Francois Chollet is leaving Google

> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision. The TF team was huge at the time, 50+ people, while Keras was just me and the open-source community. In retrospect I think Keras would have been better off as an independent multi-backend framework -- but that would have required me quitting Google back then.

The fact that an "L8" at Google ranks above an OSS maintainer of a super-popular library "L5" is incredibly interesting. How are these levels determined? Doesn't this represent a conflict of interest between the FOSS library and Google's own motivations? The maintainer having to pick between a great paycheck or control of the library (with the impending possibility of Google forking).

L8 at Google is not a random pecking order level. L8s generally have massive systems design experience and decades of software engineering experience at all levels of scale. They make decisions at Google which can have impacts on the workflows of 100s of engineers on products with 100millions/billions of users. There are less L8s than there are technical VPs (excluding all the random biz side VP roles)

L5 here designates that they were a tenured (but not designated Senior) software engineer. It doesn't meant they don't have a voice in these discussions (very likely an L8 reached out to learn more about the issue, the options, and ideally considered Francois's role and expertise before making a decision), it just means its above their pay grade.

I'll let Francois provide more detail on the exact situation.

This is just the standard Google ladder. Your initial level when you join is based on your past experience. Then you gain levels by going through the infamous promo process. L8 represents the level of Director.

Yes, there are conflicts of interests inherent to the fact that OSS maintainers are usually employed by big tech companies (since OSS itself doesn't make money). And it is often the case that big tech companies leverage their involvement in OSS development to further their own strategic interests and undermine their competitors, such as in the case of Meta, or to a lesser extent Google. But without the involvement of big tech companies, you would see a lot less open-source in the world. So you can view it as a trade off.

> How are these levels determined?

I have no knowledge of Google, but if L5 is the highest IC rank, then L8 will often be obtained through politics and playing the popularity game.

The U.S. corporate system is set up to humiliate and exploit real contributors. The demeaning term "IC" is a reflection of that. It is also applied when someone literally writes a whole application and the idle corporate masters stand by and take the credit.

Unfortunately, this is also how captured "open" source projects like Python work these days.

The IC ladder at Google grows from L3 up to L10.

An L8 IC has similar responsibilities as a Director (roughly 100ish people) but rather than people, and priority responsibility it is systems, architecture, reliability responsibility.

L5 isn't the highest IC level at Google. Broadly would go up to L10, but the ratio at every level is ~1:4 or 1:5 b/w IC levels.

The L7/L8 level engineers I've spoken or worked with have definitely earned it - they bring to bear significant large scale systems knowledge and bring it to bear on very large problem statements. Impact would be felt on billion$ impact wise.

The history of the company does not seem to demonstrate such a semi-genius are capable of producing successful products. Can hardly be third on Cloud.