Jeff Dean's final 48 hours at Google: 1,500 goodbyes in a 300-person cafe

At KDD 2026, Google's former chief scientist Jeff Dean shared the full schedule of his final 48 hours at the company for the first time. On the day he announced his departure, he began by saying goodbye to 139 close colleagues. That afternoon, roughly 1,500 people squeezed into a farewell gathering — in a cafe that fits about 300.

At 10:30 p.m., he found 400 goodbye messages in internal chat and stayed up replying until 2:30 a.m. The next morning brought another 250 internal messages and 500 emails cc'd to his personal inbox. He didn't close his laptop until 5:20 p.m.

The news of his departure had already been announced a week earlier. Dean was Google's 30th employee, spent nearly 27 years there, and ultimately served as chief scientist. He co-founded Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — an effort to let AI propose, run, and evaluate its own experiments, with thousands running in parallel for machine learning, chip design, drug discovery, and materials research. Alphabet is also a founding investor and cloud partner.