Google over their abuse of the technology. We will get an Edward Snowden releasing files to show how Google allowed Governments to spy on their own people, with the technology. Or just live in your bubble, whatever.
- emsy 7y ago
  Oh yeah behind patents and embedded in corporate secrecy that is almost guaranteed to be irrecoverable once the people that created the technology leave or die. I don’t think cooperations are bad and they should be reimbursed for their expenses, but our current way of handling these things leaves a lot of room for improvement if our goal is to advance the cooperative future of humanity (which it should be).
  - 627467 7y ago
    The point of patents is to incentivize disclosure of knowledge in exchange for limited protection. I personally think that public institutions funding research that leads to patents should share benefits of said patents. I believe most operators of those public funds (ie. Universities) actually benefit from this most of the time. At least in major public European universities

stevespang 7y ago

Non paywalled access: https://outline.com/CnEsTN https://outline.com/CnEsTN

ckemere 7y ago

I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD and postdoc in a complex field are not hoping about being a cog in someone else's machine. In academia, I've observed that the sign that that a trainee is ready to move on to independence is that they begin to have disagreements with their mentor that don't reflect misunderstandings of fact, but rather proper, interesting diverging hypotheses. In this story, the wiring incident reminding me of this. The problem is that solving these sorts of hard problems require both leaders and workers. In this case, and many others, there is not an educational path for training people to be technicians with equivalent knowledge as a PhD (which is why they poached an academic lab to do this). Moreover, if there was a path, history has shown that the people that accept the follower role (rather than wanting intellectual leadership) are highly dispensable. (See, e.g., the optics industry moving laser fab to Malaysia.) It's also a problem in medicine - physicians resist loss of diagnostic or treatment control. Though in medicine, there are NPs and PAs, but they're generally treated with much less respect. I think it's interesting that he talks about how "he" Martinis was doing the wiring. Was he? I suspect he had a team working very hard with substantial responsibility, but...

throwaway6734 7y ago
Thank you for writing this!
Matthias247 7y ago
> I think that this article points to a general challenge with our education system. By and large, the people who stick with training all the way through a PhD and postdoc in a complex field are not hoping about being a cog in someone else's machine. That's not limited to academia. In the industry (and even outside of tech) people who will have a sufficient understanding of how something works will at some point in time no longer purely want to follow orders, but want to drive things and innovate on their own. In this situations both sides - the current leaders and someone who wants more responsibility - need make some compromises in order to try to accomodate this interests.

leff_f 7y ago

I'm studying psychology and team dynamics and this is such a great example of conflict destroying the relationship. Want to share couple of thoughts on how we can avoid sacrificing the relationship. -I'm 'The responsible'. Yes, as leaders, we are responsible for the results, at the same time there are people above us who is responsible for the results more than us. The responsibility is never on the shoulders of a single person in the company. When higher-ups support anti-leaders (as in this case), they take on some of our responsibility, and the honest discussion about their expectations is required. There could be lots of reasons for them being not confident in me driving the team, and it would be very beneficial to get their feedback before proceeding. Our assumptions and using formal understanding of the roles is only helping to fuel the conflict. -The 'I know' trap. We really believe in our understanding of the future, it is always linear and always clear. At the same time, future we understand consists of 2 things: all the bad stuff happened to me before and all the good stuff happened to me before and depending on our feelings right now, we are projecting the mix of those 2 into the future. The question here is where is that 3rd category of all the thing that never happened to me? Where are the things I've never experienced? What if I don't know how this will play out? To me, creativity is something not known and something haven't been done before. Allowing ourselves to not know exactly how it will play out, helps us to keep an open mind and learn from the new experiences. In other words we are never 100% responsible for controlling everything around us and the world is a bit more complicated than we want to believe. Hoping this was useful! Happy Friday!

ripsawridge 7y ago
It was useful, thanks! I've definitely seen this in tech, esp. the latter case, which I've seen make smart people who deserve better miserable.

mleonhard 7y ago

> The Google plan is roughly to build a million-qubit system in about ten years, with sufficiently low errors to do error correction. Then at that point you will have enough error-corrected logical qubits that you can run useful, powerful algorithms that you now can't solve on a classical supercomputer. And maybe even at a few hundred qubits, with lower errors, it may be possible to do something special purpose. Can an expert please explain the applications of this? Specifically, are they expecting to break Bitcoin, forge signatures (break SHA), and decrypt old TLS traffic (break Diffie-Hellman) in 5-10 years?