Why I left Google

The author took a tangent so fast and so long into some theater that they didn't ever explain what his problem with AI is. I would love to hear more about it and specifically how Google changed in the last 3 years. I'd like to know what the outlook was 3 years ago and how it drifted.

Given the mundane title, I wasn't expecting that to go where it did.

I took a 50% paycut to quit working in advertising because I think it is a profoundly evil and useless industry. I have never regretted it, and you wouldn't have, either.

I think experiences like this provide a framework for us to confront and then move on from problems we are avoiding. the same goes for tarot or self help books or religions or even any abstract processes.

we inscribe ourselves into the narrative and populate it (subconsciously?) with our biggest issues. The narrative plays out and provides us with solutions to our conundrum. I believe this is how religions, cults, management paradigms (and even computer science design patterns) and are born.

All of it is just a trick we play on ourselves to get out of analysis paralysis.

Why does it seem so uncommon to not look for personal fulfillment through one's employment?

What I work on is so boring, but I'm grateful for a paycheck of which I'm objectively well-paid. I put in an honest 8 hours of work per day, I get free food and workout one hour every day. Overall I'm pretty happy, even though my work is neither fulfilling or will make me rich. I have no desire to think I'm above getting a paycheck, I tried earning money on my own and it was so hard, I appreciate my paymasters very much.

> cutting edge of cloud services documentation

I dont know what this means

Since she said she was in charge of Google Cloud's docs:

This was my recent experience when trying to use Google GCP to deploy a simple node docker application:

1. Google search, wade though SEO spam, 3 links on companies trying to sell me deployment products built on top of GCP, 2 paywalled Medium articles, and 3 out of date blog posts. Nothing I tried worked. -3 hours

2. Go to the GCP Developer documentation and feel like I'm opening up a course. Spent 2 hours looking around and reading, can't find the right commands, and the tutorial I found is out of date and doesn't work. -2 hours

3. Come back from lunch and decide to ask Google Gemini, who promptly replies with what looks like the answer but is really just made up. I correct it, and it even admits it made up an API and command line switch, only to give me more fake info. -30 min

4. Head to ChatGPT, which couldn't give me the right info (out of date from last year and obviously scraped from prior blog posts I read). -20 min

A management training course I took 20 years ago said when your personal values were out of step with the company then you had to leave for your own mental health. I've thought about that a lot since.

My key takeaway here is: Good for you to have so much money to just pull off decisions like that.

I wish people would just get to the point when they write.

People clicked because they want to know why you left.

Three paragraphs in... I have no idea.

sigh

Julia Masli's show is incredible. Definitely worth seeing.

I mean good for the author if they find peace through this.

In practice, it looks like they went to a meditation / mindfulness kind of event, felt like their AI work is evil, were very impacted, and left.

It comes across as a bit of drama. The view that AI is evil is very common, and it's not like Google's AI efforts are particularly more leaning towards evil than any other AI effort.

I suspect the same would have been said about "tech" in general a couple of years ago and the same article could have been written.

What a wonderful story about values and self-reflection.

AI is not evil.

AI just is.

We all need to adapt to its good and bad and middling impacts.