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> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
by bsimpson 1y ago
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
She's not alone.
Another exec fired the entire Python team (many of whom were core contributors to the language) to replace them with the lower salaried TypeScript team, which was then restaffed by a new team in an even lower salaried locale.
- slantedview 1y agoThis is shocking.
- spacemadness 1y agoWhy is it shocking? Big tech has thoroughly embraced layoffs and offshoring as a means to cut costs. Execs don’t care if it causes issues at the lower levels of the company. To them it’s just noise from the rabble. If it does cause an issue they’ll just call their buddies at the other Big Corp and work someplace else.
- yard2010 1y agoThis is a symptom of seeing the whole world through the small narrow lens of "money is everything".
- pjmlp 1y agoWelcome to big corp with Excel driven decisions, sorry, Google Sheets.
- metaltyphoon 1y agoThis is sickening
- pjmlp 1y agoExactly why one should be loyal to the team, not the employer. The team members, we might bump into them in another situation. The company, it is all about numbers and meeting projections.
- montag 1y ago"Trix"
- xnx 1y agoI've followed Google pretty closely since 2001, and had somehow never encountered that term for matrix/spreadsheet.
- exikyut 1y agoI just had a hunch, opened http://sheets.new http://sheets.new, opened the developer tools and did a CTRL+SHIFT+F search for "trix". There were a bunch of CSS and JS hits. 791. I think Trix is the internal codename for Sheets, like "Kix" is the codename for Docs (similar pile of matches for the term in devtools).
- zipy124 1y agoThe lower salaried locale for the python team is Germany no? Which isn't exactly like your tradional outsourcing. I find it hard to believe we won't see more of it in the coming years with how much cheaper engineers are in Europe especially when they are english speaking and go to good universities like Cambridge/Oxford/EPFL/ETH etc...
- UncleMeat 1y agoYes. This was a weird case and I suspect that there was some internal politicking to enable Munich as the location to rebuild the team. I don't have any inside baseball on this, but pretty much every other case of "blow up the team and rebuild it elsewhere" I've seen in the past three years has been a move to a much lower cost region (India, Mexico, and Poland are big ones). The languages group has a bunch of people in Munich and several leaders there, which I suspect played a role in getting the team to be built in a mid cost region rather than a low cost region. Still a mess and my understanding is that the AI portions of the company were none too happy given that the bulk of their development is done in python.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoI heard about this, too. Sadly, we were not in the right place at the right time, so to speak, to be able to grab some of these candidates.