Can anybody comment on whether that statement is an accurate reflection of how management at google treats these memes? On surface level it seems like they don't mind the memes and even use them as feedback but I wonder if that's how it really plays out
Memegen is something that HR wants gone, but knows it cannot afford to take away as they already made Google a worse place to work at during the past 10 years. They already sort of hijacked it and took control of it.
404media, please, take a deep breath. Your jobs are safe, your trauma is valid. Your corruption coverage is so good, but this 'employees make memes' editorial decision-making is exposing some deep insecurity I can't quite triangulate.
The engineers who critique AI are the ones who see the garbage code the LLMs write. Just look at the source dump for Claude Code; that code was a rat's nest of epic proportions.
Gemini CLI was atrocious. It's now being shuttered to AG but its very hard to use due to the limiting usage constraints
Claude is better and Codex remains king of actual usage you can get.
Oh and the OG AI department at Google had essentially everyone fired (you know, the one that had linguists) and then the AI department that took over was taken apart, half fired, to have it's corpse picked over by Deepmind. Everyone who mattered left (over 40) with only ONE real exception.
Meanwhile firing a third of the rest of the company, to make sure that whoever remains encounters company morale somewhere between mandatory fun and PIP.
Oh and you're wondering about the management reaction? They canceled PIPs (you're now fired when you'd normally have gotten a PIP)
Which also resulted in many memes of people who just don't care anymore directly criticizing leadership. Things like "Wondering about senior management? Just ask yourself how this can be made worse. For example: how can a PIP be made worse? This is how"
I've used and hated other internal tools - stuff like JIRA and Workday - that were just accepted as terrible and never going to improve.
I'll let that stand on it's own.
Memegen is a key part of the culture. Its default mode is over-the-top mocking, of course, with a grain of truth. Nobody and nothing is spared. C-level execs, products, the perf process.
So this by itself is not quite the scoop 404 media thinks it is. You could take the front page of memegen on any given day and construct twenty scandalous headlines of it.
(Observe that normal human beings will also lie to you on the internet, about everything from the best flavor of ice cream to cancer treatments.)
> After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."
The low light of the show is the Anti-gravity app. The updates are few, and the updates does background bugs that no one really cares about. They add no features. The non-customizable "Open IDE" is classic greedy Google, they want you to stick to their tools. Vs Codex, they allow it.
Have you ever worked at an employer where everyone is pressured to only say good things about the product? You have to drink the kool-aid, or at least pretend to, and always talk about how great the product is? It's not good and it doesn't help the product. Being able to admit when things are bad is really important, even if it comes in the form of memes and humor.
But it can also help Sr engineers, differently. They tend to use it in smaller, more tightly scoped use cases. Well scoped re-factoring, boilerplate stuff, improving personal tools, etc. The improvement is not nearly as visible or measurable to managers.
Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.
Google? They are shoving AI into every product for sure, but the company is going to do ok even if they immediately stop all AI work. Their revenue comes from ads, cloud etc, and AI doesn't directly translate to revenue much.
Then I tried to use Gemini for coding and it was like being back to GPT3 or something. Really bad. But on this topic at least it had possession or access to more knowledge than GPT.
"I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes" - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...
You must like burgers...
Yes, it's because they're using a cheap model to answer my question. Yes, I know how a tokenizer works and why this happens. No, I don't think the tech industry is in an insane place at all, why do you ask? /s
josefritzishere•51m ago
zuzululu•43m ago
Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
josefritzishere•41m ago
tokioyoyo•35m ago
Yes, they can be wrong. But if you’re competent enough, you should spot the irrelevant suggestions.
gretch•32m ago
Do you think if AI turns out to be a dud, most of us will permanently lose our career as software engineers?
jdiff•19m ago
baggy_trough•14m ago
prmoustache•14m ago
bigfishrunning•10m ago
datsci_est_2015•35m ago
swatcoder•23m ago
It's promising technology, but the tools are far from mature yet.
And as they do mature, the ramp up will decrease and their won't be any particular benefit to being an early adopter. For reasonably bright people, there's essentially no penalty to "missing out" for a while.
As often, the FOMO-afflicted are churning on stuff that just won't matter. Which is fine if they enjoy it, but isn't something the rest of us need to fret over.
datsci_est_2015•11m ago
Keep abreast, don’t lose sleep, don’t sacrifice work-life balance. Help each other, especially your coworkers. The current craze seems to have created stack ranking monsters out of the whole industry.
QuercusMax•15m ago
I wish we could convince folks to write docs for human consumption, but docs are docs....
righthand•26m ago