Even though I am on vacation this week, I had the humility to attend a weekly 1-1 with our VP to discuss an ongoing project. Last time, I brought out a lot of the points of contention with him, and he responded with positive feedback. So I thought I should do even more of that this time, though not necessarily with a stronger tone.
I mentioned that I felt our general strategy of using a lot of human annotation as direct input to the system is not scalable, and noisy. In a way I am questioning the existence of an entire team that interfaces between highly fine-grained customer-specific annotation tooling, and the internal working of our ai system. I sensed that he understood my meaning very clearly this time, and nodded firmly. What surprised me was that he responded by saying he was surprised of my feeling. Furthermore he called it a criticism without a better solution, that is, if I criticize something, I should bring a better solution to the table. I did not mean it as a criticism to him personally, but I guess since he’s the head of the organizations, as well as the original designer of the orgs, whatever negative feedback on the system can only be interpreted as a personal criticism.
Then he even pushed me further whether I am ready to resign. Fortunately the news of how Timnit Gebru was forced to resign by herself was still fresh in my mind. So I gave a reluctant but firm no. At that point it should have been clear to him that I am faking it. But to save any embarrassing public drama, we both refrained from dwelling on the subject further. After that failed attempt at inducing a self-resignation, I also became instantly much more alert and careful with my words. I know that this is no longer a guy I can trust with my true feeling, even at the product/technology level. I refrain from further criticism, and tried my best with zoom facial expression to swallow some bitter Galilean pills (thank god I insisted staying home for our PTO-hijacking meeting, to which he courteously apologized).
I guess the message is pretty clear. I am not welcome at this company any more, not only by my manager, but by his manager as well. The follow-up alignment 1-1 was really a test of continued employability, something I did not anticipate, due to lack of workplace maturity.
Back a few weeks ago, my manager insisted that I attend a 3 day offsite, despite my colloquial family excuse. At the time I felt it was my right to stand firm against such unreasonable demand. When I submitted my PTO this week that included the offsite, my manager brought it up again, and was quite insistent still, even offering to talk to the HR for last minute trip arrangement. Now it became clear to me that this is part of the startup cult that I must live with, or there will be no trust or bonding in future collaboration, or the conception and preservation of a common baby, the birth of this lofty goal that everyone is claiming a part of.
To survive in a startup, one needs not just personal connection with your coworkers, but a religious trust and bonding with them. It is about selling a part of you to the cause, and pushing yourself to a corner without the possibility to back off. I clearly lack this type of enterprising abandonment. I am a PhD with a decent career path so far. There are many interesting research-y ideas I want to pursue in the name of product improvement in the coming years. Family is also a big part, if not the biggest part of my life, especially in contrast to the sometimes minuscule impact I feel from the startup work I do.
As of me, there should be no ill feeling towards any of the leadership crew, or my coworkers. My tenure at any given workplace is roughly proportional to the level of accomplishment at each. And that in turn is proportional to how passionate I felt about the technology behind the work, not necessarily the practical product impact it creates. I know many would argue this is at odds with careers in industry. To me however this is an extension of the academic life that I am a few generations too late to pursue. I don’t consider myself excessively academic either. I don’t write dozens of academically flavored research papers a year, nor do I try hard to sell my big ideas in major conferences.
I enjoy the purity of solutions as the VP correctly pointed out. I don’t mind spot fixes or patches as long as they occupy a well-defined, well-constrained place in the system, as long as there is a clear picture of the overall design, and as long as there is a clear sense that the wins from systematic model based approaches have been more or less saturated. Instead I was given no concrete directions, a problem to solve, and also approaches that I am not supposed to use, even though they may still have to accept the approaches if they turn out fruitful, and even though more junior members are given the license to try them however they like. A very weird governing philosophy, as I told one recruiter, google search on steroid.
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