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    Francois Chollet is leaving Google

    (developers.googleblog.com)
    377 points xnx | 11 comments | 13 Nov 24 22:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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    fchollet ◴[14 Nov 24 07:27 UTC] No.42133844[source]▶
    Hi HN, Francois here. Happy to answer any questions!

    Here's a start --

    "Did you get poached by Anthropic/etc": No, I am starting a new company with a friend. We will announce more about it in due time!

    "Who uses Keras in production": Off the top of my head the current list includes Midjourney, YouTube, Waymo, Google across many products (even Ads started moving to Keras recently!), Netflix, Spotify, Snap, GrubHub, Square/Block, X/Twitter, and many non-tech companies like United, JPM, Orange, Walmart, etc. In total Keras has ~2M developers and powers ML at many companies big and small. This isn't all TF -- many of our users have started running Keras on JAX or PyTorch.

    "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. Making Keras multi-backend again in 2023 has been one of my favorite projects to work on, both from the engineering & architecture side of things but also because the product is truly great (also, I love JAX)!

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    1. mFixman ◴[14 Nov 24 11:48 UTC] No.42135297[source]▶
    > I was a L5 IC at the time

    Kudos to Google for hiring extremely competent people, but I'm surprised that the creator and main architect of Keras hadn't been promoted to Staff Engineer at minimum.

    replies(4): >>42135681 #>>42135814 #>>42136523 #>>42137449 #
    2. xyst ◴[14 Nov 24 12:46 UTC] No.42135681[source]▶
    at certain levels in the corporate ladder, it's all about who or whom you glaze to get to that next level.

    actual hard skills are irrelevant

    3. toxik ◴[14 Nov 24 13:06 UTC] No.42135814[source]▶
    Hierarchy aside, I am surprised the literal author and maintainer of the project, on Google’s payroll no less, was not consulted on such a decision. Seems borderline arrogant.
    replies(3): >>42136449 #>>42137091 #>>42148621 #
    4. ignoramous ◴[14 Nov 24 14:32 UTC] No.42136449[source]▶
    > ... was not consulted on such a decision ...

    What Francois wrote suggests he was overruled.

    5. petters ◴[14 Nov 24 14:42 UTC] No.42136523[source]▶
    It takes a while to get promoted, but he certainly did not leave as L5
    6. rubiquity ◴[14 Nov 24 15:25 UTC] No.42137091[source]▶
    Google being arrogant? Say it isn’t so!
    7. oooyay ◴[14 Nov 24 15:54 UTC] No.42137449[source]▶
    Down leveling is a pretty common strategy larger companies use to retain engineers.
    replies(2): >>42141244 #>>42149185 #
    8. Centigonal ◴[14 Nov 24 21:08 UTC] No.42141244[source]▶
    Could you elaborate on this? how does being down-leveled make an engineer less likely to leave?
    replies(1): >>42167107 #
    9. dekhn ◴[15 Nov 24 16:54 UTC] No.42148621[source]▶
    The leadership of tensorflow (which was a political football) at the time was not particularly wise, or introspective, and certainly was not interested in hearing the opinions of the large number of talented junior and senior engineers. They were trying to thread the needle of growing a large external open source project while also satisfying the internal (very advanced) needs of researchers and product teams.

    This was a common pattern at the time and it's part of the reason TF 2.0 became a debacle and jax was made as a side product that matured on its own before the directors got their hands on it.

    Affecting leadership's decisions at Google became gradually more difficult over time. The L8s often were quite experienced in some area, but assumed their abilities generalized (for example, storage experts trying to design network distributed strategies for HPC).

    Fortunately, with the exception of a few valuable datasets and some resources, effectively everything important about machine learning has been exported from Google into the literature and open source and it remains to be seen if google will ever recover from the exodus of the highly talented but mostly ignored junior and senior engineers who made it so productive in the past.

    10. dekhn ◴[15 Nov 24 17:50 UTC] No.42149185[source]▶
    Google in particular often downlevelled incoming engineers by one level from what their "natural" level should be- IE, a person who should have been an L6 would often be hired at L5 and then have to "prove themself" before getting that promo.
    11. toomuchtodo ◴[17 Nov 24 20:49 UTC] No.42167107{3}[source]▶
    It’s gaslighting to make you work harder to achieve the promo.