“We encourage our engineers to vigorously test and critique our internal tools; that candid feedback loop, even via our internal meme generator, is vital to how we build technology," Google said. "We continue to refine our internal tools based on employee feedback to ensure we are delivering the best experience that maximizes daily productivity.”
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
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 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.
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.
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 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).
Glad to know the struggle seems to be universal.
Im happy that this really cool and sophisticated tool got invented. But everywhere im seeing it be used is making me sad and frustrated. This software renaissance feels more like the coming dark ages.
Excel users complain about using Excel still [1]. They even make memes about it! Some of them work at Microsoft!
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.
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.
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 do wonder why Gemini/Antigravity is so behind Codex and Claude. They have it all, TPUs, the model is okay, but then its scattered across a dozen product plans, names, limits. I feel like they are spread thin.
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.
Mocking it instead of being apathetic may spur someone to try and address its problems. It's worse when management tells people not to complain because it's bad for morale.
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."
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.
> 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."
Flash 3.5 (Fast) is very fast for many things, just don't throw complicated issues with it, it just doesn't do it as well as 5.5 High.
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.
I work on a commonly used piece of software, I also make jokes to my colleagues about the software that I work on, many of us do. If I had infinite time and infinite money and infinite power, and there was no downstream risk to any of my updates, then I'd fix every single thing that I don't like about the software... things that I know other engineers don't like about it. But insofar as I am not god (... yet?), all I have is my good humor and congeniality.
Being willing and able to criticize the company's products is really important.
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.
Probably in the minority here but I think mocking the LLM is actually a good approach for integration testing, so these folks seem to know what they're doing :-)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadNobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
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.
[1]: https://www.demilked.com/excel-humor-memes/
Disliked thing can have positive utility? Must mean the criticism is wrong. gg's in chat and checkmate, atheists.
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.)
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.
I've used and hated other internal tools - stuff like JIRA and Workday - that were just accepted as terrible and never going to improve.
I'll let that stand on it's own.
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.
> 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."
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.