<story><title>After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him</title><url>https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/08/04/deepminds-cofounder-placed-leave-bullying-google-promoted</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marcinzm</author><text>&amp;gt;We had absolutely no work in Russia.&lt;p&gt;Wouldn&amp;#x27;t the point of such a high level briefing be because they&amp;#x27;re tying to get work in Russia but don&amp;#x27;t already have any? It&amp;#x27;s rather common for employees to not know the details of the strategic plans of the executives until the execution starts.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>I see a lot of people saying this seems not a big deal, or that his leadership deserved promotion.&lt;p&gt;It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;wqdkF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;wqdkF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;He would ask us to do personal things for him,&amp;quot; one of these people said. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#x27;I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.&amp;#x27; [...] We had absolutely no work in Russia.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I originally made a joke in a now-deleted comment, but then was slightly horrified to hear people excusing this behavior. So here’s a serious one: if you get locked into a prestigious institution under someone like this, run.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I should have known this would turn into a sub thread about whether it’s ok to demand an AI researcher brief an executive on Russian political history.&lt;p&gt;Here’s another one: gossiping about firing someone across the entire office, before you fire them. This article says he did that. I recommend reading through it. I have to go move into our house now, so I can’t paste everything. Suffice to say, the behavior patterns were not productive.&lt;p&gt;I think people want to recognize DeepMind’s eventual success. Having worked under some effective YC founders vs some Suleyman types, I’ve learned that sometimes a startup can succeed in spite of flaws. And remember, DeepMind was bought by Google. At that point they were the anointed child. Their success wasn’t guaranteed, but it wasn’t as tenuous as pre-billions Google investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abeppu</author><text>1. Even if you&amp;#x27;re considering doing business in Russia, an over-broad request with insufficient context is unlikely to yield a result which is of any value. Russia is huge, and its history goes back to the 9th century. Asking for a report of its history and politics without saying anything about how the report would be used is absurd. &amp;quot;Prepare a report on how Russian government contracts for software services are awarded&amp;quot; is a prompt which might give you something useful. &amp;quot;Summarize more the a millennia of history and politics in a giant country&amp;quot; is not.&lt;p&gt;2. In the article linked in the comment above, this is given as a single example of a pattern of behavior of asking people to do things unrelated to their jobs. Surely we can understand that even if there were many examples, in this article only one could be mentioned due to space reasons. One might contrive a situation in which any single example, removed from its context, could be arguably a valid request. But if someone who worked with him observed this as a pattern rather than a single incident, doesn&amp;#x27;t that have to be taken seriously? Esp in combination with the &amp;quot;I crush people&amp;quot; and the assertion that he would humiliate people in front of their colleagues? Between the possibilities of &amp;quot;maybe there was a secret plan to work in Russia&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;maybe he asked for things out of personal interest disregarding people&amp;#x27;s actual roles&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;maybe he had a dysfunctional need to demonstrate power over others by having them do bullshit &amp;#x27;work&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;, I think the latter two are seem pretty plausible.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Suleyman would also sometimes ask employees to carry out tasks unrelated to their jobs or DeepMind&amp;#x27;s work, two former employees said.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;He would ask us to do personal things for him,&amp;quot; one of these people said. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#x27;I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.&amp;#x27; We knew it was absurd. We knew it was a waste of time. We had absolutely no work in Russia.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him</title><url>https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/08/04/deepminds-cofounder-placed-leave-bullying-google-promoted</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marcinzm</author><text>&amp;gt;We had absolutely no work in Russia.&lt;p&gt;Wouldn&amp;#x27;t the point of such a high level briefing be because they&amp;#x27;re tying to get work in Russia but don&amp;#x27;t already have any? It&amp;#x27;s rather common for employees to not know the details of the strategic plans of the executives until the execution starts.</text></item><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>I see a lot of people saying this seems not a big deal, or that his leadership deserved promotion.&lt;p&gt;It’s because this is a second order article. The original, most substantive source that I could find is quite thorough:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;wqdkF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;wqdkF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;He would ask us to do personal things for him,&amp;quot; one of these people said. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#x27;I need you to write a briefing for me on Russian history and politics.&amp;#x27; [...] We had absolutely no work in Russia.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I originally made a joke in a now-deleted comment, but then was slightly horrified to hear people excusing this behavior. So here’s a serious one: if you get locked into a prestigious institution under someone like this, run.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I should have known this would turn into a sub thread about whether it’s ok to demand an AI researcher brief an executive on Russian political history.&lt;p&gt;Here’s another one: gossiping about firing someone across the entire office, before you fire them. This article says he did that. I recommend reading through it. I have to go move into our house now, so I can’t paste everything. Suffice to say, the behavior patterns were not productive.&lt;p&gt;I think people want to recognize DeepMind’s eventual success. Having worked under some effective YC founders vs some Suleyman types, I’ve learned that sometimes a startup can succeed in spite of flaws. And remember, DeepMind was bought by Google. At that point they were the anointed child. Their success wasn’t guaranteed, but it wasn’t as tenuous as pre-billions Google investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MisterBastahrd</author><text>No.&lt;p&gt;Because when you&amp;#x27;re as large as Google, you don&amp;#x27;t ask your underlings to write book reports on things that are of strategic business importance. You go through the proper channels and get them to hire qualified people to cut through the bullshit.</text></comment>