Comment by sn41

7 months ago

Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, which is kind of a big deal. The work was related to randomized rounding, which is a bread-and-butter technique for LP relaxation approaches to integer optimization, similar to knapsack problems.

This is not to defend any bad decisions he may have made at Google and Yahoo, but to make him an anonymous clueless corporate honcho who is good only at scheming and wrecking companies is bizarre. All this information, moreover, is available on Wikipedia and (cough) Google scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...

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sn41

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slingnow  7 months ago

> But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

Surely YOU can't be serious. The author was very clearly comparing this guy to much more famous and heavily derided figures like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. I don't think co-authoring a text on randomized algorithms gets you the same notoriety as being the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter...

tflol  7 months ago

i love this person google scholar, it is important to this employee resume that the moment i click on this link i immediately see compact list of articles with brief introductions in plaintext. very easy to see everything and access exactly what i'm interested in almost immediately with a swift skim.

it sadly ironic how google search used to look like this, now it looks like bloated shit, this dude pushed ruining it, yet this guys resume google scholar page just looks so slick. wow what a slick, _compact_, looking resume page. wish google search looked like this

EDIT: we should advertise between the articles, missed revenue google scolar

betageek  7 months ago

This isn't an article for computer scientists, and I think he covers this pretty well:

"While Levy calls him a “world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field,” he also describes Raghavan as “choosing a management track,” which definitely tracks with everything I’ve found about him."

"Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies that would make Google more profitable and less useful to the world at large."