I chose to join DeepMind instead of taking a professorship and it is one of the greatest regrets of my life. If you are a woman or minority, avoid at all costs. Toxic workplace, shambolic HR, and leadership that absolutely refuses to listen to their staff. They claim to bring together the best of industry and the best of academia but it also has the worst of both: no accountability for harassment or abuse, bullying, massive egos, and covering up bad behaviors with NDAs.
I have worked in male dominated spaces for my entire career, but DeepMind takes the cake. There is extremely little diversity, though they're trying to change that, many employees are vocally against these diversity efforts, arguing that they "lower the bar" (whereas every female technical staff I've interacted with there is ridiculously talented, yet still under-leveled compared to their male counterparts).
There is also a strong hierarchy amongst the roles, where researchers trump engineers trump non-technical staff. This sets up some really nasty dynamics, and researchers treating others like their 'servants'--especially troubling when most of the gender and racial diversity is to be found in the "underclass" of non-technical staff.
There are no feedback mechanisms, leadership lies through their teeth, and refuses any kind of transparency. They will go to great lengths to protect abusive senior employees at the expense of junior employees--the founder, Moose, bullied dozens of his reports whilst HR turned a blind eye for years. There are several new reports of HR failing to act on horrific sexual harassment/assault by senior researchers, just look up the news stories. Instead of committing to do anything about their massive HR failures, however, leadership has continued to deny, waffle and deflect blame.
Ultimately, I believe Demis just wants to be a researcher, not a CEO, and seems to be largely uninterested in staff problems. Until leadership actually exerts any effort on this, the toxicity will continue.
