Almost exactly what I heard, he was told (paraphrased) "for people at this level and pay, we expect them to be working full on time on AI".

Sad and not surprising. Presumably when you are in the US with US sized total compensation this is even more of a problem. It is also a sign that the technical buffer layer (people like directors, VP, CTO) is not functioning well and also points to issues with company vision and roadmap.

I don't think it's wrong per se to suggest that Google should not be in the business of "Go" e.g. but presumably there are many other areas where similar technical expertise can be used in this size of company.

That said I've seen good people get stuck in large companies. They are put in a certain bucket and find it very hard to change. Sometimes leaving is the correct answer.

As someone who switched to Go in its early days (from C++) and had some interaction with the community (bugs, conventions etc.) it's a little sad but I think also just the way things go.

He's at a level where he's part of that technical buffer layer.

And that's likely the problem. (Note: my speculation. I haven't read his internal goodbye and wouldn't make it public if I had). An L6 with a good L8 for air cover can kinda hide behind the SI rating, and because they never have direct contact with VPs, they can continue doing the necessary-but-not-glamorous part of keeping Google going. An L8/L9 has that direct contact with VPs, so there's nowhere to hide.

Go particularly is a sort of fixed ceiling project.

Ian recently had a really pleasant error handling proposal that nonetheless wasn’t going to change the core philosophy of error handling, or memory arenas are another area where the current tradeoffs are fine and not worth reengineering, etc.

IMHO Go is in excellent shape as far as hitting needs when it’s a good technical fit - it’s supposed to be a really stable language - and paradoxically this also may mean not everyone who’s been involved would have the same job description in the future.

That’s fine. A lot of really excellent Go team members have come and gone over the years. Russ and Ian may be some of the late leavers in a sense, so I really, really appreciate their dedication and followthrough. The culture they stewarded has payed off for the community and the kinds of upcoming things that look promising are less about the core language, more about improving and maintaining the standard library.

Sundar has to go before he drives Google completely into the ground. What an absolute waste.

I have yet to see a thing made better by LLMs.

I've seen things with more impressive results, but then interlaced with garbage results. Far less reliable is the outcome.

Whether it's the now horrible pixel camera app, search results, or really anything else, it's all garbage

Meanwhile, yay!, let's use a billion times the compute.

Yep, we're essentially burning billions of dollars to produce garbage, and the next generation of these LLMs will ingest that new garbage and start producing more.

But hey we got a few pretty pictures and funny videos along the way!

And this is consistent with the role change for Russ Cox a few months ago.

Wow talk about ridiculous. Hopefully this is not the case, I’m in Google and I don’t want to see it deteriorate to this point.

If you are internal to Google, you can find his goodbye letter with a fair amount of additional detail. He chose not to make that additional detail public, so I won't either.

Without going into the aforementioned detail, would you say he burned his bridges on the way out?

No.

It’s a big club and we aren’t in it