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On top of what you wrote, Memegen is not representative of opinions among Googlers. Memegen, like most social media, focuses on the extremes. You'll see a lot of spicy takes, but that's not what the typical Googler thinks. For a more realistic view, the comments on Memegen are better but, again, unlikely to represent the views of most Googlers.

So this article boils down to "On a site that focuses on extreme positions drawn from a very large population of people, we found extreme positions about this product." Doesn't really tell you much about the product or the very large population. You can make the same statement about most products and most very large populations.

Disclaimer: Xoogler, worked at G 10+ years.

Came here to say that (not a Xoogler, but very familiar with portions of Google). Other companies have similar things :)

Its bad: https://imgur.com/gallery/google-ai-sota-llDaUDr

There seems to be a difference between the Google memes, which are mocking of the product and leadership, and the Excel memes, which seem closer to the way one teases a friend.

You also get the sense that the Excel memes are made by folks who are proud of their expertise in Excel; I don’t get that pride from the Google memes. Put another way, the folks inside the house are calling out the hype. (That said, I broadly agree with the serious tone of the article being out of step with the evidence they’re sourcing.)

I think it's pretty interesting to read what companies think of their own products, especially when the product is this big. A story about internal Microsoft opinions of Excel would also be newsworthy in my opinion.

You're inferring quite a lot from a pretty harmless piece of reporting. Are you sure you're not the one that feels insecure?

> Excel users complain about using Excel still

Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.

That is not what the news is about. The shocking revelation is that even Google engineers gave up on the AI race.

If your memes are too spicy you'll get HR try to turn a critique of something being bad or underfunded into a personal attack on people that put a lot of effort into something no matter how broken it is. They'll pull strings and you'll have to speak with your manager about it and even if they agree it wasn't a personal attack, they'll push you into not doing it again and just lay low under their radar. It's not the usual though, so maybe it only happens if someone feels attacked and complains to HR about it?

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.

I suspect that someone at Google has read economist Albert O. Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty [1]. The central idea is that when people are unhappy with a relationship between themselves and, say, a firm, they have basically two options: (1) Exit, that is, leave the relationship; and (2) Voice, signal their unhappiness. Hirschman argues that encouraging one option reduces the inclination to exercise the other option. Further, he argues that when people Exit, the firm has little opportunity to understand what motivated the people to leave, so it is advantageous to shift people toward the Voice option, which conveys that precious information readily. So, by allowing Memegen to exist and be used, Google management gives employees a way to exercise Voice instead of Exit, and management learns more about what people are upset about on the margins of the employee base, giving management an opportunity to respond (which they are free to ignore if they want).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I've worked 12 years at Google. When I was tech lead, I periodically checked Memegen and searched for my project name. I found it useful to get this feedback. Sometimes I converted the meme into a proper bug report; sometimes I responded to the meme with an explanation.

Not everyone will use Memegen in the same way. But quite often a high voted meme can be treated like a high voted bug report. It provides signal to the team.

Note that I worked on internal tooling. External facing teams have lots of other feedback channels, and they know that Googler's feedback is biased. So how the team responds to the feedback can be vary a lot.

I haven't worked there in several years, but assuming memegen hasn't wildly changed: Management likes having a pulse on employees, and they tolerate memegen since it's mostly fun, it builds shared culture in a massive company, lets workers (mostly) harmlessly blow off steam, and it would be massively unpopular to shut it down. Management does not like that memegen is often a nexus of cynicism and employee activism. Also in my experience, most employees were nearly completely agnostic or ignorant about whatever trend was on memegen, so it wasn't necessarily representative.

Yes. This is considered pretty tame and the lines you can’t cross mostly involve other people or groups of people (reasonable).

When I worked there a few years ago, if you made a meme that made anybody unhappy, there was a team in corporate that woudl threaten your job to make you delete it.

Yeah, look at how Google treated employees that protested against Palestinian genocide. Immediately fired and violently removed.

Jira (and bitbucket) have actually improved a lot in the last 2-3 years. Not sure what they did, but it's much snappier now with better uptime than GitHub

Having amazing foundational technology that gets wrapped into subpar products has been Google's standard operating procedure for a long time. That being said, it's not clear that proprietary harnesses are going to be any kind of moat. For OAI and Ant, these are marketing vehicles that need to be good if the 1T+ valuation are to be justified given how easy it is to swap out inference.

For OpenAI and Anthropic, their entire business is AI. If this thing does not work out, their company is over.

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.

They are at least 6 months behind the other labs because they got a late start.

There is a Google way to develop software and all engineers have to follow it, willing or not. There is no space for creativity and joy.

I've wondered the same thing but Gemini (free, just in the browser) helped me complete a GIS/radar app that Codex/GPT didn't seem informed enough to do. Really gave some excellent suggestions and I was impressed and feeding it into Codex we were off on a positive track again.

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.

They simply have no incentive. If AI tanks there's no sweating it, the cash cow of Search will keep printing money and no one is the wiser.

a mistery indeed

Disagree and if you actively use it in your workflow well you will realize its a major competitive edge.

Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.