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.
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.
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.
I guess Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Uber, and Spotify aren’t serious long term applications.
I'm not sure i'd cite Reddit as a positive example of such a thing.
You wouldn’t cite Reddit as a positive example of successfully using Python to run a large scale, high traffic application?
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?
I think it's a copy pasta.
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.
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.
Someone should rewrite this but Rust instead of Java; it would be a perfect meme.
Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++
The what, now?
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++.
C++, Java, and Go are the languages for backends IIRC. I think Typescript is the frontend language of choice.
Kotlin has been seeing more and more usage as well, even outside of Android:
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 ?
yes, SRE uses loads of python, despite a decade+ pseudo-mandate to encourage Go
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
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
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.
I agree with you on this, but just saying, there is plenty of actual python (not starlark) at Google, all over the most crucial places (which a lot of people who haven’t touched those don’t even realize exist).
Personal example - the fleet of hardware prototypes (that I used to work on) used for hardware-in-the-loop testing (basically the hardware version of CI/CD) was pretty much reliant on python. Anything that was compact enough to be accomplished by a script and generic enough (open this serial connection, write to that memory address, etc.), the de-facto default choice was almost always python.
But I fully agree with you otherwise, in a sense that I haven’t seen much of a gigantic python codebase consisting of a bunch of interconnected python modules, like you would see with other popular languages at Google (e.g., C++/Java/JS).
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).
Well over 100m lines of Python as has been publicly stated several times over the years is not "very little".
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
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
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.
Can you say more about the automated refactoring? How did it work? How was it triggered? How much human involvement was there? Are any parts of it public?
can't say too much about it because it mostly used a lot of internal tools, but it was a combination of writing per-file utilities to do specific code transforms (think something like libcst), and then a framework to scan the google codebase, find affected files, and apply the transforms to them.
Code mods are fun. Were they gated by human PR reviews, perhaps in batches, or applied without review?
yes, gated by human reviews based on who owned the code, unless they were completely trivial and then were gated by a single global approver. there were always humans in the loop though.
Ah makes sense. At another MAANG, there was a code mod template job with a half dozen subvariants. I recall using a variant that supported ripgrep piping to sed -i for a simple replacement mod. There were jobs properties controlling how many mods per diff and whether it needed human approval or not. I think I did one batched by 1000 running once every 2 weeks to keep noise down.
the rule at google is if you check any code in, you are responsible for every single breakage it causes
i can no longer edit my post to clarify this, but by "responsible for breakages" i meant that if your new check-in caused any CI tests anywhere within the codebase to fail, even if due to bugs in the other code, you had to stop and fix it, or get the owners to fix it, or find some principled way to temporarily disable those tests, before you could check your code in.
this was a very real issue for things like the python runtime or widely used code checkers like pytype or pylint, because if e.g. the new version of python, or some improved check in pytype, started raising failures in a code pattern that was technically wrong but which the existing toolchain did not complain about, you could not release the new version until you had fixed all those new breakages.
contrast this with non-monorepo codebases, where the other code would have had to deal with the fact that "oh, our code works under 3.10 but 3.11 broke it, guess we have to pin our own repo to 3.10 until we fix it", but as the python team we could just say "we support 3.11 now, you need to catch up"
i can no longer edit my post to clarify this, but by "responsible for breakages" i meant that if your new check-in caused any CI tests anywhere within the codebase to fail, even if due to bugs in the other code, you had to stop and fix it, or get the owners to fix it, or find some principled way to temporarily disable those tests, before you could check your code
Google engineers hate this one weird hack: just send a mail saying "we're deleting/deprecating [everything your product depends on] in [14-180] days, good luck!"
this reminds me of kenton v's complaint about working on infra being so hard
> very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
it's open source! check out https://github.com/google/pytype and https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/main/docs/developers/t... for more on the multi-file runner
Terrific! Thank you.
I was your opposite number at AWS for many years. Like you say, it was one of the best jobs I've ever had, but over there it was a career dead end. I wasn't laid off, but I had to leave it to have any hope of growing myself.
I feel for ya, zem; if you ever turn up at a PyCon in person, lemme buy you a drink.
I guess it was in some ways a career dead end at google too, I joined as a senior engineer and never bothered applying for promotion to staff, and most of my teammates were similar. On the other hand, I never felt I wasn't growing myself because I learnt a lot, took on some very ambitious projects, and was trusted with a lot of ownership and input into "what do you feel the most effective thing you could be working on right now is?"
When was pytype invoked? Runtime? CI/CD? Did it output types to be added to files or did it infer and then enable downstream tasks based on those inferences?
it was invoked manually at build time, and then at CI/CD time (there was no runtime type checking). we did output types to pyi files (the python equivalent of C header files), but mainly we used the inferred types to check the code for type correctness - one of the unique selling points of pytype, and why google was developing its own typechecker in the first place, was that the other available python type checkers would check annotated code for consistency, but would not do anything about type errors in unannotated code. if pytype did detect type errors, the code failed CI and had to be fixed before it was checked in.
we did also have a separate tool that could merge the inferred types back into the source code as annotations, but it never got much uptake.
Frankly, it sounds like a dream job for me too, to be responsible for a particular technology and make sure that it works for all your internal (and external) users.
agreed! it takes a certain kind of person to find that fun, but the people who enjoy it really enjoy it.
I’m so sorry.
That is a lot of great work. Sorry to hear that it is gone. Take some time to rest and hope find somewhere with better vision!
When Wall St. concerns lead to imposing cannibalistic capitalism plans that are pennywise but pound foolish.
Just wait a few years. When they come calling for consulting services, charge them triple.
lol some of the replies in this thread better be satire otherwise they are just moronic at best.
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.
Be as surprised as you like
It does not surprise me that people shitpost calling an expert "moronic" without any counter arguments.
Classic: ask what the team does, and before getting an answer, decide that it doesn't make sense.
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
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?
Your point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.
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.
Really, no shit, I thought it was one guy and his cat who did all the coding for everything
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.
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.
Python is only used for prototyping within google. All production ai code is run on c++
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.
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
Google is an AI first company
Google is an ad first company
FTFY
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?
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.
Yes, and not to repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940
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.
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
it's an adverts company, when i looked in the past 80% of the revenue came from the ads unit
All AI is written with Python.
Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
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!
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.
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.
What is a MAAN_
I'm guessing "Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google" but with a "_" for some reason
_ is for Alphabet
then why not MAAANG?. Much better acronym, but then I just say big N.
Even better, why don’t we just get rid of the unwieldy acronyms altogether and simply refer to them as “major tech companies”? It’s clearer and avoids the constant reshuffling every time the market shifts.
People have a strange attachment to catchy mnemonics that Jim Cramer was using in 2014.
We can still call Alphabet Google, just like everyone calls X Twitter. Clunky rebrands don't have to be accepted by everyone.
Edit: Personally I'm in favor of sorting by present market cap, so it's MANGAM.
Can’t we just stick with FANG?
Sure, the acronym doesn’t mean anything anymore, but at least everyone knows what it means.
Why is Netflix still included? They should be kicked out, I haven’t heard anything tech about the, for years now.
Then we can go with Meta Apple Google Amazon, or MAGA for short. Ok, not a good look that one.
Because they still pay $500k cash.
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.
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?
t. Jerome Powell and Julie Su
Well for sure, but it also helps make sense of why you'd see tech executives clamoring for something to be done about inflation even as they were clearly benefiting from the inflationary environment in some sense.
Top talent is based outside of USA too
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"
while i'm sympathetic, it still means you had a great deal going. if/when it ends you shouldn't get pissed off you got the opportunity in the first place - a visa isn't permanent.
to be clear - what i was reacting to was the author's idea that he should reject capitalism and/or start a trade union, after having been a very, very, lucky player of the capitalism game indeed. it pisses me off when people making N multiples of 6 figure incomes start forgetting how lucky they are and how much they personally benefited from that exact system. a laid off googler's worst day is many, many times better than the average guys daily life. in this country, let alone somewhere else.
A visa is not permanent, but it might as well be for Indian and Chinese citizens. The green card lottery can easily take decades. You could have gone to college, got married, had kids, bought a house, and maybe even see your kids graduate college and have kids of their own before you get guaranteed residency in the US.
"Oh you should be happy you had a good thing going" is not something I'd find especially comforting if I was told I needed to rapidly uproot my entire life and leave a country I've spent decades in.
thanks, glad someone understands! (i'm indian and stuck in just that situation)
I have a bunch of open Python roles. Like, a could-hire-your-entire-team bunch. Which doesn't mean I can afford you! But happy to chat and see what's possible.
If you're physically within the U.S. (just a location, not a citizenship/green card restriction) feel free to reach out, contact info is in my profile.
"wind up your current life and leave the country"
Isn't that what so many people do in their own country in order to come to the US on a work visa to begin with?
yes, and trust me, it makes a big difference when it's voluntary and you are in full control the time frame.
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.
If Google was really existing in service of its employees rather than its investors
But then it wouldn't make that kind of profit.
Why wouldn't it?
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.
One of the posts has
as do I, in .nl
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.
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.
Salary, right? I have to imagine at one point the gap between US devs and European devs is starting to be felt
The team wasn't US based - GP is in .nl...
As others have pointed out, OP is in NL, but the rest of the team was in the US.
I’m sorry to hear that.
It does not make sense at all. Python cython is a complex ecosystem. It is very difficult for new engineers to pick up speed.
Do you think there is some priority change? Like more focus on internal use case, instead of upstream contribution?
i doubt there is much room for a priority change. as i said elsewhere, we were a pretty understaffed team, so we were already very focused on the highest value internal use cases. we did have a couple of people who also worked on the core python interpreter, but that was only a fraction of their duties, and even our open source and upstream contributions were driven by stuff that google also needed done.
The Python Foundation team should spin off and make an AI company. Would probably receive a lot of interest from investors.
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.
we were working on a ton of stuff (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) - pretty sure the munich team will need to pick up most or all of it.
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.
@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 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.
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.
On the internal memegen site, where people post and vote on memes, the AWU folks (they have a red logo around their profile picture, so easy to identify) are basically Debbie Downers. Constantly posting comments or memes shitting on the company. Whatever it is, see red logo around profile picture, you know it's going to be a "this company sucks" comment.
They very much give me the vibe of the "late stage capitalism" 23 year old reddit type. I remember one post from a guy complaining about how the company abuses its employees because in the EU everyone gets so much more vacation. I guess he didn't compare his US salary to EU salaries. Checked profile, tenure: been at company 6 months, and already complaining.
Union's power is in the enforcement of employers to accept collective bargaining (that's why the misnamed US "right to work" laws are so effective at disenfranchising workers). AUW, as it currently organized, lacks that power, so yes, all that remains is bitching.
Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees. Had they didn't had memegen to post on, the higher probability more would tunnel their disappointments into organizing.
Those disappointments were created by Google: they (used to) market themselves as a benevolent employer. People get on board, and realize that the truth is far from that. Of course, they wouldn't be able to hire some people they wanted to if they had told them the truth. Should those employees know better? Maybe. But any relationship, including labor, is built on trust.
Memegen is a way for employees to vent with no action taken by leadership. It serves its intended purpose.
No further action taken by employees as well. If memegen didn’t exist, some might be inclined to escalate, actually forcing leadership to do better.
That's essentially the thesis of Hirschman's treatise on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
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.
Ah but unlike the crazy USA, Germany has a legal maximum of 48 hours per week.
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.
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
Jax is next level though
Same thing with the Kythe (aka Grok) team that does the cross references for codesearch.
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.
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.
They have three months to find new roles/teams. Their employment only ends if they can't.
Assuming this wasn't financially motivated.
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).
Sundar take a pay cut yet?
Yeah, negative paycut
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…
morons
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.
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.
Google feels like it can re-externalize costs. Therefore it does.
As Brian Cantrill said, Don't Anthropomorphize Google!
Curious. Are other corps funding open-source python dev?
I wonder if he blames his exorbitant salary on capitalism too?
Google's python team probably need some restructure for better product in the future
We need python programmers in Pharma right now edaclinical.com/apprenticeship
There's no sense in that.
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.
lol so this guys takeaway is “capitalism bad”. even though capitalism is what got him his cushy google job to start with
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 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.
People of Cgc jhanjeri shares deep condolences with the python team. Hope they get job somewhere else with more success
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.
Google laid off it's entire python foundation team
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)
You know, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to use this divide to actually move to the EU and get residency. Then again, with so many countries having to beef up military spending and facing economic headwinds you really have to question whether all the social / quality of life programs that make europe more livable than the US would be sustainable long term either.
Who knows maybe in 30 years Americans ultimately have a higher quality of life just due to our stronger economic position making it easier to sustainably fund M4A or whatever.
If you work a white-collar job the US standard of living is substantially higher. If you're a laborer the opposite is true but you also probably have a harder time getting in to Europe in the first place.
I really do wonder if our material standard of living really contributes to happiness though? I don't want more 'stuff' I want guaranteed access to healthcare. I want worker and consumer rights. I want a country that recognizes climate change is a real problem and is doing something about it. I want a more fair and representative government actually beholden to the will of the people. I don't need a McMansion, a luxury car, I want a better society. I feel like Europe, or at least the Nordics, have that, and if my parents were not here in the US, I think I'd happily move.
Military spending is a good point. If the middle class all moves to Germany, the US tax base will suffer, and probably Germany will have to raise taxes for their military to compensate. But that would take decades.
”Slightly cheaper”? What are the actual numbers we are talking about regarding yearly comp?
TC diffs of 230k vs 350k is what i've seen, for a mid-career SRE
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).
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.
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.
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.
How do you "protect" a job?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.
Or will they, I mean, are you really going to found your business in... where, Singapore?... if you live in the US and your whole network is there? Maybe not. And tariffs are certainly an approach that could work to advantage native companies or those that employ a large number of US developers.
Either way, I think this gets away from the premise and starts getting into reasons not to do it (theoretically, you're losing some new jobs that would otherwise be created) more than reasons it's impossible
Laws and regulation.
You start a business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But remember, everyone has to be 'in office' for collaboration! /s
Disney famously did this, I think it was tech support for their Florida parks.
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.
Wages by Geo is a Urs Hözle move, whom should get paid in NZ dollars.
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.
for many many yearsr it's been a SVP-level project to move people and teams out of the expensive US parts to cheaper regions - Munich was a particular target for some reason (maybe it was the cheapest medium eng office in that timezone). there used to be a lot more carrot, though.
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.
yeah, that's basically it.
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.
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).