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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

by voxl 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  TF?
  - reverendbyte 6y ago
    Possibly TensorFlow
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    TensorFlow. The API is outrageous.
    - cossray 6y 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.
      - Yajirobe 6y ago
        What is awful with it?
        kevinskii 6y ago
        This summed up my experience with it pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21216200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21216200
- jl2718 6y ago
  I think there is a way to set a strong objective s and give freedom for the solution. Generally I’ve found that success comes from limiting objectives: one part focus, and one part humility, saying no to anything ill-defined or potentially impossible. Those are the things that the marketing engine is built on. The difference between the audience and the magician is that the magician doesn’t believe in magic. There are many more audience. Martinis seems like a very focused leader. The problem chosen was very specific to what they knew they could do with the technology, assuming only that the theory works. He had to say no to business units asking for application value, no to easier paths to publication, no to other people trying to build their careers on a different problem, because he needed everybody’s best ideas on the one problem. But many people can’t adapt to a new problem, and many leaders can’t tell the difference between an idea for solving the problem, and an idea for solving a different problem. The wiring thing sounds petty, but maybe it was really a divergence. I don’t know. It sounds like part of the problem is that he achieved the goal and didn’t know what to lead with next.
  - Junk_Collector 6y ago
    The wiring thing highlights the problem I think. He was the hardware manager but he didn't actually have control over the direction of the hardware team. That's a terrible position to be in. Also, don't underestimate wiring in a quantum computer. I don't know the details of Google's system but Quantum computers uses analog RF pulses to interact with the Qubit system which are then later digitized. The design of a wiring system in a Quantum computer is similar to what you would see designing a high end phased array radar system with the need for everything to be phase matched, highly stable, and temperature controlled except that a quantum computer is also extremely susceptible to cross talk at the interfaces. Wiring a system of Google's scale can easily run into the $100k+ range in just material and manufacturing costs. If the other person didn't have any experimental experience like Martinis says, then he would almost certainly run into problems.
    - mleonhard 6y ago
      Yes. People usually leave jobs because their boss doesn't meet their needs. Hartmut hired Martinis to be a manager and then didn't give him authority to do his job. Martinis tells how he had several meetings with Hartmut about this problem but nothing was done. It's clear to me that Hartmut failed in his role.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > Everybody does what they want. As opposed to what? Everyone having their own personal sort of projects or splitting up in groups of two and three is natural in the academia research groups I’ve been in to. What is wrong with that?
  - high_derivative 6y ago
    Because you cannot deliver experimental physics breakthroughs or hardware with teams of two deciding every week what they feel like doing. Have you ever thought about how much work it takes to deliver hardware? How many teams and processes and planning there are involved from physics level to software stack to deliver something usable? It's insane. And normal processor hardware is something people have experience with. For a physics experiment, virtually everything is custom made and you only have budget for a few fixes or trials on each component. There is just not much room for slack.
    - mturmon 6y ago
      Smart comment. I work at a large lab that does cutting-edge hardware development. The slow buildup of fabrication and fundamental-physics know-how is hard for someone who has mostly worked on software to appreciate. To realize these breakthroughs, you need to plan at the decade time scale.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      > For a physics experiment, virtually everything is custom made and you only have budget for a few fixes or trials on each component. I'm actually speaking from my experience in experimental physics (solid state) labs. Certainly, you can't just have teams of two entirely deciding what to do independently of the group, but the level of control and dictation Martinis is speaking about seems like a whole different level. He got pissed just because a theorist tried to come up with an alternate way of doing this wiring and the lab leader didn't shut it down in favor of just him researching the problem.
- mikorym 6y ago
  In my experience at honours university level, which may or may not be relevant to the conversation, is that everyone does what they want if the leader figure doesn't understand the topics in depth. In my case, I am someone who wants to do everything from first principles whereas my study leader at the time unfortunately told me "you can't understand everything". Although that statement is true, you should at least try to understand one thing really as deep as you can. But what bothered me was that if I wanted to understand something deeply, I realised I had to do it myself. So what I can say is that you don't have to be completely unfocused; it could be that your interests and objectives are different in the group. Long story short, my HonsBSc was a basically a failure and my MSc was a success for these reasons. The funny thing is that I get satisfaction today when I do anything that would have been a great honours project in my topic (signal analysis in bioinformatics).
ackbar03 6y ago
It's interesting to see your take versus some of the views below like >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 Not saying any view particular is right or wrong since these things usually are tricky
fsh 6y ago
Having one guy micromanage a large research group is also very inefficient. Nobody (not even Martinis) knows if and how a practical quantum computer can be built.
op00to 6y ago
Welcome to academia. You just have to ignore the bluster.
- gustavo-fring 6y ago
  Unfair to paint academia like that. My interactions with tenured professors in my dep has been nothing but pleasant. They don't have egos (or don't act like it), are more than happy to help, and have been like a family to me my entire academic career. Don't mean to nitpick, and I know there are academics that are huge pricks and depts that are unfriendly places. But it's not true of them all and I'd hate for people to get that view.
  - blaufast 6y ago
    This comment is so dissonant with the average experience in academia it reads like sarcasm
    - pocket_titan 6y ago
      I'm not sure where your idea about the "average experience in academia" comes from (I don't even know if such a thing exist, because the very word "experience" implies a subjectivity beyond the scope of surveys or other objective measures), but even given such an average more positive experiences do still exist in the head of the distribution. But concerning the point: even though my own experience in academia hasn't been exactly pleasant, my professors weren't the source of it (the "system" was), and always provided helpful advice and selfless acts of teaching, like the OP described.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      Outside of bio/medical academia, I think the GP is very true to my experiences as well.
    - N1H1L 6y ago
      Not really. Academia has it's share of assholes, but the probability distribution of encountering assholes is pretty similar outside of academia too. Thing is, it can be very brutal if you are flaky. It has a very low tolerance for bullshit/lack of expertise and people will not hesitate a second to call others out on it - even in public.
plafl 6y ago
On the other hand I really liked the interview. He gives straight answers, no bullshit, no need to read between the lines. It's his own version of it but looks quite sincere precisely because he is not painting himself as a hero, just someone who didn't fit with how things are being run.
dynamite-ready 6y ago
Nothing more infuriating for a knowledge worker, than duplicated effort. No one likes a 'silo' either. That said, if someone has a proven track record in an area of expertise, it probably makes more sense to organise around them and move overlapping resource on to some another area of responsibility, if only for productivity's sake. It would only be a bad idea, if no one was allowed to review or challenge the work produced by the aforementioned expert... Who knows. We only have one side of the argument here. I'm sure he'll find a better environment for himself very soon.
quantum0anon 6y ago
Speaking as a former student of his, he has a good heart but can be quite difficult to work for. It very much is his way or the high way in terms of overall direction. That said, he can be convinced by a sound physical argument. He is above all a great physicist.

by voxl 6y ago

high_derivative 6y 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 6y ago
TF?
- reverendbyte 6y ago
  Possibly TensorFlow
- DSingularity 6y ago
  TensorFlow. The API is outrageous.
  - cossray 6y 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.
    - Yajirobe 6y ago
      What is awful with it?
      - kevinskii 6y ago
        This summed up my experience with it pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21216200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21216200
jl2718 6y ago
I think there is a way to set a strong objective s and give freedom for the solution. Generally I’ve found that success comes from limiting objectives: one part focus, and one part humility, saying no to anything ill-defined or potentially impossible. Those are the things that the marketing engine is built on. The difference between the audience and the magician is that the magician doesn’t believe in magic. There are many more audience. Martinis seems like a very focused leader. The problem chosen was very specific to what they knew they could do with the technology, assuming only that the theory works. He had to say no to business units asking for application value, no to easier paths to publication, no to other people trying to build their careers on a different problem, because he needed everybody’s best ideas on the one problem. But many people can’t adapt to a new problem, and many leaders can’t tell the difference between an idea for solving the problem, and an idea for solving a different problem. The wiring thing sounds petty, but maybe it was really a divergence. I don’t know. It sounds like part of the problem is that he achieved the goal and didn’t know what to lead with next.
- Junk_Collector 6y ago
  The wiring thing highlights the problem I think. He was the hardware manager but he didn't actually have control over the direction of the hardware team. That's a terrible position to be in. Also, don't underestimate wiring in a quantum computer. I don't know the details of Google's system but Quantum computers uses analog RF pulses to interact with the Qubit system which are then later digitized. The design of a wiring system in a Quantum computer is similar to what you would see designing a high end phased array radar system with the need for everything to be phase matched, highly stable, and temperature controlled except that a quantum computer is also extremely susceptible to cross talk at the interfaces. Wiring a system of Google's scale can easily run into the $100k+ range in just material and manufacturing costs. If the other person didn't have any experimental experience like Martinis says, then he would almost certainly run into problems.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    Yes. People usually leave jobs because their boss doesn't meet their needs. Hartmut hired Martinis to be a manager and then didn't give him authority to do his job. Martinis tells how he had several meetings with Hartmut about this problem but nothing was done. It's clear to me that Hartmut failed in his role.
MiroF 6y ago
> Everybody does what they want. As opposed to what? Everyone having their own personal sort of projects or splitting up in groups of two and three is natural in the academia research groups I’ve been in to. What is wrong with that?
- high_derivative 6y ago
  Because you cannot deliver experimental physics breakthroughs or hardware with teams of two deciding every week what they feel like doing. Have you ever thought about how much work it takes to deliver hardware? How many teams and processes and planning there are involved from physics level to software stack to deliver something usable? It's insane. And normal processor hardware is something people have experience with. For a physics experiment, virtually everything is custom made and you only have budget for a few fixes or trials on each component. There is just not much room for slack.
  - mturmon 6y ago
    Smart comment. I work at a large lab that does cutting-edge hardware development. The slow buildup of fabrication and fundamental-physics know-how is hard for someone who has mostly worked on software to appreciate. To realize these breakthroughs, you need to plan at the decade time scale.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > For a physics experiment, virtually everything is custom made and you only have budget for a few fixes or trials on each component. I'm actually speaking from my experience in experimental physics (solid state) labs. Certainly, you can't just have teams of two entirely deciding what to do independently of the group, but the level of control and dictation Martinis is speaking about seems like a whole different level. He got pissed just because a theorist tried to come up with an alternate way of doing this wiring and the lab leader didn't shut it down in favor of just him researching the problem.
mikorym 6y ago
In my experience at honours university level, which may or may not be relevant to the conversation, is that everyone does what they want if the leader figure doesn't understand the topics in depth. In my case, I am someone who wants to do everything from first principles whereas my study leader at the time unfortunately told me "you can't understand everything". Although that statement is true, you should at least try to understand one thing really as deep as you can. But what bothered me was that if I wanted to understand something deeply, I realised I had to do it myself. So what I can say is that you don't have to be completely unfocused; it could be that your interests and objectives are different in the group. Long story short, my HonsBSc was a basically a failure and my MSc was a success for these reasons. The funny thing is that I get satisfaction today when I do anything that would have been a great honours project in my topic (signal analysis in bioinformatics).

ackbar03 6y ago

It's interesting to see your take versus some of the views below like >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 Not saying any view particular is right or wrong since these things usually are tricky

fsh 6y ago

Having one guy micromanage a large research group is also very inefficient. Nobody (not even Martinis) knows if and how a practical quantum computer can be built.

op00to 6y ago

Welcome to academia. You just have to ignore the bluster.

gustavo-fring 6y ago
Unfair to paint academia like that. My interactions with tenured professors in my dep has been nothing but pleasant. They don't have egos (or don't act like it), are more than happy to help, and have been like a family to me my entire academic career. Don't mean to nitpick, and I know there are academics that are huge pricks and depts that are unfriendly places. But it's not true of them all and I'd hate for people to get that view.
- blaufast 6y ago
  This comment is so dissonant with the average experience in academia it reads like sarcasm
  - pocket_titan 6y ago
    I'm not sure where your idea about the "average experience in academia" comes from (I don't even know if such a thing exist, because the very word "experience" implies a subjectivity beyond the scope of surveys or other objective measures), but even given such an average more positive experiences do still exist in the head of the distribution. But concerning the point: even though my own experience in academia hasn't been exactly pleasant, my professors weren't the source of it (the "system" was), and always provided helpful advice and selfless acts of teaching, like the OP described.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    Outside of bio/medical academia, I think the GP is very true to my experiences as well.
  - N1H1L 6y ago
    Not really. Academia has it's share of assholes, but the probability distribution of encountering assholes is pretty similar outside of academia too. Thing is, it can be very brutal if you are flaky. It has a very low tolerance for bullshit/lack of expertise and people will not hesitate a second to call others out on it - even in public.

plafl 6y ago

On the other hand I really liked the interview. He gives straight answers, no bullshit, no need to read between the lines. It's his own version of it but looks quite sincere precisely because he is not painting himself as a hero, just someone who didn't fit with how things are being run.

dynamite-ready 6y ago

Nothing more infuriating for a knowledge worker, than duplicated effort. No one likes a 'silo' either. That said, if someone has a proven track record in an area of expertise, it probably makes more sense to organise around them and move overlapping resource on to some another area of responsibility, if only for productivity's sake. It would only be a bad idea, if no one was allowed to review or challenge the work produced by the aforementioned expert... Who knows. We only have one side of the argument here. I'm sure he'll find a better environment for himself very soon.

quantum0anon 6y ago

Speaking as a former student of his, he has a good heart but can be quite difficult to work for. It very much is his way or the high way in terms of overall direction. That said, he can be convinced by a sound physical argument. He is above all a great physicist.