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It's possible that this project was created as a sort of L8+ engineer/manager retention program. There's been some reporting that high level execs have been leaving GAMMA companies for blockchain/crypto projects with high payout potential[1]. I wonder if Google is heading in this direction to toss these people a bone with the hopes they'll stay.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley...

discuss

PragmaticPulp|4 years ago

Doesn't really make sense. People leave for cryptocurrency projects because they’re promised a huge portion of the tokens or pre-mined coins. The idea is that they just need to make the project work well enough to hype enough people into buying the coins, at which point they can unload them at huge returns and then move on to the next crypto project to repeat the process.

It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects without the same asymmetric upside potential, all to keep them from going to companies that weren’t even competitors in the first place.

vmception|4 years ago

I'm all for a huge premine and short vesting period, but Google is competing with Meta.

Google is Web 2.0 "get off my lawn" Mecca, they ignored this space until Meta.

People go there because they just caught on to the compensation packages and are going to catch on to Web3 compensation packages just as late. They already work on overly complicated stacks for useless cogs on useless products that Google shuts down randomly.

Have you seen what "backend" competency entails these days? Its absurd!

dehrmann|4 years ago

> It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects

It might. This keeps these people out of the job market.

jmeister|4 years ago

This is silly. There are many, many true believers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140393

progbits|4 years ago

But why keep them if they are going to be doing useless work? In the hopes they get bored and move internally to different project?

xnx|4 years ago

Sometimes having someone do useless work for you is better than having them do useful work for a competitors.

uvdn7|4 years ago

It’s not entirely useless. It costs big companies little to make this type of investments to avoid a potential big miss longer term (think of IBM, Nokia, etc.) Big companies are paranoid about missing the next big thing, so it makes sense to invest in a lot of things.

kaycebasques|4 years ago

Is GAMMA the new FAANG?

* Google

* Amazon

* Microsoft

* ???

* Apple

lmkg|4 years ago

Facebook is now Meta, so the acronyms have to change.

basch|4 years ago

Google is Alphabet tho, so its MAAMA or MAMAA.

langitbiru|4 years ago

Or TAAAMM. Companies with hug TAMs.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1484571438442967042

oplav|4 years ago