Jeff Dean Reveals Departure from Google in Final 48 Hours: 1,500 People Cram into Small Coffee Shop to Bid Farewell

According to Dongcha Beating monitoring, Google's former Chief Scientist Jeff Dean revealed his detailed schedule for the last two days before leaving during KDD 2026. On the day of his announcement, he first said goodbye to 139 close colleagues. In the afternoon, about 1500 people attended the farewell party, but the on-site cafe could only accommodate around 300 people.

At 10:30 p.m., he found 400 farewell messages in the internal chat, which kept him up until 2:30 a.m. The next morning, he received another 250 internal messages and 500 emails forwarded to his personal inbox. It wasn't until 5:20 p.m. that he closed his laptop.

The news of his departure was announced a week ago. Dean, Google's 30th employee, worked at the company for nearly 27 years, eventually serving as Chief Scientist. He co-founded Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, aiming to enable AI to automatically propose, run, and evaluate experiments while concurrently running thousands of experiments for machine learning, chip design, drug discovery, and material science research. Alphabet is also the company's founding investor and cloud partner.