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Google lays off its Python team

511 points by compiler-guy 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
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.
- zaphar 2y ago
  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.
  - madrox 2y ago
    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).
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  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?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Less cultural clashes, and still cheap versus US.
  - yadaeno 2y ago
    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).
- Rapzid 2y ago
  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.
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    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.
    - zem 2y ago
      yeah, that's basically it.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    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.
    - sitkack 2y ago
      Wages by Geo is a Urs Hözle move, whom should get paid in NZ dollars.
      - paganel 2y ago
        Interesting, didn’t know that. I remember older threads of people fawning his accomplishments, but nothing about him being a cheap b*stard when it came to his colleagues salaries. We should do more of this name and shaming in our industry, it’s one of the few levers we still have at our disposition.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  How do you "protect" a job?
  - dec0dedab0de 2y ago
    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.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      Yeah, and really enforce anti-dumping laws. The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for? Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but not so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.
      - kaashif 2y ago
        > How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for? In my experience, US workers, even with much higher wages, are simply better than Indian workers being paid much lower wages. Note that Indians being paid US wages, in the US, are fine - you just can't expect much if you're paying peanuts. I have had experiences where entire offshore teams have contributed significant negative value. This false economy is as false as they come. I think a bigger danger to US wages is European offshoring.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.
- VBprogrammer 2y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    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.
  - throwaway345435 2y ago
    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).
    - allarm 2y ago
      How hard is it? As in - they have to let you work for the duration of the notice period hard? Honest question.
      - dongping 2y ago
        Aside from the mandatory negotiation with the employee co-determination (works council), the layoffs "must be determined according to the principles of social selection [...] (t)his is often perceived as a major obstacle [...] it would be disastrous to have to dismiss top performers simply because they are younger than other employees or have been recently hired." [Source] Random link from the Internet so that I don't need to translate: https://www.emplawyers-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/files/docs/RedundancyinGermany_Overview.pdf https://www.emplawyers-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/files/...
        ghosty141 2y ago
        You are on the spot, it's almost impossible to lay somebody off who is like 50 y/o and has kids + has been with the company for quite a while. Generally, workers rights here in Germany are quite good so as an employee life tends to be quite comfortable since you don't have to fear termination the moment the company isn't doing exceptionally well.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  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.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.
  - bitcharmer 2y ago
    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.
    - kaashif 2y ago
      Cut salaries 90% and quality will drop. It's a false economy however you slice it or wherever the replacements are based. It never works.
    - phendrenad2 2y ago
      Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.
      - huhtenberg 2y ago
        > all of the best developers ... ... have already left the country. It's a joke, but not really.
    - orochimaaru 2y ago
      In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well. You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pclmulqdq 2y ago
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.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
  There’s a ton of python all over the place. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
  - beanjuiceII 2y ago
    maybe they plan to adopt mojo
    - melodyogonna 2y ago
      Mojo developers will not be different from Python developers, also Mojo is still very unstable. Chris Lattner said last May that he expected Mojo to be usable in 18 months, so within the next 7 - 8 months
- martius 2y ago
  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.
  - ddalex 2y ago
    is it really Python though ?
    - bananapub 2y ago
      yes, SRE uses loads of python, despite a decade+ pseudo-mandate to encourage Go
      - 2y ago
gjytfhbfd 2y ago
So TensorFlow is not officially dead.
- xnx 2y ago
  New version release 1 month ago: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-216.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-...
  - mihai_maruseac 2y ago
    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
    - ddalex 2y ago
      Jax is next level though
      - hyperliner 2y ago
        [dead]
deputy 2y ago
[deleted]
skrbjc 2y ago
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.
dmoy 2y ago
Same thing with the Kythe (aka Grok) team that does the cross references for codesearch.
- aluminum96 2y ago
  Just vaporized a whole team so the roles can be moved overseas :(
  - lbruno 2y ago
    full-timers or contacting?
- __float 2y ago
  Oh no, this is truly a valuable (though somewhat niche) open source project, too.
- sluongng 2y ago
  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?
nineplay 2y ago
> 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?
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  The poster lives in NL so not sure what to make of these statements.
  - jsiepkes 2y ago
    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.
    - LeafItAlone 2y ago
      One of the posts has > as do I, in .nl
- hnfong 2y ago
  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.
- fargle 2y ago
  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.
peppertree 2y ago
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.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  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.
  - filoleg 2y ago
    > 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.
zem 2y ago
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.
- _giorgio_ 2y ago
  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 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.
  - zem 2y ago
    they are building a new python team from scratch in munich, for whatever reason. yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.
    - joyboyluffy 2y ago
      I am sure you will find another job that you really like. Well you said you guys were seriously understaffed but that makes it more nonsense to fire them. So were you guys working on a specific project and will those guys from munich continue on it.
      - zem 2y ago
        we were working on a ton of stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) - pretty sure the munich team will need to pick up most or all of it.
    - rtpg 2y ago
      Salary, right? I have to imagine at one point the gap between US devs and European devs is starting to be felt
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
readthenotes1 2y ago
I wonder if he blames his exorbitant salary on capitalism too?
vinni2 2y ago
Just curious what does a Python team do? It doesn’t make sense to dedicate a team to a programming language.
- compiler-guy 2y ago
  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.
  - zem 2y ago
    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.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
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.
- emodendroket 2y ago
  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.
  - xcrjm 2y ago
    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.
    - emodendroket 2y ago
      If it's localized to one company it is but that's the beauty of a sector-wide slowdown... where are they going to go instead?
      - nebula8804 2y ago
        Maybe we can see this as a positive, if it gets bad enough, the people coming into tech from the bootcamps who just did it for the money might move onto other fields.
mihai_maruseac 2y ago
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
- bmc7505 2y ago
  > All AI is written with Python. Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  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.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
    - madaxe_again 2y ago
      Your point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.
      - fragmede 2y ago
        That's interesting, but two people over a couple of weeks isn't the same as one person claiming they could build it over one weekend.
      - throwaway5959 2y ago
        They built a prototype (probably in Rails, lol). Thousands of people built Twitter, including many who have never written a line of code in their lives.
Nimitz14 2y ago
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.
anonymousemous 2y ago
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.
tgma 2y ago
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.
- gnu8 2y ago
  > ("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.
  - ferrouswheel 2y ago
    Ah but unlike the crazy USA, Germany has a legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
  - tgma 2y ago
    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.
  - jubalfh 2y ago
    i think you might want to read up about labour protections in germany before opining this strongly.
udia 2y ago
Where does the source indicate Python team layoff?
- lvh 2y ago
  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).
lesi_nedo 2y ago
[flagged]
realyashnag 2y ago
Curious. Are other corps funding open-source python dev?
- kortex 2y ago
  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.
smsm42 2y ago
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.
- jubalfh 2y ago
  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?
  - smsm42 2y ago
    > 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.
    - jubalfh 2y ago
      dude, i'm polish, and i know very well how dysfunctional ussr was. moreover, my father was from lviv; he repatriated to poland in 1956. members of my family enjoyed the hospitality of the siberian gulags for the reason of defending warsaw as a part of polish pre-war military, too. however, i do not mistake capitalism with free markets; capitalism (in the stage where we are, ruled by rentiers and oligarchs that we call billionaires) needs to be reined in if we want to fucking survive.
sitkack 2y ago
Google feels like it can re-externalize costs. Therefore it does. As Brian Cantrill said, Don't Anthropomorphize Google!
- VHRanger 2y ago
  Don't anthropomorphize Sundar Pichai
bluecrab 2y ago
There's no sense in that.
tlaui 2y ago
morons
YeBanKo 2y ago
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.
bndr 2y ago
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.
- throwaway5959 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - CydeWeys 2y ago
    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.
    - throwaway5959 2y ago
      All SWEs at Google are well compensated. Not all of them would be a good fit for maintaining Python.
      - CydeWeys 2y ago
        Then I don't understand the point you were making in your first post.
        throwaway5959 2y ago
        A waste of talent not of cash.
        CydeWeys 2y ago
        That's the thing, it's not clear that the Python core engineers are more talented than other Google SWEs on average. You have all sorts of talented engineers working on all sorts of random projects within Google.
alkibiades 2y ago
lol so this guys takeaway is “capitalism bad”. even though capitalism is what got him his cushy google job to start with
- Sleepful 2y ago
  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:
throwaway5959 2y ago
Sundar take a pay cut yet?
- ddalex 2y ago
  Yeah, negative paycut
  - dolphinraging 2y ago
    [flagged]
sidcool 2y ago
This is sad. Google just keeps getting worse from people perspective. And keeps getting better for shareholders.
- twojobsoneboss 2y ago
  I mean, it’s way easier to buy GOOG than get hired there, just sayin…
oksteven 2y ago
Google's python team probably need some restructure for better product in the future
7wge7g27ev 2y ago
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.
- mathverse 2y ago
  Munich is HCOL even for European standards. Just a tiny bit behind London and Switzerland.
  - __52849__ 2y ago
    Waaayyy behind Zurich, lol.
7wge7g27ev 2y ago
Google laid off it's entire python foundation team
CgcJhanjeri 2y ago
People of Cgc jhanjeri shares deep condolences with the python team. Hope they get job somewhere else with more success
mholdsaga 2y ago
[flagged]
mholdsaga 2y ago
[flagged]
exploredata 2y ago
We need python programmers in Pharma right now edaclinical.com/apprenticeship
WSST 2y ago
Silly sounding, serious question: What is the 'Python' team? Open source python language package maintainers?
- mihai_maruseac 2y ago
  Already answered in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
twobitshifter 2y ago
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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
seaworthiness26 2y ago
How about flutter/dart teams? Are they safe?
- franticsurvivor 2y ago
  Flutter has nothing to fear anymore. The funeral will be held next week.
  - pylua 2y ago
    Can you elaborate?
- mihai_maruseac 2y ago
  Flutter was already affected in this wave.
taylodl 2y ago
Playing Devil’s Advocate - why does Google need a Python team when they made Go?
- tail_exchange 2y ago
  Because they have Python code that needs to be supported. The ML ecosystem, for example, is much larger in Python than Go.
  - DoctorDabadedoo 2y ago
    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.
    - tail_exchange 2y ago
      Not sure, but I believe the performance-critical components are C++.
- VHRanger 2y ago
  Go is not used in machine learning at all
Madmallard 2y ago
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.
- franticsurvivor 2y ago
  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.
dre_bot 2y ago
You all help fuel these companies. Don't complain.
franticsurvivor 2y ago
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.
franticsurvivor 2y ago
[flagged]
p5v 2y ago
I am wondering what this means for the future prospects of their Go team.
torginus 2y ago
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.
a_vanderbilt 2y ago
The institutional sickness at Google continues to consume. They are making the kind of shortsighted moves that are already costing them.
CodeiumCareers 2y ago
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alexxelaalex 2y ago
If a Google recruiter comes for you, don't walk, run. That is what Google has become under Sundar Pichai.

511 points by compiler-guy 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

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.

zaphar 2y ago
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.
- madrox 2y ago
  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).
darth_avocado 2y ago
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?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Less cultural clashes, and still cheap versus US.
- yadaeno 2y ago
  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).
Rapzid 2y ago
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.
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  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.
  - zem 2y ago
    yeah, that's basically it.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  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.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Wages by Geo is a Urs Hözle move, whom should get paid in NZ dollars.
    - paganel 2y ago
      Interesting, didn’t know that. I remember older threads of people fawning his accomplishments, but nothing about him being a cheap b*stard when it came to his colleagues salaries. We should do more of this name and shaming in our industry, it’s one of the few levers we still have at our disposition.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
How do you "protect" a job?
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  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.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    Yeah, and really enforce anti-dumping laws. The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for? Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but not so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.
    - kaashif 2y ago
      > How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for? In my experience, US workers, even with much higher wages, are simply better than Indian workers being paid much lower wages. Note that Indians being paid US wages, in the US, are fine - you just can't expect much if you're paying peanuts. I have had experiences where entire offshore teams have contributed significant negative value. This false economy is as false as they come. I think a bigger danger to US wages is European offshoring.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.
VBprogrammer 2y ago
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.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  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.
- throwaway345435 2y ago
  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).
  - allarm 2y ago
    How hard is it? As in - they have to let you work for the duration of the notice period hard? Honest question.
    - dongping 2y ago
      Aside from the mandatory negotiation with the employee co-determination (works council), the layoffs "must be determined according to the principles of social selection [...] (t)his is often perceived as a major obstacle [...] it would be disastrous to have to dismiss top performers simply because they are younger than other employees or have been recently hired." [Source] Random link from the Internet so that I don't need to translate: https://www.emplawyers-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/files/docs/RedundancyinGermany_Overview.pdf https://www.emplawyers-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/files/...
      - ghosty141 2y ago
        You are on the spot, it's almost impossible to lay somebody off who is like 50 y/o and has kids + has been with the company for quite a while. Generally, workers rights here in Germany are quite good so as an employee life tends to be quite comfortable since you don't have to fear termination the moment the company isn't doing exceptionally well.
vineyardmike 2y ago
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.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.
- bitcharmer 2y ago
  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.
  - kaashif 2y ago
    Cut salaries 90% and quality will drop. It's a false economy however you slice it or wherever the replacements are based. It never works.
  - phendrenad2 2y ago
    Every company thinks that they're going to hack the system. They think that they'll be the first American company to ever outsource and get the best developers. But all of the best developers are happily working for local companies, and they don't want to have to deal with an American boss.
    - huhtenberg 2y ago
      > all of the best developers ... ... have already left the country. It's a joke, but not really.
  - orochimaaru 2y ago
    In this case its Munich I think based on previous comments. Also, in India things depend on who you hire and how much you're willing to pay (like everywhere else). If you pay a salary you expect in rural Alabama in the Bay Area for a tech job you'll attract shitty devs as well. You comment isn't wrong. I've observed the same thing but only when things get outsourced to low cost consulting shops. If Google pays decently in India (which I think they do), they'll get much better devs. There's a pretty strong start-up ecosystem and dev culture but as with everything you need to pay good $$ - as in not 10% of bay area pay but closer to 60-70% of it to attract top talent.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pclmulqdq 2y ago

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.

hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
There’s a ton of python all over the place. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
- beanjuiceII 2y ago
  maybe they plan to adopt mojo
  - melodyogonna 2y ago
    Mojo developers will not be different from Python developers, also Mojo is still very unstable. Chris Lattner said last May that he expected Mojo to be usable in 18 months, so within the next 7 - 8 months
martius 2y ago
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.
- ddalex 2y ago
  is it really Python though ?
  - bananapub 2y ago
    yes, SRE uses loads of python, despite a decade+ pseudo-mandate to encourage Go
    - 2y ago

gjytfhbfd 2y ago

So TensorFlow is not officially dead.

xnx 2y ago
New version release 1 month ago: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-216.html https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-...
- mihai_maruseac 2y ago
  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
  - ddalex 2y ago
    Jax is next level though
    - hyperliner 2y ago
      [dead]

deputy 2y ago

[deleted]

skrbjc 2y ago

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.

dmoy 2y ago

Same thing with the Kythe (aka Grok) team that does the cross references for codesearch.

aluminum96 2y ago
Just vaporized a whole team so the roles can be moved overseas :(
- lbruno 2y ago
  full-timers or contacting?
__float 2y ago
Oh no, this is truly a valuable (though somewhat niche) open source project, too.
sluongng 2y ago
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?

nineplay 2y ago

> 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?

LeafItAlone 2y ago
The poster lives in NL so not sure what to make of these statements.
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  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.
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    One of the posts has > as do I, in .nl
hnfong 2y ago
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.
fargle 2y ago
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.

peppertree 2y ago

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.

vineyardmike 2y ago
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.
- filoleg 2y ago
  > 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.

zem 2y ago

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.

_giorgio_ 2y ago
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 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.
- zem 2y ago
  they are building a new python team from scratch in munich, for whatever reason. yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.
  - joyboyluffy 2y ago
    I am sure you will find another job that you really like. Well you said you guys were seriously understaffed but that makes it more nonsense to fire them. So were you guys working on a specific project and will those guys from munich continue on it.
    - zem 2y ago
      we were working on a ton of stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) - pretty sure the munich team will need to pick up most or all of it.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    Salary, right? I have to imagine at one point the gap between US devs and European devs is starting to be felt

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

readthenotes1 2y ago

I wonder if he blames his exorbitant salary on capitalism too?

vinni2 2y ago

Just curious what does a Python team do? It doesn’t make sense to dedicate a team to a programming language.

compiler-guy 2y ago
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.
- zem 2y ago
  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.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

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.

emodendroket 2y ago
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.
- xcrjm 2y ago
  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.
  - emodendroket 2y ago
    If it's localized to one company it is but that's the beauty of a sector-wide slowdown... where are they going to go instead?
    - nebula8804 2y ago
      Maybe we can see this as a positive, if it gets bad enough, the people coming into tech from the bootcamps who just did it for the money might move onto other fields.

mihai_maruseac 2y ago

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

bmc7505 2y ago
> All AI is written with Python. Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
zooq_ai 2y ago
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.
- fragmede 2y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    Your point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      That's interesting, but two people over a couple of weeks isn't the same as one person claiming they could build it over one weekend.
    - throwaway5959 2y ago
      They built a prototype (probably in Rails, lol). Thousands of people built Twitter, including many who have never written a line of code in their lives.

Nimitz14 2y ago

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.

anonymousemous 2y ago

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.

tgma 2y ago

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.

gnu8 2y ago
> ("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.
- ferrouswheel 2y ago
  Ah but unlike the crazy USA, Germany has a legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
- tgma 2y ago
  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.
- jubalfh 2y ago
  i think you might want to read up about labour protections in germany before opining this strongly.

udia 2y ago

Where does the source indicate Python team layoff?

lvh 2y ago
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).

lesi_nedo 2y ago

[flagged]

realyashnag 2y ago

Curious. Are other corps funding open-source python dev?

kortex 2y ago
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.

smsm42 2y ago

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.

jubalfh 2y ago
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?
- smsm42 2y ago
  > 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.
  - jubalfh 2y ago
    dude, i'm polish, and i know very well how dysfunctional ussr was. moreover, my father was from lviv; he repatriated to poland in 1956. members of my family enjoyed the hospitality of the siberian gulags for the reason of defending warsaw as a part of polish pre-war military, too. however, i do not mistake capitalism with free markets; capitalism (in the stage where we are, ruled by rentiers and oligarchs that we call billionaires) needs to be reined in if we want to fucking survive.

sitkack 2y ago

Google feels like it can re-externalize costs. Therefore it does. As Brian Cantrill said, Don't Anthropomorphize Google!

VHRanger 2y ago
Don't anthropomorphize Sundar Pichai

bluecrab 2y ago

There's no sense in that.

tlaui 2y ago

morons

YeBanKo 2y ago

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.

bndr 2y ago

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.

throwaway5959 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CydeWeys 2y ago
  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.
  - throwaway5959 2y ago
    All SWEs at Google are well compensated. Not all of them would be a good fit for maintaining Python.
    - CydeWeys 2y ago
      Then I don't understand the point you were making in your first post.
      - throwaway5959 2y ago
        A waste of talent not of cash.
        CydeWeys 2y ago
        That's the thing, it's not clear that the Python core engineers are more talented than other Google SWEs on average. You have all sorts of talented engineers working on all sorts of random projects within Google.

alkibiades 2y ago

lol so this guys takeaway is “capitalism bad”. even though capitalism is what got him his cushy google job to start with

Sleepful 2y ago
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:

throwaway5959 2y ago

Sundar take a pay cut yet?

ddalex 2y ago
Yeah, negative paycut
- dolphinraging 2y ago
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sidcool 2y ago

This is sad. Google just keeps getting worse from people perspective. And keeps getting better for shareholders.

twojobsoneboss 2y ago
I mean, it’s way easier to buy GOOG than get hired there, just sayin…

oksteven 2y ago

Google's python team probably need some restructure for better product in the future

7wge7g27ev 2y ago

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.

mathverse 2y ago
Munich is HCOL even for European standards. Just a tiny bit behind London and Switzerland.
- __52849__ 2y ago
  Waaayyy behind Zurich, lol.

7wge7g27ev 2y ago

Google laid off it's entire python foundation team

CgcJhanjeri 2y ago

People of Cgc jhanjeri shares deep condolences with the python team. Hope they get job somewhere else with more success

mholdsaga 2y ago

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mholdsaga 2y ago

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exploredata 2y ago

We need python programmers in Pharma right now edaclinical.com/apprenticeship

WSST 2y ago

Silly sounding, serious question: What is the 'Python' team? Open source python language package maintainers?

mihai_maruseac 2y ago
Already answered in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338

twobitshifter 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

seaworthiness26 2y ago

How about flutter/dart teams? Are they safe?

franticsurvivor 2y ago
Flutter has nothing to fear anymore. The funeral will be held next week.
- pylua 2y ago
  Can you elaborate?
mihai_maruseac 2y ago
Flutter was already affected in this wave.

taylodl 2y ago

Playing Devil’s Advocate - why does Google need a Python team when they made Go?

tail_exchange 2y ago
Because they have Python code that needs to be supported. The ML ecosystem, for example, is much larger in Python than Go.
- DoctorDabadedoo 2y ago
  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.
  - tail_exchange 2y ago
    Not sure, but I believe the performance-critical components are C++.
VHRanger 2y ago
Go is not used in machine learning at all

Madmallard 2y ago

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.

franticsurvivor 2y ago
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.

dre_bot 2y ago

You all help fuel these companies. Don't complain.

franticsurvivor 2y ago

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.

franticsurvivor 2y ago

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p5v 2y ago

I am wondering what this means for the future prospects of their Go team.

torginus 2y ago

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.

a_vanderbilt 2y ago

The institutional sickness at Google continues to consume. They are making the kind of shortsighted moves that are already costing them.

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alexxelaalex 2y ago

If a Google recruiter comes for you, don't walk, run. That is what Google has become under Sundar Pichai.