3 ms·

Can you expand on why the the role didn't work out for you? Was it lack of direction on how to bring the research advances as a product or was it the lack of su

Can you expand on why the the role didn't work out for you? Was it lack of direction on how to bring the research advances as a product or was it the lack of support for the research itself?

dekhn 5y ago
Everything worked fine but I was stuck in application development when I wanted to be a research scientist (IE I wanted somebody else to build product so i could do the research on top of it). During that time, I managed to make a team member unhappy with my criticism of their work, and that led to an HR interaction where transfers into all the research parts of the company were blocked. In the case above, it was really about a pivot of Google Cloud Genomics- my market research suggested that people wanted to store large amounts of BAM files cheaply and access them via an API, when they really wanted Spark for Genomics. I brought that up with our leadership and they declined to make that pivot early. Here's what the Cloud Genomics product eventually evolved into, which actually is pretty good: https://verily.com/solutions/terra/ https://verily.com/solutions/terra/ (I was the person who set up the original Google/Broad relationship that led to all of this).
- ra7 5y ago
  > Everything worked fine but I was stuck in application development when I wanted to be a research scientist This seems to be a fairly common thing at Google. I hear Google "hoards" a lot of PhDs who are just "refactoring APIs and doing migrations". Is this not seen as a problem there wrt retaining talent?
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Sure, I knew a ton of PhDs who were workign on random unrelated stuff (like, protein folding genius -> building next gen music UI). You can retain a lot of talent in SV by paying more than other people so that those employees can buy a house here.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      The whole talent hoarding strategy by big tech sounds anti-competitive as all hell, in spirit if not by any applicable letter of the law.

Can you expand on why the the role didn't work out for you? Was it lack of direction on how to bring the research advances as a product or was it the lack of support for the research itself?

dekhn 5y ago

Everything worked fine but I was stuck in application development when I wanted to be a research scientist (IE I wanted somebody else to build product so i could do the research on top of it). During that time, I managed to make a team member unhappy with my criticism of their work, and that led to an HR interaction where transfers into all the research parts of the company were blocked. In the case above, it was really about a pivot of Google Cloud Genomics- my market research suggested that people wanted to store large amounts of BAM files cheaply and access them via an API, when they really wanted Spark for Genomics. I brought that up with our leadership and they declined to make that pivot early. Here's what the Cloud Genomics product eventually evolved into, which actually is pretty good: https://verily.com/solutions/terra/ https://verily.com/solutions/terra/ (I was the person who set up the original Google/Broad relationship that led to all of this).

ra7 5y ago
> Everything worked fine but I was stuck in application development when I wanted to be a research scientist This seems to be a fairly common thing at Google. I hear Google "hoards" a lot of PhDs who are just "refactoring APIs and doing migrations". Is this not seen as a problem there wrt retaining talent?
- dekhn 5y ago
  Sure, I knew a ton of PhDs who were workign on random unrelated stuff (like, protein folding genius -> building next gen music UI). You can retain a lot of talent in SV by paying more than other people so that those employees can buy a house here.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The whole talent hoarding strategy by big tech sounds anti-competitive as all hell, in spirit if not by any applicable letter of the law.