What does this even mean? The power and resource disparity between Google and an individual researcher are so vast that this in no way can go bad for Google.
The idea that a few members on HN are disillusioned with Google is just another Tuesday for them. They literally do not care...no business of this size and magnitude do. The general public will never hear about this and if they do, they won't understand it, and if they do then they aren't the general public.
You're not wrong. But like it or not, HN is the newspaper of our time. For many of us, anyway. So stuff like this tends to percolate in unexpected ways. And as a hiring manager, you get no feedback when people decide not to apply to your company, so it's probably better not to kill your hiring momentum.
If it seems absurd that anyone would turn down a job at DeepMind, well... Let's just say, in my experience, prestigious institutions tend to come with a pile of downsides that everyone puts up with (because prestige) but no one really talks about (because no reason). If you care about shipping results quickly -- some researchers do (or at least I do) -- then the idea of joining a big company is already worrisome. Like you're a professional rower, happily rowing along and navigating wherever you want to go, then you're asked to join a galley rower: https://youtu.be/TyzQ-bVaqPU?t=294
There's no substitute for Google-scale work. (Working on TPUs would be a dream, IMO; where else could you possibly build those?) But if you join Google as a researcher, it sounds like your ideas have to (a) pass through their internal academic review, (b) pass through a journal's review, and then finally your idea can be published to the wider scientific community for comment. (b) was painful but possibly worthwhile, with arxiv serving as a bucket to catch everything else. Why roll your own internal review process? And why is Google trying to micromanage what researchers are allowed to publish?
I know we're probably missing a lot of the story. But on the other hand, Jeff has now given an official side of that story, so it's not like they didn't have a chance to set expectations.
What does this even mean? The power and resource disparity between Google and an individual researcher are so vast that this in no way can go bad for Google.
The idea that a few members on HN are disillusioned with Google is just another Tuesday for them. They literally do not care...no business of this size and magnitude do. The general public will never hear about this and if they do, they won't understand it, and if they do then they aren't the general public.