@ShenHuang: “I’ve got a friend at DeepMind. Last Wednesday at 9 p.m. he texted me: ‘I’ve got no work to stay late for.’ Two seconds later: ‘I want to cry.’—the saddest ‘nothing to do’ I’ve ever heard. Anyone who’s survived five-plus years in Silicon Valley knows the unspoken rule: worse than being laid off is slowly turning invisible inside the perf system.”
Summary
A viral tweet captures a DeepMind engineer’s quiet despair as his workload evaporates—an ominous sign of Google’s stealth layoffs by attrition.
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Cached at: 04/21/26, 09:29 AM
I have a friend at DeepMind. Last Wednesday, at nine in the evening, he messaged me:
“I’ve got nothing to work on tonight.”
Two seconds later he added:
“I want to cry.”
It was the most heartbreaking “nothing to do” I’ve ever heard.
Anyone who’s been in Silicon Valley more than five years knows the unspoken rule:
Worse than being laid off is slowly turning invisible inside the performance system.
You’re still employed, the paycheck still lands, your Slack
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