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.
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.
Tried zooming in on text on iOS. Ads filled the screen and some random other imgur link loaded. Nope.
Kinda wanted to see what you shared, but that’s as far as I got.
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.
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.
A long long time ago I used to work at Yahoo. There was an internal mailing list called "devel-random@yahoo-inc.com", which was basically a forum for engineers to let off steam. I used to enjoy the occasional emacs-vs-vim threads, or the ribbing it frequently gave to Jan Koum (founder of Whatsapp).
When Marissa Mayer became CEO in 2012, one of the first things she did was to join this forum, to get a pulse on the developers.
I know this, because my VP comes running to me one day: how do I join this group "devel-random"?
I asked him: are you sure you want to join it? It's a huge time suck if you're not careful.
No, no, he replied; Marissa wants us to join it so we can get a feel for the company (turned out she said no such thing, but you know how senior management is: aping everything that a CEO does).
A couple of weeks later he quietly quit the list. :-D
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.
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.)
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.
Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.
If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
* other recent examples:
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.
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.
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"
Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
Depends on your line of work. I regularly try to incorporate it with mine and find myself telling it that it's wrong more often than not. I'm yet to be convinced that double-checking and correcting an LLM's work has saved me any more time than wading through garbage SEO-filled results to find what I need.
>Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
The cockiness/hubris is real.
At no point has Google engineering culture actually embraced this at the ground level. This isn’t a change, this is the existing disconnect between the workers and the managers.
I've used and hated other internal tools - stuff like JIRA and Workday - that were just accepted as terrible and never going to improve.
> 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."
I'll let that stand on it's own.
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.
