This is standard recent Google. A year or so ago, they laid off GCP upper tier support to replace them with cheaper workers.
PS: I won't say which MAAN_, but the recruiters are half based in India now. Coincidentally, it's a MAAN_ that laid me off previously in a relatively recent timeframe rather than attempt to find me another home internally. Brain explodes. Perhaps MAANGs need to focus more on long-term sustainability if they intend to retain top talent because morale is non-uniformly, moderately miserable due to the actions of multiple rounds of layoffs creating unbounded uncertainty, vague bizword slogans, and cheap perk cutbacks.
I'm not convinced demoralization is undesired in all cases; certainly it seems like there was a lot of frustration about workers demanding more pay, remote work, stances on various social/political issues, and so on. Making people demoralized and afraid of losing their jobs is one possible answer to that.
Theoretically you have a point. On the other hand it’s so bad for recruiting. I view companies that do large layoffs the same way I view companies that do a lot of contract hiring. You clearly don’t care about employees and their wellbeing.
Support team is one thing. Google's Python team was a small team, most of which were also on the Python steering council or Core Python developers. These people had decades of experience in Python. Their knowledge and community connections is irreplaceable.
I'd fathom to guess that it's not even worth Google's time to replace a ten people team. It's probably just a KPI sent from the top -"Replace a few people to earn your bonus this year". Constructing useless KPI, when you cannot come up with interesting ones.
Moving things to india sounds like a great idea, except the 13-15 hour difference in communication. it's all well and good until you're in Cupertino and taking an 11:30 pm call because they have 0 hours of overlap... guess you can force them to work US hours, but that goes to culture as well.
Are they trying to show that India's workplace is more compliant and they'll just do what corp types will tell them?
In this tech job environment the US google employee is willing to do as many 11:30 nights as needed to keep his high paying tech job, and management knows it
Anecdotally, I've heard this is the case at more than one major tech firm, and will likely have caught on since many of the same companies already laid off many recruiters during "difficult decisions for the very harsh economic environment for hiring that we caused, are largely immune to, and are now using as cover to cut costs and increase stock prices via huge buybacks"
i got caught up in this :( really sad about the whole thing; this was by far the best job i've had in my 20-year career (including other teams at google), and i do not know if i will ever have another one as good. we were a chronically understaffed team supporting a large part of the python ecosystem at google, and we did some amazing work over the years.
In my mind it would make sense if there are some laws to which they want to adhere, perhaps something EU-related (GDPR? IDK), and moving to Munich might be a good way of prioritizing. Perhaps something US-related they don't like, see for example that TikTok is an AI company and yeah, or the KYC-related stuff [1]. However, I am talking out of my ass, I don't really keep up with laws, upcoming bills or anything like that. :shrug:
@zem maybe you would be interested in what we do http://tektonic.ai please let me know at nic.surpatanu@tektonic.ai We are looking for an ML + DSL engineer to imagine and build our execution runtime and dev platform.
i reckon we simply got offshored, since they're now building a whole new python team in munich, though i don't know whether for cost reasons or to expand the languages presence in the munich office or both.
Okay, let's debug this logic. Google is AI-focused, true, but they're not a one-trick pony. Python's great for Al, but it's not the ONLY language. And mass-firing your Python team seems...counterproductive. Segmentation fault indeed!
Well it mostly still is a one-trick pony: ads. It has kept trying to not be a one-trick pony for a decade. In the latest report, Cloud and Hardware did add up to around 25%, so they are getting closer.
They've been trying to focus on AI, but with moves like this, their position in AI will likely end up matching their position in Cloud vs AWS/Azure.
CUDA is not C, it is a polyglot stack for GPGPU, using C++ memory semantics, with C, C++ and Fortran compilers, and anything else able to target PTX bytecode, including Julia, .NET, Haskell, Python JIT, Java,...
Yes, production code is C++, but the way the models are built is Python code, colab, save via Orbax/TF SavedModel, etc and then serve in C++. All (most, to hedge it) development is done via Python.
I don't directly develop the models, I played with some for fuzzing [1] and I'm working on security for them [2]. And, before joining GOSST, I was leading the OSS DevInfra team in TF. I still have the most number of commits made by a human [3] even after 2 days of leaving the team, though I see the next person only needs 4 more :)
I retired (after 18+ years at Google) last August, and as of that date A LOT of production code used languages different from C++ -- Go, Java, Kotlin, AND Python, plus a few more (Rust, Dart, and many others). In my successful, long career at Google I did use C++ (I had "readability" in C++), but rarely: only when "ridiculous scalability" was needed.
For example, collecting Stackoverflow posts about GCP products, and distributing the needed subsets of them among vendors and employees in tech support to potentially answer, comment, edit, vote on, re-tag, &c, used to be all Python (and the "scale" was a few hundred or thousands of posts and people at a time -- ridiculously small "by Google `production` standards", and perfectly adequate for the much-higher-programmer-productivity Python has always afforded... I know, because I did the vast majority of that coding, including maintenance, ongoing monitoring of performance, and VERY occasional optimizations if and when monitoring showed them to be desirable).
That was the core of my job for my last several years at Google -- I won't even list the many other NON-prototyping tasks I did in previous years (decades, almost), the vast majority of them in Python. And -- the majority of my performance reviews during those 18+ years were rated "exceeds expectations", so it seems that world-class Python skill (which clearly was crucial to me getting a hiring offer back in 2004, though, alas, visa issues delayed my start to early 2005) were extremely useful for at least some of us Google engineers.
You seem to imply that Google won't have a Python team... Google replaced it with a cheaper (and quite likely worse) alternative. They are still going to do the same thing (at least they believe so). They aren't changing direction or anything like that.
It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else?
Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.
Yes, I admit that this was a little bit reductionistic. I was aiming it to be mostly a joke about the situation, didn't expect it to garner so much response
People are focusing on verbage and precision, but are missing the point.
Having a well-maintained Python tooling is essential for _any_ company who does AI. While smaller companies can get away with open source solutions, for bigger companies it is unavoidable to have teams dedicated to maintaining and supporting Python tooling.
This announcement is troubling, and may indicate one of the two: 1) Google is in dire situation, and there is no more fat to cut, so they are starting to cut muscle. 2) Google management is clueless and cannot discriminate between fat and muscle.
Did you miss this?
> ... and you're asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it.
What people / HN don't understand is does the work they do really a 10 person $5Million per year value to Google or can it be done by Two really smart Python Experts.
The problem with Tech layoffs is not that they weren't doing important work, it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
That really doesn't jive with this description of how much they were doing. Let me guess, this mythical two person team could also build Twitter and Uber over a weekend?
> it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
You're mistaking their intent, they are actually okay with less work being done. It's a desire to simply hit the reset button and see how much money they can save, and how much they need to build up the team again. They know it harms productivity but maybe something cheaper will come out of it. They are gambling.
Correction, outside of the ML groups and anything related to CI/infra. Especially if you remember that Starlark[0] is a dialect of Python.
And that’s without going into all the outside-of-g3 code (of which there is a metric ton, especially if you worked with any teams that deal with hardware or third-party/acquisition stuff).
Starlark is not Python. It feels like Python when you write it, but it's very different in a lot of ways that really matter.
A lot of people don't realize that the issues that python haters (myself included) have aren't generally about the look and feel of the language, but about how many sharp edges the language has for maintenance and scaling. Python 4 could fix all of these things if they ever did it.
Python is mostly the Perl of the current day. And it attracts tons of beginners, that also means nearly equivalent amount of bad code(Just like in the Perl days).
These days if you are doing serious work, you simply use Java. Especially if you want something running for years. Java is really the only option you have.
A decade back I interviewed at a major telecommunications firm. Python was the new fashion then, they were trying to rewrite a fairly big Java code base to Python. Anyway I didn't get the job. My friend did. After a few years of this they realised, Python was not a serious alternative for an application of that nature. And abandoned it midway.
I know several other banks that have had a similar arc. Python is an amazing glue language and perfect for lots of automation and adhoc glue work. Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++.
Other languages like golang have come up in the past. While they are really good for smaller applications. They are just not there for something serious. 'Simplicity' has different meanings in different contexts. Either way, I think both Python and Java are here to stay and will be used for tasks where they are good at.
But we are now past the 'Python for everything' days.
Even as a lifelong java dev, this is a silly take.
Python is an absolutely lovely language. It is not the 'perl of it's day'. In my experience, things get hairy when you start building bigger systems that require a lot of collaboration but you can probably do away with most of the pitfalls if you use type hints. Beyond that, it's main downside is performance but you would be shocked how little code you have to convert to C/C++ to remove bottlenecks.
You are right that most large orgs choose a language like java, but I'd also argue that C# and golang are good fits as well. They're fast, and they have a garbage collector. I suppose typescript / node could be in that same category but I steer away from that stack as a backend dev.
Do you realise how your comment sounds? No actual reason for any of the opinions, just "this happened" and words like "serious". What does serious means, is it type safe or something? Can you try again with substance?
Using Python for a serious backend thing at a telecom firm is a big no-no, and I say that as a guy who has been paid to write Python code for almost 20 years now.
The post suggests their jobs were offshored. Is this a common practice versus just closing the roles? I feel like US legislators should do more to protect domestic jobs from domestic companies, or else they’ll face the same eventual collapse as in manufacturing.
When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India. They had another tranche of layoffs that were “delayed exit” to train those Indian employees.
You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.
This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
(and this article goes into the rationale too. Basically the idea is you're paying more than you would in a developing economy, but you can trust the team with more autonomy and fewer cultural misunderstandings, so it's an option for offshoring higher-value work)
> It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
extremely wrong. what are you basing your assumption on?
the cost of a Munich employee is less than half of the cost of a California one, when you take into account salary, stock, office costs, whinging, etc.
It's extremely hard to lay off in Germany, so existing Google employees in Germany are, on the margin, nearly free, and so can be reassigned (with something else being done with their current project).
You might be surprised - the absolute difference in salary between Munich and a trendy US tech hub is more than $100k. The difference between getting a decent dev in Poland vs Munich is $30-50k max.
I believe the replacements were already Google employees. Just not python-team employees. So it's sort of offshoring but not exactly.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. When I was there python was a pretty big part of the google internal ecosystem. Each major language there had a team supporting it. Not sure why you would be gutting those teams.
I get what you're saying about them already being Google employees, but this feels like a loophole and not a material difference. I could see this being exploited if there ever were offshoring rules. Just hire your offshores a month or two ahead of time.
That said, I find that most sensitive managerial decisions aren't fully explained right away, if ever. I don't expect someone in this position, especially upset by the change, to know the full story. There's possible extenuating circumstances, such as team performance (even the manager was RIF'd).
This isn't the greatest submission and lacks any semblance of context. The poster is in Netherlands apparently and the new team in Germany? I have no idea what to make of this.
Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Yesterday's layoffs seem to have been framed as reorgs. Some teams have been wholly dismissed. Some have been consolidated (two teams -> one team).
There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in lower cost regions. For instance, two teams get combined and the higher cost manager is laid off. Or a whole team is laid off, but those duties are being restaffed by people in a lower wage office.
Looks like the new roles in Munich, if I’m reading the thread right? Could be more than just offshoring? Why not do India or some other cheaper place instead of Munich which isn’t cheap and has relatively strong labor protections?
Just for this specific team. They are “defragging their global footprint” and moving roles to Mexico City, Bangalore, and Germany (probably to to go after gov contracts).
Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.
Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.
lots of python tooling did seem to be quite bad while I was there. thousands of wasted engineer hours spent recompiling tensorflow for no fundamental reason; little suggestion that core language folks were interested in fixing it.
There's not much info in that thread, but it reads to me that they consolidated the responsibilities of this one team into another and let the original team go.
agree. i can tell it was a bad day for the author and it sucks. but it's irritating to sit there and blame the exact system and company that gave him the exceptional job and pay in the first place.
everyone who works in FAANG, if you are drawing an enormous salary and bonus, compared to the average guy, i hope you realize the how fortunate you are. i hope you are putting away, saving, investing, at least 1/3 or 1/2 of it. when and if this happens after a few years, unlike the average guy, you can simply choose to retire or take some time off and travel rather than the normal option of loosing your home and being completely ruined.
People who work at Google are indeed very fortunate. We are paid large sums of money. I feel like I've found a pot of gold and give significant portions of my income away to the less fortunate directly because I feel that so much of my pay is based on luck.
However, Google employees only capture a fraction of Google's profits. Google made twenty five billion dollars in profit in Q1. Annualized that is 100b. Google has 180,000 employees. That is 555,555 in profit per employee. If Google was really existing in service of its employees rather than its investors, as it would be in a socialist system, then I'd expect my pay to rise dramatically.
The context is sparse, but it looks like Google laid off the Python team based in the US. The poster was not in US, so maybe that's why they're not laid off.
The quote you mentioned was a sarcastic comment on the US-specific layoffs, presumably.
Ad hominem with just a tinge of that sweet sweet latent homophobia? Why?
And that hypo... what exactly is the fear bringing all this on so viscerally... is a long defunct soviet union still the starring Freddy of folk's dreams?
Disclaimer: I grew up in the USSR, it stank big ups. I live in the USA, it also stinks big ups. Sometimes for similar and sometimes for different reasons. Let's hope Fukuyama was wrong and we'll eventually come up with something better.
I believe this is just a product of US corporate tax laws and high interest rate but I would like to hear other takes on it. Corporations don't want to bring overseas profit home and be double taxed, so they borrow domestically using oversea cash as collateral. High interest rate and strong USD make it less attractive to hire in US.
This is definitely true, but Google pays US employees very well. Layoffs dramatically increase profits. That’s been a meaningful driver of their growth and margin in recent earnings reports lately.
There are, of course, many benefits to US hiring - a strong talent pool, maintaining a team in the same region/timezone, etc. Google can easily hire back Americans in a few quarters if they need to.
Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.
I would support the AWU if they were actually monomaniacally focused on worker issues like they're supposed to be (specifically I'd love to see a main focus on preventing offshoring). But instead it seems like they spend most of their time fighting the same kind of culture wars you see on college campuses, most recently Palestine. I don't agree with their views on that issue, and thus they've turned me off completely. They just overall strike me as young, immature, overly idealistic, and not actually suited to run a broad union that should be able to appeal to most of the employees (which is what is required for the union to actually be useful).
> Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.
I was considering, but after seeing how they operate, I am certain I will be ok without doing so. I am yet to see them accomplish anything meaningful, and behavior of some of their members tripped my “this seems unethical” meter really bad.
I might’ve mentioned that story on HN before, but the rundown of it was that one of my friends was interviewing at Google. He called me the day after one of his interviews, saying that he had a really weird experience, and he wasn’t sure what to think of it.
TLDR: his interviewer was a member of AWU and spent every single second of the interview (that wasn’t spent on working on the coding problem) on trying to sell AWU to my friend (as a candidate/interviewee). All that time that would normally be reserved for the candidate to talk about their experience/projects, ask questions, etc., it was all taken up by the interviewer shilling AWU. My friend was shocked enough by this to warrant calling me, which he never did before with any work-related things.
Had a neutral-positive opinion on AWU until then, and had a neutral-negative opinion since then. And it has only been very slowly going down as the time passes.
P.S. The following part is definitely biased on my end, but the vibe I got from a bunch of interactions with a number of AWU members over the years was the same vibe I get from reddit slacktivists coming from certain subreddits (antiwork and atheism ones specifically). And while I have nothing against the stated goals/purposes of those subreddits, I have plenty against the actual reality of the behaviors of their members. I don’t care about it much, because a lot of them are actual teenagers. But it isn’t good optics for an actual workplace union, when your union members behave like they forgot they aren’t on reddit anymore.
I can see a team doing python migrations being less needed once the hard work is done. The warning sign here is not that work was shifted, but that Google didn’t have another python project here that they needed people for. Google should be full of potential AI applications using python and existing employees would be the most cost effective way to build teams for those projects. This seems to indicate that Google has given up on investing in R&D.
Let me add my 2 cents: afaik US companies can avoid paying taxes by reinvesting their profits into companies. Since software engineering wasn't a very capital rich endeavor, this manifested mainly in increased salaries for their employees. This has now changed, with the advent of AI, since increased capital is funneled towards acquiring AI hardware.
How is moving all your labor offshores at all reasonable? It seems like this should just be straight up an illegal practice if the talent is plentiful in your own country. This is just accelerating the demise of your own country.
This.
I think that the move is not over as well.
Today it's Germany (where thanks to the #dieforukraine war jobs are in crisis and wages are shrunken) tomorrow they will shift to India or wherever it costs less.
Why not just retrain the python team to another language? I mean, software engineers are not really language specific, they can learn other languages if needed.
All SWEs at the same level at Google are making the same compensation (with some exceptions for high-flying AI researchers). They Python SWEs certainly weren't making more than anyone else.
So Meta invests in open source AI and one of the reasons is to undermine competition from smaller AI companies, like OpenAI, etc. Wouldn’t Python tram at Google serve the same purpose? Building tools for AI and ML and open sourcing it, so that smaller companies wouldn’t have an edge and never become a threat.
Microsoft actually funds a lot of cpython work and 3rd party libs, IIRC they have played a big hand in the recent speed improvements, JIT work, the pyright type checker, and a bunch in the AI/GPGPU space like ONNX.
Dropbox has historically done a lot for python, idk how current that is. Netflix has a huge python codebase but I'm not sure what they contribute.
Of course it does. Pretty much every FAANG, and many smaller ones, have teams for every programming language they consider important. Google has C++, Rust, Python, Java, JavaScript, and others (although I've heard that several of these teams were hard it in this round.)
To take a basic example: Google has a team that works inside LLVM and Clang to improve the code it produces for Google's specific workloads. (Often these help all of LLVM's clients.) But if this team is able to make a search query faster by even 0.01% a year, at Google scale that saves literally millions of hours in compute across Google's fleet. And millions of hours of compute is millions of dollars in power, space, and need to expand.
This is true of all the other language teams at Google too.
The Python team builds a better python by fixing upstream bugs, reducing the memory it consumes and so on. It upgrades the internal installation of Python to the newest versions, ensuring that the upgrade is smooth and doesn' break the using teams.
It contributes proposals for language features to upstream, ensuring that Google's use cases are at least considered.
in addition to contributing to upstream python, we
* maintained a stable version of python within google, and made sure that everything in the monorepo worked with it. in my time on the team we moved from 2.7 to 3.6, then incrementally to 3.11, each update taking months to over a year because the rule at google is if you check any code in, you are responsible for every single breakage it causes
* maintained tools to keep thousands of third party packages constantly updated from their open source versions, with patch queues for the ones that needed google-specific changes
* had highly customised versions of tools like pylint and black, targeted to google's style guide and overall codebase
* contributed to pybind11, and maintained tools for c++ integration
* developed and maintained build system rules for python, including a large effort to move python rules to pure starlark code rather than having them entangled in the blaze/bazel core engine
* developed and maintained a typechecker (pytype) that would do inference on code without type annotations, and work over very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
* performed automated refactorings across hundreds of millions of lines of code
and that was just the dev portion of our jobs. we also acted as a help desk of sorts for python users at google, helping troubleshoot tricky issues, and point newcomers in the right direction. plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams, the colaboratory and IDE teams, teams like protobuf that integrated with and generated python bindings, teams like google cloud who wanted to offer python runtimes to their customers, teams like youtube who had an unusually large system built in python and needed to do extraordinary things to keep it performant and maintainable.
and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the "marathon, not sprint" approach to work. as i said in another comment, it's the best job i've ever had, and i'll miss it deeply.
I'm a bit surprised anybody with DevOps in their name would be unclear about the benefits of having specific roles devoted to what might seem to the uninitiated like just some tiny corner of the development process. Past a certain scale, things can't be covered by just having anybody pitch in as required and everybody collectively muddling through.
Cushy or not, everyone likes to feel that they can trust the people that they work for. Everyone is equally upset when their job is off-shored, especially if they were sold the idea of pouring themselves on the job. This feels equally harsh for the Personal Assistants with a 60k salary that get off-shored for half the price.
I agree that just shouting "capitalism" is really poor commentary though, now everything that involves money is called "capitalism" for some reason, even though every single place that organizes around money has this basic incentive of cheaper labor. "Capitalism" or "not so capitalism". :shrug:
I love if though when people working for trillion dollar corporation getting high six figure salaries and probably more money in a year than average worker in most countries
makes in a lifetime, casually dunk on "capitalism". Yeah, sure, in the USSR you'd do much better, dude. I mean, I know layoffs suck, but come on.
you do realise that ussr does not exist anymore (it's been replaced with a hyper-capitalist structure that mutated into a fascist dictatorship); and that the existence of people being highly paid does not disprove the fact tha the us-style capitalism is a terrible system for anyone but the highest echelons?
O RLY?! That fact totally changes my whole argument... unless it was an example of a non-capitalist society and I never claimed it currently exists and the point was the comparison of living in capitalist and non-capitalist system.
> the existence of people being highly paid does not disprove the fact tha the us-style capitalism is a terrible system for anyone but the highest echelons
The guy complaining about it is the highest echelons. He was working for frickign Google, which pays tons of money. Not that this duckspeak isn't a complete lie for pretty much all people. As a person who, unlike you, actually lived in the USSR, I can tell you that it had humongous inequality and a myriad of daily degrading and humiliating problems for almost everybody "but the highest echelons", on the level that somebody living in a Western country can't even imagine. Capitalism may have its flaws, in the US and everywhere, but man you don't know how lucky you are, compared to the alternative. And I don't wish on anybody to ever learn it. Just stay ignorant and take your knowledge from your weed-smoking cool pol-sci prof who surely knows everything about the matter. Really, this way it's much, much better.
The point is that many would view Google SWEs as being in the highest echelons. Generally, people who get paid very large amounts of money under capitalism are seen as being hypocritical when they criticize capitalism, if they aren't using their wealth to make change.
It's not that their criticism isn't valid, it's the feeling that they are perpetuating and benefiting from capitalism more than 99% of people, so they are all talk and no walk.
1 - I think the move to Germany is a tentative one - they could not pack all and move it to India thoroughly like IBM did, because in a election year this can create waves in the public opinion and shift votes against MAANG/FAANG corporations sponsored globalist politicians.
2 - It's only but the beginning. German and European staff have a better STEM formation in real universities (for now) but when Alphabet will have to face work unions in Germany they will pack again and go India, Burundi or whatever else.
3 - I see that some of the most relevant FOSS projects core programmers are getting the axe in this move. I would like to elaborate on this since open source now fosters autopilot, gemini, that are perceived by the big companies as a way to lay off or to pay peanuts the real software developers that created and fostered the FOSS movement.
4 - The people left in the cold were not saved by their putting the pronouns in their bio, nor by abiding to cambodian-style woke ideologies. They licked but when they were not needed anymore they were dumped, with their mouth full of it.
5 - Flutter is DEAD. No matter how you put it.
6 - Since the Agile mindset and antipatterns were adopted, it seems that large companies are self-eating thinking they can do keeping management only. Meetings and fake presentations of systems that deliver 5% of what stated. Anything productive is seen as debris of demon. Pol-Pot style, if you have any competence you are an enemy of the people and of the DEI mantra.
7 - People with experience in this and willing to react to this trend are scared to talk and isolated. Not being able to express dissent while seeing the whole productive sector of the western world being dismembered, vilified, destroyed.
8 - Large companies are like Zelensky, they need stupid cannon fodder that follows the orders and if not can be replaced in zero time with even more submitted servants. If you are OK with this I feel no empathy towards you and your peers. These people saw google implement sjw ideologies in any products, staid silent, and now they are not useful anymore to the system they so eagerly and willingly contributed to enthrone.
I recognize this guy based on his handle as the guy who'd always give spectacularly unhelpful replies on #python freenode irc. Not surprised he also makes simplistic statements about capitalism.
Meta is clearly driving most of CPython efficiencies. The projects listed are mostly stable so it's smart of Google to let the community drive it forward and they just use it ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
Python inside Google, for non-AI stuff at least, feels quite a bit different than with different defaults than the rest of the world. This may have the side effect of eventually aligning with the broader outside Python community.
> ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
That's how all jobs should be though. The only time anyone should be sprinting is if the building is on fire. I guess Google is moving to a 9-9-6 schedule, and they want to do it in Munich where they can pay peanuts for it.
Haha sure, that's assuming Google's starting baseline is 9-5, mind you, which is not even close. Many people barely work at Google and "work-life balance" is really a euphemism for not really working.
Google used to be about working smartly and not grinding just for grind's sake, which is totally respectable. At some point, however, that became Google's external brand as well, and went in the head of the people being recruited. The result is, recently, people self-select and optimize for joining Google precisely for "work-life balance." i.e. if you want to actually work and get paid for performance, you are better off joining Facebook. Google ends up with the rest of the folks who join with the expectation of low expectations.
> The projects listed are mostly stable so it's smart of Google to let the community drive it forward and they just use it ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
If you prioritize busyness you will get busyness but not necessarily productivity.
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This is standard recent Google. A year or so ago, they laid off GCP upper tier support to replace them with cheaper workers.
PS: I won't say which MAAN_, but the recruiters are half based in India now. Coincidentally, it's a MAAN_ that laid me off previously in a relatively recent timeframe rather than attempt to find me another home internally. Brain explodes. Perhaps MAANGs need to focus more on long-term sustainability if they intend to retain top talent because morale is non-uniformly, moderately miserable due to the actions of multiple rounds of layoffs creating unbounded uncertainty, vague bizword slogans, and cheap perk cutbacks.
I'm not convinced demoralization is undesired in all cases; certainly it seems like there was a lot of frustration about workers demanding more pay, remote work, stances on various social/political issues, and so on. Making people demoralized and afraid of losing their jobs is one possible answer to that.
Theoretically you have a point. On the other hand it’s so bad for recruiting. I view companies that do large layoffs the same way I view companies that do a lot of contract hiring. You clearly don’t care about employees and their wellbeing.
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t. Jerome Powell and Julie Su
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“The beatings will continue until morale improves”
Support team is one thing. Google's Python team was a small team, most of which were also on the Python steering council or Core Python developers. These people had decades of experience in Python. Their knowledge and community connections is irreplaceable.
I'd fathom to guess that it's not even worth Google's time to replace a ten people team. It's probably just a KPI sent from the top -"Replace a few people to earn your bonus this year". Constructing useless KPI, when you cannot come up with interesting ones.
Feels like this will make it so that in the future any python related requests coming from google might just as well end up in /dev/null
Moving things to india sounds like a great idea, except the 13-15 hour difference in communication. it's all well and good until you're in Cupertino and taking an 11:30 pm call because they have 0 hours of overlap... guess you can force them to work US hours, but that goes to culture as well.
Are they trying to show that India's workplace is more compliant and they'll just do what corp types will tell them?
I worked at Amazon for almost 10 years and I hate, repeat hate working with India teams. Their quality is subpar, period. No other way to put it
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In this tech job environment the US google employee is willing to do as many 11:30 nights as needed to keep his high paying tech job, and management knows it
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Great idea for who? Not for paying customers.
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Anecdotally, I've heard this is the case at more than one major tech firm, and will likely have caught on since many of the same companies already laid off many recruiters during "difficult decisions for the very harsh economic environment for hiring that we caused, are largely immune to, and are now using as cover to cut costs and increase stock prices via huge buybacks"
Top talent is based outside of USA too
What is a MAAN_
I'm guessing "Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google" but with a "_" for some reason
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the layoffs are to fearmonger employees to stop asking for more, duh
i got caught up in this :( really sad about the whole thing; this was by far the best job i've had in my 20-year career (including other teams at google), and i do not know if i will ever have another one as good. we were a chronically understaffed team supporting a large part of the python ecosystem at google, and we did some amazing work over the years.
Seriously, what is the reason for this move?
The language is so good and well known that they don't need a dedicated team to do these activites you talked about?
Or are they hiring cheaper workers?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125#40176438
I don't understand such a move, because all AI is developed in pytorch. I think that google uses JAX and pytorch.
they are building a new python team from scratch in munich, for whatever reason. yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.
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In my mind it would make sense if there are some laws to which they want to adhere, perhaps something EU-related (GDPR? IDK), and moving to Munich might be a good way of prioritizing. Perhaps something US-related they don't like, see for example that TikTok is an AI company and yeah, or the KYC-related stuff [1]. However, I am talking out of my ass, I don't really keep up with laws, upcoming bills or anything like that. :shrug:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158752
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Care to weigh in about what you reckon happened? Surely the company didn't suddenly lose its need of the Python ecosystem?
i reckon we simply got offshored, since they're now building a whole new python team in munich, though i don't know whether for cost reasons or to expand the languages presence in the munich office or both.
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Google is an AI first company
Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products
All AI is written with Python.
Google lays off all Python team.
Segmentation fault
Okay, let's debug this logic. Google is AI-focused, true, but they're not a one-trick pony. Python's great for Al, but it's not the ONLY language. And mass-firing your Python team seems...counterproductive. Segmentation fault indeed!
Well it mostly still is a one-trick pony: ads. It has kept trying to not be a one-trick pony for a decade. In the latest report, Cloud and Hardware did add up to around 25%, so they are getting closer.
They've been trying to focus on AI, but with moves like this, their position in AI will likely end up matching their position in Cloud vs AWS/Azure.
> All AI is written with Python.
Only high-level is written in python, low level is Cuda that is a form of C.
Also, you would think the first to replace workers with AI would be the AI companies like Google.
CUDA is not C, it is a polyglot stack for GPGPU, using C++ memory semantics, with C, C++ and Fortran compilers, and anything else able to target PTX bytecode, including Julia, .NET, Haskell, Python JIT, Java,...
Yes, and not to repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940
Python is only used for prototyping within google. All production ai code is run on c++
Yes, production code is C++, but the way the models are built is Python code, colab, save via Orbax/TF SavedModel, etc and then serve in C++. All (most, to hedge it) development is done via Python.
I don't directly develop the models, I played with some for fuzzing [1] and I'm working on security for them [2]. And, before joining GOSST, I was leading the OSS DevInfra team in TF. I still have the most number of commits made by a human [3] even after 2 days of leaving the team, though I see the next person only needs 4 more :)
[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/ai-powered-fuzzing-b... [2]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/10/increasing-transpare... [3]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors
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I retired (after 18+ years at Google) last August, and as of that date A LOT of production code used languages different from C++ -- Go, Java, Kotlin, AND Python, plus a few more (Rust, Dart, and many others). In my successful, long career at Google I did use C++ (I had "readability" in C++), but rarely: only when "ridiculous scalability" was needed.
For example, collecting Stackoverflow posts about GCP products, and distributing the needed subsets of them among vendors and employees in tech support to potentially answer, comment, edit, vote on, re-tag, &c, used to be all Python (and the "scale" was a few hundred or thousands of posts and people at a time -- ridiculously small "by Google `production` standards", and perfectly adequate for the much-higher-programmer-productivity Python has always afforded... I know, because I did the vast majority of that coding, including maintenance, ongoing monitoring of performance, and VERY occasional optimizations if and when monitoring showed them to be desirable).
That was the core of my job for my last several years at Google -- I won't even list the many other NON-prototyping tasks I did in previous years (decades, almost), the vast majority of them in Python. And -- the majority of my performance reviews during those 18+ years were rated "exceeds expectations", so it seems that world-class Python skill (which clearly was crucial to me getting a hiring offer back in 2004, though, alas, visa issues delayed my start to early 2005) were extremely useful for at least some of us Google engineers.
Alex
That is quite the claim, any source?
Edit: I guess I'm not sure on whether large training runs count as prod or not. They're certainly expensive and mission critical.
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Even still, the need to prototype does not go away.
> All AI is written with Python.
Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
You seem to imply that Google won't have a Python team... Google replaced it with a cheaper (and quite likely worse) alternative. They are still going to do the same thing (at least they believe so). They aren't changing direction or anything like that.
It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else?
Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.
Yes, I admit that this was a little bit reductionistic. I was aiming it to be mostly a joke about the situation, didn't expect it to garner so much response
People are focusing on verbage and precision, but are missing the point.
Having a well-maintained Python tooling is essential for _any_ company who does AI. While smaller companies can get away with open source solutions, for bigger companies it is unavoidable to have teams dedicated to maintaining and supporting Python tooling.
This announcement is troubling, and may indicate one of the two: 1) Google is in dire situation, and there is no more fat to cut, so they are starting to cut muscle. 2) Google management is clueless and cannot discriminate between fat and muscle.
I suspect it’s 2. Local organizational optimizations to garner promotions for middle-managers and without regard for systemic impact.
Well, it seems like it isn't 1, as everything indicates that Google is doing better financially than ever: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/04/25/google-soa...
> Google is an AI first company
Google is an ad first company
FTFY
Adtech used AI to make money before it was cool. You wouldn't believe how many ML models are required to build those shitty little pieces of HTML.
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Exactly. If Google's ads income suddenly got cut in half, most teams would be impacted
And how exactly do you think ads get served?
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it's an adverts company, when i looked in the past 80% of the revenue came from the ads unit
Did you miss this? > ... and you're asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it.
Google isn't AI first
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mihai is an ml engineer who works at google.
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What people / HN don't understand is does the work they do really a 10 person $5Million per year value to Google or can it be done by Two really smart Python Experts.
The problem with Tech layoffs is not that they weren't doing important work, it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
That really doesn't jive with this description of how much they were doing. Let me guess, this mythical two person team could also build Twitter and Uber over a weekend?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
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> it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
You're mistaking their intent, they are actually okay with less work being done. It's a desire to simply hit the reset button and see how much money they can save, and how much they need to build up the team again. They know it harms productivity but maybe something cheaper will come out of it. They are gambling.
Outside of the ML groups, Google really doesn't like Python and there's very little of it in the codebase. This move isn't surprising in that light.
Also, Google is IBM at this point, so I would expect a lot of IBM-like moves.
Former googler. It's very team dependent. My first team was 100% c++, I moved to a sub team that was 100% python. There's a lot of it around
Very little at the scale of this codebase is still a lot.
From where I sit (SRE), I see a lot of Python which is very much mission critical.
is it really Python though ?
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Well over 100m lines of Python as has been publicly stated several times over the years is not "very little".
In a codebase of 13+ trillion lines it's very little.
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Correction, outside of the ML groups and anything related to CI/infra. Especially if you remember that Starlark[0] is a dialect of Python.
And that’s without going into all the outside-of-g3 code (of which there is a metric ton, especially if you worked with any teams that deal with hardware or third-party/acquisition stuff).
0. https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark
Starlark is not Python. It feels like Python when you write it, but it's very different in a lot of ways that really matter.
A lot of people don't realize that the issues that python haters (myself included) have aren't generally about the look and feel of the language, but about how many sharp edges the language has for maintenance and scaling. Python 4 could fix all of these things if they ever did it.
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This is not true, for example the entire mobile test infrastructure is written in python.
>Outside of the ML groups
Google is also going all in on ML (or AI if you prefer).
They seem to support Python quite widely. There are a handful of languages that have an API for google cloud and the likes, Python is one of them
There’s a ton of python all over the place. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
maybe they plan to adopt mojo
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Getting a python readability review seems downright impossible in my org.
Which languages would you say google prefers these days? But also in light of what an early SWE might want to focus on to maximize career options?
Honest answer, only C++.
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Python is mostly the Perl of the current day. And it attracts tons of beginners, that also means nearly equivalent amount of bad code(Just like in the Perl days).
These days if you are doing serious work, you simply use Java. Especially if you want something running for years. Java is really the only option you have.
A decade back I interviewed at a major telecommunications firm. Python was the new fashion then, they were trying to rewrite a fairly big Java code base to Python. Anyway I didn't get the job. My friend did. After a few years of this they realised, Python was not a serious alternative for an application of that nature. And abandoned it midway.
I know several other banks that have had a similar arc. Python is an amazing glue language and perfect for lots of automation and adhoc glue work. Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++.
Other languages like golang have come up in the past. While they are really good for smaller applications. They are just not there for something serious. 'Simplicity' has different meanings in different contexts. Either way, I think both Python and Java are here to stay and will be used for tasks where they are good at.
But we are now past the 'Python for everything' days.
Even as a lifelong java dev, this is a silly take.
Python is an absolutely lovely language. It is not the 'perl of it's day'. In my experience, things get hairy when you start building bigger systems that require a lot of collaboration but you can probably do away with most of the pitfalls if you use type hints. Beyond that, it's main downside is performance but you would be shocked how little code you have to convert to C/C++ to remove bottlenecks.
You are right that most large orgs choose a language like java, but I'd also argue that C# and golang are good fits as well. They're fast, and they have a garbage collector. I suppose typescript / node could be in that same category but I steer away from that stack as a backend dev.
Do you realise how your comment sounds? No actual reason for any of the opinions, just "this happened" and words like "serious". What does serious means, is it type safe or something? Can you try again with substance?
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Someone should rewrite this but Rust instead of Java; it would be a perfect meme.
I guess Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Uber, and Spotify aren’t serious long term applications.
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> Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++
The what, now?
Using Python for a serious backend thing at a telecom firm is a big no-no, and I say that as a guy who has been paid to write Python code for almost 20 years now.
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The post suggests their jobs were offshored. Is this a common practice versus just closing the roles? I feel like US legislators should do more to protect domestic jobs from domestic companies, or else they’ll face the same eventual collapse as in manufacturing.
Yes it’s common. At Google and across America.
When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India. They had another tranche of layoffs that were “delayed exit” to train those Indian employees.
You can call me bigoted or racist, I don't care. The fact is with moving technical roles to India quality plummets. But I can totally see how in some beancounter's narrow mind this makes perfect sense.
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Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.
>When Google did its massive 12k person layoff they moved a lot of those roles to places like India.
But remember, everyone has to be 'in office' for collaboration! /s
This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
You might think twice if you looked at the figures; the numbers in this article comparing US and UK wages are astounding: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/britain-white-collar-j...
(and this article goes into the rationale too. Basically the idea is you're paying more than you would in a developing economy, but you can trust the team with more autonomy and fewer cultural misunderstandings, so it's an option for offshoring higher-value work)
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There are tons of people in Europe working as offshore resources for American companies.
Being the same Western culture helps a lot versus other areas favoured for offshoring.
> It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.
extremely wrong. what are you basing your assumption on?
the cost of a Munich employee is less than half of the cost of a California one, when you take into account salary, stock, office costs, whinging, etc.
It's extremely hard to lay off in Germany, so existing Google employees in Germany are, on the margin, nearly free, and so can be reassigned (with something else being done with their current project).
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You might be surprised - the absolute difference in salary between Munich and a trendy US tech hub is more than $100k. The difference between getting a decent dev in Poland vs Munich is $30-50k max.
”Slightly cheaper”? What are the actual numbers we are talking about regarding yearly comp?
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In USA it is quite easy to get above 200k USD. In Europe the comparable salary would be around 180k and it almost never reaches that point.
Even 100k is considered a lot.
I believe the replacements were already Google employees. Just not python-team employees. So it's sort of offshoring but not exactly.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. When I was there python was a pretty big part of the google internal ecosystem. Each major language there had a team supporting it. Not sure why you would be gutting those teams.
I get what you're saying about them already being Google employees, but this feels like a loophole and not a material difference. I could see this being exploited if there ever were offshoring rules. Just hire your offshores a month or two ahead of time.
That said, I find that most sensitive managerial decisions aren't fully explained right away, if ever. I don't expect someone in this position, especially upset by the change, to know the full story. There's possible extenuating circumstances, such as team performance (even the manager was RIF'd).
This isn't the greatest submission and lacks any semblance of context. The poster is in Netherlands apparently and the new team in Germany? I have no idea what to make of this.
Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower.
Yesterday's layoffs seem to have been framed as reorgs. Some teams have been wholly dismissed. Some have been consolidated (two teams -> one team).
There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in lower cost regions. For instance, two teams get combined and the higher cost manager is laid off. Or a whole team is laid off, but those duties are being restaffed by people in a lower wage office.
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My read of it is that a US team was laid off. The poster is in NL and has to train he Munich team. The poster was not laid off.
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Looks like the new roles in Munich, if I’m reading the thread right? Could be more than just offshoring? Why not do India or some other cheaper place instead of Munich which isn’t cheap and has relatively strong labor protections?
Just for this specific team. They are “defragging their global footprint” and moving roles to Mexico City, Bangalore, and Germany (probably to to go after gov contracts).
Less cultural clashes, and still cheap versus US.
How do you "protect" a job?
Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.
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Tax breaks for hiring citizens.
Tariffs for hiring non citizens.
Force companies to follow all the same employment laws for employees and contractors in other countries.
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Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.
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You start a business.
Laws and regulation.
Same thing with the Kythe (aka Grok) team that does the cross references for codesearch.
Do you know what happened to Kythe/Grok? Is the project being shutdown or if there is a new team being spun up in another region?
Just vaporized a whole team so the roles can be moved overseas :(
full-timers or contacting?
Oh no, this is truly a valuable (though somewhat niche) open source project, too.
Google feels like it can re-externalize costs. Therefore it does.
As Brian Cantrill said, Don't Anthropomorphize Google!
Don't anthropomorphize Sundar Pichai
lots of python tooling did seem to be quite bad while I was there. thousands of wasted engineer hours spent recompiling tensorflow for no fundamental reason; little suggestion that core language folks were interested in fixing it.
If a Google recruiter comes for you, don't walk, run.
That is what Google has become under Sundar Pichai.
There's not much info in that thread, but it reads to me that they consolidated the responsibilities of this one team into another and let the original team go.
Sundar take a pay cut yet?
Yeah, negative paycut
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> It's almost like capitalism isn't actually good and you shouldn't want to live in the US
Strong words from a FAANG employee. Does he think there's another economic system which would give him the same extraordinary compensation package?
agree. i can tell it was a bad day for the author and it sucks. but it's irritating to sit there and blame the exact system and company that gave him the exceptional job and pay in the first place.
everyone who works in FAANG, if you are drawing an enormous salary and bonus, compared to the average guy, i hope you realize the how fortunate you are. i hope you are putting away, saving, investing, at least 1/3 or 1/2 of it. when and if this happens after a few years, unlike the average guy, you can simply choose to retire or take some time off and travel rather than the normal option of loosing your home and being completely ruined.
some of us are on work visas, so "take some time off" would also mean "wind up your current life and leave the country"
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People who work at Google are indeed very fortunate. We are paid large sums of money. I feel like I've found a pot of gold and give significant portions of my income away to the less fortunate directly because I feel that so much of my pay is based on luck.
However, Google employees only capture a fraction of Google's profits. Google made twenty five billion dollars in profit in Q1. Annualized that is 100b. Google has 180,000 employees. That is 555,555 in profit per employee. If Google was really existing in service of its employees rather than its investors, as it would be in a socialist system, then I'd expect my pay to rise dramatically.
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The context is sparse, but it looks like Google laid off the Python team based in the US. The poster was not in US, so maybe that's why they're not laid off.
The quote you mentioned was a sarcastic comment on the US-specific layoffs, presumably.
The poster lives in NL so not sure what to make of these statements.
The name may be Dutch but are you sure he lives there? Apparently (according to one of his own comments) the new team is located in Munich.
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Ad hominem with just a tinge of that sweet sweet latent homophobia? Why?
And that hypo... what exactly is the fear bringing all this on so viscerally... is a long defunct soviet union still the starring Freddy of folk's dreams?
Disclaimer: I grew up in the USSR, it stank big ups. I live in the USA, it also stinks big ups. Sometimes for similar and sometimes for different reasons. Let's hope Fukuyama was wrong and we'll eventually come up with something better.
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I believe this is just a product of US corporate tax laws and high interest rate but I would like to hear other takes on it. Corporations don't want to bring overseas profit home and be double taxed, so they borrow domestically using oversea cash as collateral. High interest rate and strong USD make it less attractive to hire in US.
This is definitely true, but Google pays US employees very well. Layoffs dramatically increase profits. That’s been a meaningful driver of their growth and margin in recent earnings reports lately.
There are, of course, many benefits to US hiring - a strong talent pool, maintaining a team in the same region/timezone, etc. Google can easily hire back Americans in a few quarters if they need to.
Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.
I would support the AWU if they were actually monomaniacally focused on worker issues like they're supposed to be (specifically I'd love to see a main focus on preventing offshoring). But instead it seems like they spend most of their time fighting the same kind of culture wars you see on college campuses, most recently Palestine. I don't agree with their views on that issue, and thus they've turned me off completely. They just overall strike me as young, immature, overly idealistic, and not actually suited to run a broad union that should be able to appeal to most of the employees (which is what is required for the union to actually be useful).
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> Join the alphabet workers union if you’re a Googler who cares.
I was considering, but after seeing how they operate, I am certain I will be ok without doing so. I am yet to see them accomplish anything meaningful, and behavior of some of their members tripped my “this seems unethical” meter really bad.
I might’ve mentioned that story on HN before, but the rundown of it was that one of my friends was interviewing at Google. He called me the day after one of his interviews, saying that he had a really weird experience, and he wasn’t sure what to think of it.
TLDR: his interviewer was a member of AWU and spent every single second of the interview (that wasn’t spent on working on the coding problem) on trying to sell AWU to my friend (as a candidate/interviewee). All that time that would normally be reserved for the candidate to talk about their experience/projects, ask questions, etc., it was all taken up by the interviewer shilling AWU. My friend was shocked enough by this to warrant calling me, which he never did before with any work-related things.
Had a neutral-positive opinion on AWU until then, and had a neutral-negative opinion since then. And it has only been very slowly going down as the time passes.
P.S. The following part is definitely biased on my end, but the vibe I got from a bunch of interactions with a number of AWU members over the years was the same vibe I get from reddit slacktivists coming from certain subreddits (antiwork and atheism ones specifically). And while I have nothing against the stated goals/purposes of those subreddits, I have plenty against the actual reality of the behaviors of their members. I don’t care about it much, because a lot of them are actual teenagers. But it isn’t good optics for an actual workplace union, when your union members behave like they forgot they aren’t on reddit anymore.
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I can see a team doing python migrations being less needed once the hard work is done. The warning sign here is not that work was shifted, but that Google didn’t have another python project here that they needed people for. Google should be full of potential AI applications using python and existing employees would be the most cost effective way to build teams for those projects. This seems to indicate that Google has given up on investing in R&D.
The institutional sickness at Google continues to consume. They are making the kind of shortsighted moves that are already costing them.
Let me add my 2 cents: afaik US companies can avoid paying taxes by reinvesting their profits into companies. Since software engineering wasn't a very capital rich endeavor, this manifested mainly in increased salaries for their employees. This has now changed, with the advent of AI, since increased capital is funneled towards acquiring AI hardware.
Those who are saying india are wrong, this time they are training them at munich office.
Rule is simple cheap labour and more people can do better job.
Munich is HCOL even for European standards. Just a tiny bit behind London and Switzerland.
Waaayyy behind Zurich, lol.
Playing Devil’s Advocate - why does Google need a Python team when they made Go?
Because they have Python code that needs to be supported. The ML ecosystem, for example, is much larger in Python than Go.
Has Youtube been completely moved off from Python? Last account I have from it (quite outdated, I must admit) was that it had heavy ties with it.
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Go is not used in machine learning at all
How is moving all your labor offshores at all reasonable? It seems like this should just be straight up an illegal practice if the talent is plentiful in your own country. This is just accelerating the demise of your own country.
This. I think that the move is not over as well. Today it's Germany (where thanks to the #dieforukraine war jobs are in crisis and wages are shrunken) tomorrow they will shift to India or wherever it costs less.
Globalism at its worst.
Why not just retrain the python team to another language? I mean, software engineers are not really language specific, they can learn other languages if needed.
They were maintaining Python itself, likely very well (as one would expect) compensated. It’d be a waste to have these devs do product development.
All SWEs at the same level at Google are making the same compensation (with some exceptions for high-flying AI researchers). They Python SWEs certainly weren't making more than anyone else.
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They have three months to find new roles/teams. Their employment only ends if they can't.
Like finding a lunch table to sit at on your first day of school
Assuming this wasn't financially motivated.
This is sad. Google just keeps getting worse from people perspective. And keeps getting better for shareholders.
I mean, it’s way easier to buy GOOG than get hired there, just sayin…
So Meta invests in open source AI and one of the reasons is to undermine competition from smaller AI companies, like OpenAI, etc. Wouldn’t Python tram at Google serve the same purpose? Building tools for AI and ML and open sourcing it, so that smaller companies wouldn’t have an edge and never become a threat.
I am wondering what this means for the future prospects of their Go team.
Curious. Are other corps funding open-source python dev?
Microsoft actually funds a lot of cpython work and 3rd party libs, IIRC they have played a big hand in the recent speed improvements, JIT work, the pyright type checker, and a bunch in the AI/GPGPU space like ONNX.
Dropbox has historically done a lot for python, idk how current that is. Netflix has a huge python codebase but I'm not sure what they contribute.
Just curious what does a Python team do? It doesn’t make sense to dedicate a team to a programming language.
Of course it does. Pretty much every FAANG, and many smaller ones, have teams for every programming language they consider important. Google has C++, Rust, Python, Java, JavaScript, and others (although I've heard that several of these teams were hard it in this round.)
To take a basic example: Google has a team that works inside LLVM and Clang to improve the code it produces for Google's specific workloads. (Often these help all of LLVM's clients.) But if this team is able to make a search query faster by even 0.01% a year, at Google scale that saves literally millions of hours in compute across Google's fleet. And millions of hours of compute is millions of dollars in power, space, and need to expand.
This is true of all the other language teams at Google too.
The Python team builds a better python by fixing upstream bugs, reducing the memory it consumes and so on. It upgrades the internal installation of Python to the newest versions, ensuring that the upgrade is smooth and doesn' break the using teams.
It contributes proposals for language features to upstream, ensuring that Google's use cases are at least considered.
in addition to contributing to upstream python, we
* maintained a stable version of python within google, and made sure that everything in the monorepo worked with it. in my time on the team we moved from 2.7 to 3.6, then incrementally to 3.11, each update taking months to over a year because the rule at google is if you check any code in, you are responsible for every single breakage it causes
* maintained tools to keep thousands of third party packages constantly updated from their open source versions, with patch queues for the ones that needed google-specific changes
* had highly customised versions of tools like pylint and black, targeted to google's style guide and overall codebase
* contributed to pybind11, and maintained tools for c++ integration
* developed and maintained build system rules for python, including a large effort to move python rules to pure starlark code rather than having them entangled in the blaze/bazel core engine
* developed and maintained a typechecker (pytype) that would do inference on code without type annotations, and work over very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
* performed automated refactorings across hundreds of millions of lines of code
and that was just the dev portion of our jobs. we also acted as a help desk of sorts for python users at google, helping troubleshoot tricky issues, and point newcomers in the right direction. plus we worked with a lot of other teams, including the machine learning and AI teams, the colaboratory and IDE teams, teams like protobuf that integrated with and generated python bindings, teams like google cloud who wanted to offer python runtimes to their customers, teams like youtube who had an unusually large system built in python and needed to do extraordinary things to keep it performant and maintainable.
and we did all this for years with fewer than 10 people, most of whom loved the work and the team so much that we just stayed on it for years. also, despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the "marathon, not sprint" approach to work. as i said in another comment, it's the best job i've ever had, and i'll miss it deeply.
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Classic: ask what the team does, and before getting an answer, decide that it doesn't make sense.
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I'm a bit surprised anybody with DevOps in their name would be unclear about the benefits of having specific roles devoted to what might seem to the uninitiated like just some tiny corner of the development process. Past a certain scale, things can't be covered by just having anybody pitch in as required and everybody collectively muddling through.
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Google's python team probably need some restructure for better product in the future
Silly sounding, serious question:
What is the 'Python' team?
Open source python language package maintainers?
Already answered in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
So TensorFlow is not officially dead.
New version release 1 month ago: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-...
Based on the contents of the blog (as that's the only think I can talk about -- I was in the team pre 2022), it's mostly dead.
JAX (and Keras) is where the push is now. And, grudgingly, PyTorch
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lol so this guys takeaway is “capitalism bad”. even though capitalism is what got him his cushy google job to start with
Cushy or not, everyone likes to feel that they can trust the people that they work for. Everyone is equally upset when their job is off-shored, especially if they were sold the idea of pouring themselves on the job. This feels equally harsh for the Personal Assistants with a 60k salary that get off-shored for half the price.
I agree that just shouting "capitalism" is really poor commentary though, now everything that involves money is called "capitalism" for some reason, even though every single place that organizes around money has this basic incentive of cheaper labor. "Capitalism" or "not so capitalism". :shrug:
How about flutter/dart teams? Are they safe?
Flutter has nothing to fear anymore. The funeral will be held next week.
Can you elaborate?
Flutter was already affected in this wave.
Where does the source indicate Python team layoff?
The additional information you need is that that's what Thomas Wouters does (and has done for as long as I've known them, which is many, many years).
People of Cgc jhanjeri shares deep condolences with the python team. Hope they get job somewhere else with more success
I love if though when people working for trillion dollar corporation getting high six figure salaries and probably more money in a year than average worker in most countries makes in a lifetime, casually dunk on "capitalism". Yeah, sure, in the USSR you'd do much better, dude. I mean, I know layoffs suck, but come on.
you do realise that ussr does not exist anymore (it's been replaced with a hyper-capitalist structure that mutated into a fascist dictatorship); and that the existence of people being highly paid does not disprove the fact tha the us-style capitalism is a terrible system for anyone but the highest echelons?
> you do realise that ussr does not exist anymore
O RLY?! That fact totally changes my whole argument... unless it was an example of a non-capitalist society and I never claimed it currently exists and the point was the comparison of living in capitalist and non-capitalist system.
> the existence of people being highly paid does not disprove the fact tha the us-style capitalism is a terrible system for anyone but the highest echelons
The guy complaining about it is the highest echelons. He was working for frickign Google, which pays tons of money. Not that this duckspeak isn't a complete lie for pretty much all people. As a person who, unlike you, actually lived in the USSR, I can tell you that it had humongous inequality and a myriad of daily degrading and humiliating problems for almost everybody "but the highest echelons", on the level that somebody living in a Western country can't even imagine. Capitalism may have its flaws, in the US and everywhere, but man you don't know how lucky you are, compared to the alternative. And I don't wish on anybody to ever learn it. Just stay ignorant and take your knowledge from your weed-smoking cool pol-sci prof who surely knows everything about the matter. Really, this way it's much, much better.
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The point is that many would view Google SWEs as being in the highest echelons. Generally, people who get paid very large amounts of money under capitalism are seen as being hypocritical when they criticize capitalism, if they aren't using their wealth to make change.
It's not that their criticism isn't valid, it's the feeling that they are perpetuating and benefiting from capitalism more than 99% of people, so they are all talk and no walk.
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There's no sense in that.
You all help fuel these companies. Don't complain.
Google laid off it's entire python foundation team
I wonder if he blames his exorbitant salary on capitalism too?
morons
This news has so many implications.
1 - I think the move to Germany is a tentative one - they could not pack all and move it to India thoroughly like IBM did, because in a election year this can create waves in the public opinion and shift votes against MAANG/FAANG corporations sponsored globalist politicians.
2 - It's only but the beginning. German and European staff have a better STEM formation in real universities (for now) but when Alphabet will have to face work unions in Germany they will pack again and go India, Burundi or whatever else.
3 - I see that some of the most relevant FOSS projects core programmers are getting the axe in this move. I would like to elaborate on this since open source now fosters autopilot, gemini, that are perceived by the big companies as a way to lay off or to pay peanuts the real software developers that created and fostered the FOSS movement.
4 - The people left in the cold were not saved by their putting the pronouns in their bio, nor by abiding to cambodian-style woke ideologies. They licked but when they were not needed anymore they were dumped, with their mouth full of it.
5 - Flutter is DEAD. No matter how you put it.
6 - Since the Agile mindset and antipatterns were adopted, it seems that large companies are self-eating thinking they can do keeping management only. Meetings and fake presentations of systems that deliver 5% of what stated. Anything productive is seen as debris of demon. Pol-Pot style, if you have any competence you are an enemy of the people and of the DEI mantra.
7 - People with experience in this and willing to react to this trend are scared to talk and isolated. Not being able to express dissent while seeing the whole productive sector of the western world being dismembered, vilified, destroyed.
8 - Large companies are like Zelensky, they need stupid cannon fodder that follows the orders and if not can be replaced in zero time with even more submitted servants. If you are OK with this I feel no empathy towards you and your peers. These people saw google implement sjw ideologies in any products, staid silent, and now they are not useful anymore to the system they so eagerly and willingly contributed to enthrone.
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I recognize this guy based on his handle as the guy who'd always give spectacularly unhelpful replies on #python freenode irc. Not surprised he also makes simplistic statements about capitalism.
We need python programmers in Pharma right now edaclinical.com/apprenticeship
Meta is clearly driving most of CPython efficiencies. The projects listed are mostly stable so it's smart of Google to let the community drive it forward and they just use it ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
Python inside Google, for non-AI stuff at least, feels quite a bit different than with different defaults than the rest of the world. This may have the side effect of eventually aligning with the broader outside Python community.
> ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
That's how all jobs should be though. The only time anyone should be sprinting is if the building is on fire. I guess Google is moving to a 9-9-6 schedule, and they want to do it in Munich where they can pay peanuts for it.
Ah but unlike the crazy USA, Germany has a legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
Haha sure, that's assuming Google's starting baseline is 9-5, mind you, which is not even close. Many people barely work at Google and "work-life balance" is really a euphemism for not really working.
Google used to be about working smartly and not grinding just for grind's sake, which is totally respectable. At some point, however, that became Google's external brand as well, and went in the head of the people being recruited. The result is, recently, people self-select and optimize for joining Google precisely for "work-life balance." i.e. if you want to actually work and get paid for performance, you are better off joining Facebook. Google ends up with the rest of the folks who join with the expectation of low expectations.
i think you might want to read up about labour protections in germany before opining this strongly.
> The projects listed are mostly stable so it's smart of Google to let the community drive it forward and they just use it ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.)
If you prioritize busyness you will get busyness but not necessarily productivity.
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