I remember back in the early 2000's that discussion, but now with the the tonnage that systems like npm can pull in I laugh that we ever thought it wouldn't get worse.
This is my educated guess on the topic having spent time investigating the intersection of poor memory, human growth patterns etc where this topic intersects:
Norepinephrine is a key regulatory of memory. Before a certain age the body is much more in parasympathetic activation v.s. sympathetic activation, very low Norepinephrine, lower cortisol response needs, etc. Once growth slows down and this can flip over then mammals will start to form memories. Human curves for the curious:
https://obgynkey.com/growth-and-puberty-3/
Some fun notable mentions such as many earliest memories are "super scary" and those with poor ability to produce Norepinephrine and slower growth velocity will have later "first memories" than everyone else.
And there is so much still to uncover. Just the other day I was going through Neanderthal DNA during lunch and noticed that three of the four existing DNA samples show that they were carriers for the rs6467 form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to 21-Hydroxylase Deficiency.
Neanderthals were highly inbred and had low population numbers. Being a carrier of this form of CAH would have absolutely kept the population numbers low all by itself as getting two copies would have been nonviable. Further Neanderthals are most known for contributing to human specific DNA sets such as improved immune system. Here we have something that even in the non classic form is havoc with the HPA-Axis and give incredible evolutionary pressure to resolve, one way is to simply dramatically improve the immune system.
As far as I can tell this hasn't been written about before. Lots of stuff like this will be noticed and or figured out in the decades ahead.
IMO the next big thing - if anyone ever has the stones to propose it - is going to be the reclassification of many archaic human species as subspecies of Homo sapiens. The difference between humans and known neanderthal samples is barely more than the genetic diversity within extant humans. The more data we get, the more archaic humans in general look like small morphological variations of the hairless monkeys we see now. I think the taxonomy we have is the result of prestige-seeking behavior more so than actual science.
Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
For example you can spend your career mapping hundreds of small-effect variants linked to intelligence or phenotypes that lead to increased likelihood of certain behaviours.
You can even publish a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public in a certain region.
You can also publish a population genetics study showing that humans have relatively easily computed genetic structure (see: 23andMe ancestry) because countless alleles are practically fixed in certain populations relative to others due to selection or founder effects, or are prevalent enough that if you have a segment of your genome with enough of them them you must have had an ancestor from a certain region.
What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.
> Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
History has shown this to be wise. If human beings -- as individuals or as a group -- come to view themselves as superior to others, the next step is always abuse, enslavement, or war. Civilization tries very hard to suppress this for the same reason that it suppresses some of the wilder expressions of unbridled human sexuality, physical aggression, etc. Moral issues aside, there’s certain stuff that just breaks everything if you let it run unchecked.
A truly intelligent being could look dispassionately at the various distributions of abilities and other differences in its population and deal with this maturely and rationally. We aren't capable of this yet. I don’t think we can handle it emotionally.
This is an area where my opinions have evolved as I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world. We do, in fact, need taboos around certain things. I don’t think there should be too many of them, but there’s areas where the need has been repeatedly demonstrated.
Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better to study something that can be studied without being forced to make a political stand.
That would not happen in the ideal world, where people try to avoid misinterpreting and overgeneralizing results. But controversial topics always attract people acting in bad faith. Even most of those acting in good faith are unused to the level of precision and pedantry required to make justified conclusions from data.
They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.
Race as we culturally define it (which varies significantly over time and location) doesn't respresent differences in fact, but rather the things that are most obvious to our perception - e.g., skin color. There's no coincidence that what we see most easily - skin color - is somehow a strong indicator.
It's also a misunderstanding of statistics to think that differences will apply to individuals. These aren't two completely separate distributions, but rather distributions that overlap in different ways for different factors that impact outcomes in complicated an often unknown ways. Science and genetics are not that simple.
> That would not happen in the ideal world
Our world is far from that, sadly. What has caused more damage in history than racism - wars, massacres, slavery, oppression (including mass incarceration), endless lifetimes and generations lost to neglect? There have been no wars, slavery, or massacres due to anti-racism.
> They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.
What's amusing is that according to the literature height can be inherited but intelligence can not be.
More generally, any characteristic that can be used to denigrate (or promote) a group is not inheritable. It's the fiction that keeps genetics moving along.
Academia has been claiming otherwise actually. There have been a bunch of studies trying to overturn the idea that dog behaviour is genetic, and turn it into a purely environmental thing. My guess is they’re worried that if we accept it’s true for animals , there’s not much of a leap to assuming it’s true for humans.
I don’t know enough about it to say whether the studies are BS or not, but as an experienced animal keeper, claims that it’s not heritable goes so heavily against my lived experience that I can’t reconcile it with reality.
That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report. Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
> That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report.
I though ancestry reports were regarded as unreliable to the point of meaninglessness because the genes used were not sufficiently strong indicators of population?
> Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
Not discussing something because people can misrepresent it is a bad idea. it is both wrong, and has the opposite effect to that intended because it lends credibility to claims of cover up.
I would posit that whoever is saying they’re unreliable has an agenda. Are they 100% accurate in the sense of being able to determine whether you’re 6.2 vs 6.3% Italian? No, there’s always a small degree of uncertainty as more genomes are sequenced and reference panels are updated, but at this point unless you’re from an isolated tribe in the Amazon or some incredibly niche case they’re very representative.
Most people don’t necessarily understand recombination and that if three of your grandparents are Danish and one of your grandparents is, Italian, then you are going to be on average 25% Italian… but that it’s also a distribution centred around 25%. By luck of the draw you could be 3% or you could be 45% Italian genome-wise. People might base their identity on being 1/4 this or 1/8 that, and be upset when an ancestry report gives the actual %.
You can see this by looking at genes with observable consequences such as lactose tolerance. While there are multiple genes for this AFAIK, the commonest is spread over a huge area.
Something as specific as "Danish" or "Italian" genes looks illusory.
Looking for intelligence differences between people of different skin color makes as much sense as looking for intelligence differences between tall and short people. You seem to believe in distinct "races" as a genetic concept, whereas all I see in the data is correlations with place-of-collection. The more people you sample from, the more any clustering will literally start looking like a physical map of the world.
So, what would you say about looking for intelligence differences between people of different ancestry?
We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a single place or two: marathon winners come disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim.
Few people dispute the above. The really controversial question is whether there are any such differences from the neck up, so to say.
If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?
> two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means
It depends if we talk about means or tail ends. The GP post referred to marathon runners, presumably winning marathon runners, even within the Rift Valley in Kenya don't get selected from the mean of the population but from the tail-end. So, while there isn't much of a difference for means between runners in Albania and Kenya, when we look at tail end we might find very large differences.
Same thing for any case where is a selection process. If you have any "top-X" selection involved, then looking at means is a bit more confusing.
> Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal
Hmm, I don't see here people anyone arguing not treating people as individuals. Of course we have to treat people as individuals. But not sure how that contradicts looking a distribution of traits, features, disease markers, etc.
If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal? If we could identify some genetic marker that increased the probability by a few percentage points of identifying intellectual marathon runners would that justify discriminating to favor them at the expense of others? Many dystopian scifi stories start from a similar premise.
> If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal?
Maybe you're arguing for or against some point the GP poster made. I was mainly saying relying on means in the particular example doesn't seem to work. I was helping you out! If you wanted to refute GP's point you could have said, "here marathon runners statistics doesn't quite apply".
Yeah I know "the means are closer to each other than the standard deviation" is the "standard" (pun intended) thing that high school and college kids get about difference between men vs women and other population characteristics and you're trying to make a very good point, but it just doesn't always apply and sometimes repeating it when it doesn't apply, instead of convincing people, could end up confusing them.
"If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation."
Overlapping normal distribution, yes, but slightly different means, well within a standard deviation seems to be overconfident.
"Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal."
No contest here.
"So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?"
Because the difference at the extremes would be significant, and would explain overrepresentation and underrepresentation of certain groups among, say, top scientists.
The competing hypothesis, which explains differences among groups by discrimination and/or poverty, doesn't fully explain why heavily persecuted groups such as Jewish or Vietnamese refugees still manage an academic rebound within a generation or so of arriving into safety, even though they are still targeted by racial hatred. Taken globally or even just in the US, the correlation between academic success and persecution/power status is weak enough that it makes people doubt the "discrimination/poverty" explanation and motivates them to seek alternatives.
I’ve said nothing of the sort. I’m also well aware of the concept of admixture and that dimensionality reduction methods like PCA and MDS with enough samples mirror geography. I also know that the variants contributing the most to the X and Y axes of such analyses are the ones with a high FST, because unsurprisingly prior to a few hundred years ago people didn’t move around that much and were subject to different genetic bottlenecks and selection pressures. And most alleles are rare, so when one is fixed between populations it’s generally informative from an ancestry standpoint even if non-coding.
Your reflexive dismissal of something that’s not only factual but wouldn’t be controversial about any vertebrate except humans is exactly what I was alluding to.
I think it's even deeper than confusing cause and effect.
I mean, maybe I'm missing some information, but the comment says:
a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”
The potential fundamental error there is the whole multiple independent variable thing. The study was likely designed from the outset without regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method. Which is a bigger issue than just confusing cause and effect. It gives other scientists a suspicion that the people doing the study aren't even aware of the potential confounding nature of the design?
The people doing the study will of course call the "snobbish" scientists "anti-racists" for pointing these things out. But scientists are neither "racist" nor "anti-racist". The conclusions follow from the data via the scientific method, or the conclusions don't follow. A good scientist will not presume, a priori, what the conclusions are. In this instance, scientists can be forgiven for concluding that the findings don't follow.
Scientists are better described as Scientific Method Fundamentalists. If they believe in anything, it is the scientific method. Everything else? Well, yeah, you will need to convince them. The good news is you can do that, but you have to use the scientific method to do so. If you don't, they rightfully dismiss you out of hand.
I think the people who push these studies are misunderstanding the dismissal of their "findings" as antagonism to their conclusions. And on the other side, there are probably scientists who are not even bothering to explain the nature of their problem to them. There's probably a sense of, "It's a waste of time to talk to them", on both sides.
> have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public
If your goal is to show that the gene variant causes violence, you probably need to compare violent vs nonviolent prison populations, not prison populations vs general public. We already know that there are aspects of genetics that affect likelihood of being imprisoned, all else being equal.
A common refrain among non religious people is that religion is false, self contradictory, or something similar.
And yet the large overlap between these people and anti-racists cannot face the evidence that evolution applies to humans, and that genetic differences can have measurable effects. This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that evolution is real. Two completely incompatible beliefs (or concepts, if you can't stand such a word).
Prevalence of the MAOA gene is quite interesting indeed.
To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. That our only differences come from nurture.
The other belief (or "non-skeptically accepted prospect") is that humanity has evolved, first from africa, then in disparate populations spread over the entire land area of the earth, being subject to many varied natural environments and thus selections. Such natural selections MUST select for different traits, often wildly different. Such traits cannot be contained to "skin color only" a meaningless, arbitrary restriction.
It's less hilarious when whole country policies are made on those assumptions thus ruining it economically (notably), and voicing any concerns is threatened with legal force.
In France the official dogma of the educated is that every difference is cultural, and races don't exist. My father for example strongly held and defend those beliefs. Somehow he gets very angry when I ask why there is wide academic achievement difference between his children despite growing in the same environment, or how Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a foreigner while not uttering a single words. I think that deep down all those people know the truth but they don't want to admit it, nor admit it to other for fear of the social consequences.
> why there is wide academic achievement difference between his children despite growing in the same environment
Why are there wide academic achievement differences between children who have the same "race" who grow up in the same environment? According to you, this should not be the case.
> how Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a foreigner while not uttering a single words
Do you think they can do so for any given person? I guarantee you there are foreign people who Japanese people don't guess are foreign, and non-foreign people who Japanese people guess are foreign. How can this be?
I can sympathize with your father getting angry. Considering how trivial it is to come up with counter arguments, it must be frustrating to have this brought up more than once.
Most of the definitions around race are tied to a subjective view of a person’s physical appearance.
Is Obama (the son of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman) black or white? If neither, what is this new race to be called? Would he be a different race if his father was also mixed race?
I find that often times asking people this question leads us back to something akin to the one-drop rule and I don’t see any value in that.
This [1] discussion on X includes a gene prevalence graph, showing varied groups mostly easily identifiable by DNA sequencing. Such graphs use the prevalence of 2 genes amongst different samples of populations. Including more genes develops a much sharper image.
You're referring to the normal and reasonable view, but I think most are targeting this weird new(ish) concept, heavily intertwined into politics, that any and all differences between groups are due to biases or other environmental factors.
So if you see that e.g. one group is lagging behind in math then that is taken at face value as evidence that 'math is racist.' A search for that exact phrase will turn up a million hits, pushed by some very big entities, if you want to go down this rabbit hole.
But if you don't already know about this stuff - just don't. The amount of stupidity and transparent divide+conquer politics in it all is just nauseating.
On the other hand it does have contemporary relevance as a lot of the funding for this stuff is being scrapped, and it's nice to understand what we're 'losing.'
>This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that evolution is real.
This is a strawman of the real understanding that humans, as a species, have extremely low genetic diversity. Along with that, variations within a population are larger than variations between populations. In addition, there are countless confounding factors that play a larger role. Lastly, teasing out actual cause and effect is incredibly difficult. “Anti-racist” scientists simply understand to not take simplistic, reductive interpretations and jump to conclusions trying to get easy answers to complex situations.
> within a population are larger than variations between populations
That doesn’t really change anything, though. That low variance still might allow (and well.. obviously does) enough space for significant genetics differences (that impact everything ranging from physical properties to intelligence) between individuals or subgroups to manifest themselves.
In theory we could certainly produce a “breed” of extremely physically fit “super-humans”. Same probably applies to other traits. Not that anyone should be ever allowed under any circumstances to try something like that.
With modern understanding of genetics eugenics would be more or less scientifically sound on paper (of course a dystopian society which regulates human breeding would be a horrible place to exist in even if it was made up of objectively “genetically superior” individuals)
Exactly. A single base pair out of 3 billion can cause blonde hair, sickle cell, dwarfism, and a million other things that aren’t necessarily even negative. People from two different continents differing at hundreds of thousands of sites in addition to millions of within-population variants says nothing about phenotypic differences.
There'd be no hilarity whatsoever if people discriminated against you based on something they said you could not change.
Anyone doing actual science cannot determine whether you are worth hiring based on your DNA - all they can do is point to some correlations which don't tell them about you individually. It is quite possible for such research to be discredited in future by other studies.
It's not even well defined what are all the characteristics that make a good "X" to then discriminate about because people of all kinds end up doing things we didn't expect them to be able to. What is intelligence and how many ways are there of measuring it and what kind does a certain job require anyhow?
So it is factually and morally wrong to discriminate on DNA. It might be pointless to say this though, as I notice that to convert a prejudiced person into an anti-racist all you have to do is make them think they're being discriminated against.
In the absence of any other information about an applicant whatsoever, DNA evidence can give you strong likelihoods and useful correlations for many possible outcomes.
If I was to take this to the logical end, you can bar any bananas, lizards, dogs, or other non humans by simply looking at their DNA and having no other applicant specific information.
To bring this back to the more mundane, even the BBC is covering whether genes impact your likelihood to have certain hobbies. We are not going to discover that genes impact our lives LESS as we dig into the human genome more. To proclaim by personal fiat that people will never figure out how to productively (and for personal/corporate gain) filter by DNA is simply wrong.
This is similar to the idea that criminals with 20 previous felonies can be given any punishment besides life in prison or death. It is really super easy to predict the future of any such criminal let loose. A 90% chance of a 21st felony and yet another ruined or ended life.
The fact that it’s morally wrong (and IMHO objectively evil) does not mean that it wouldn’t be an efficient policy purely from a strict utilitarian angle. Assuming we could actually identify the genetic markers that signal a higher likelihood of preferable traits even if on the whole it would only be e.g. 80% accurate that might still be useful. Individual outliers could just be ignored at minimal cost.
Of course it would be inefficient because it is an extreme oversimplification of what is desirable (which is arguable) and whether or not certain markers would achieve it.
The big mistake that racists and bigots make is in overvaluing whatever they think their own strengths are and undervaluing strengths they don't have.
True. But there are some “low hanging fruits” e.g. if not outright eradicating then at least significantly reducing the prevalence of congenital diseases.
Of course giving the government the right to prevent some individuals from having children is an extremely slippery slope. States that are willing and capable of engaging in such things e.g. ( Communist China back in the 70s ) also tend to be run by extremely misguided and delusional people.
We already test for things like Downs Syndrome which doesn't mean that we stop pregnancy but it tells the parents what to expect.
Since we can do gene therapy to some degree already I imagine we'll fix things that are already known health problems for an individual.
Eventually other things will become possible, including modifications that are not about health. That's where dragons be. We'll at least need rules about modifications that aren't 99% understood and "guaranteed" to do what is wanted. We will also want to ensure some level of genetic diversity - not allowing everyone to make their kids blue eyed.
There's been a dispute over that for a long time, they're often called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. (Modern humans then being Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which seems somewhat vain, calling ourselves "wise wise man")
I'm not sure that matters but one hill I will die on is that all members of homo are humans too.
If we're renaming things I'd rather we call ourselves homo gregarius. There's no evidence we were individually smarter than our Neanderthals cousins, rather we were a variety of humans which lived in larger groups and thus could sustain a more sophisticated technological toolkit.
Biologically I have low melatonin and low cortisol. This means I have trouble falling asleep and then I have trouble waking up.
Countless times in my life I have lived 26-28 hour cycles and otherwise I am in a never ending struggle to live a 24 hour cycle. Once I hit retirement I will definitely try this 28 hour cycle and might even switch to it permanently.
Yeah there are obvious downsides having to do with SO, friends, etc. Having a husband with this same biological quirk would be ideal, but again once I no longer have to go into the office it will be really hard not to fall into a > 24 hour pattern.
> author seems like they were only there for a promotion
It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.
This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely willing to believe that there are parts where people are like this, but I found that people generally did not care about my level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall be promoted".
There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.
The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.
An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.
I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.
But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.
Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.
There's different kinds of customers for different kinds of bureaucracies though.
However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.
>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period
At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.
You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.
Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\
It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.
Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?
If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !
You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)
I will second what the parent poster says, people definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team". This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since I have worked at other places where someone's level almost never comes up in any conversation I always found it a little concerning.
So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened, but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a bit of a dick.
In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.
It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.
This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.
Yes, the last few years there has been a big push to try to hide levels, don't celebrate promos as publicly, etc, but the overall you can't overnight change (if ever) a culture that has been built for two decades around this concept.
AGI. Writing up a paper on defining core principles of general intelligence on which artificial general intelligence can be built with a POC of an artificial life system that can evolve better AGI systems.
I bought a NYC to Boston ticket for a few weeks from now for $35 this morning. Depends on many factors but once you know you can easily buy the cheap tickets.
SetUpdatedToNow
- set %content.updated% as %now% in the file "file.txt"
The whole reading and writing feels like a leftover from the days of programming. Reading it in, modifying and then writing assume it fits in memory, leaves out ideas around locking, filesystem issues, writing to a temp and swapping, etc. Giving the actual intent lets the LLM decide what is the best way which might be reading in , modifying and then writing.
The way I designed the language I had the current languages in mind. Don't forget you are programming, it's just more natural, you need details
But also the main reason is that it's much more difficult to solve the intent when mixing multiple action into the same step. In theory it's possible but the language isn't there yet.
> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?
I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.
As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.
