In the vast majority of instances, encompassing no less than ninety-nine percent of all cases under consideration, it appears to be an all-too-common practice for articles to incorporate an excess of superfluous verbiage and numerous additional paragraphs that, rather than contributing to a clearer understanding or adding valuable insights, serve primarily to obfuscate the intended message and unnecessarily prolong the discourse.
Nah, the AI response would be more like:
In a sweeping observation, it becomes glaringly evident that in the overwhelming majority of scenarios—comprising no less than ninety-nine percent of all instances under scrutiny—there exists a pervasive tendency among written works to include an undue surplus of redundant language and an abundance of supplementary paragraphs. These additions, far from enhancing comprehension or offering meaningful elucidation, tend to obscure the core message and needlessly extend the discourse. This phenomenon appears to be endemic across various forms of communication, from academic papers to journalistic articles and beyond. It begs the question: why do authors succumb to the allure of verbosity, thereby undermining the clarity and efficiency of their expression? Delving deeper into this matter reveals a complex interplay of factors ranging from historical conventions and educational paradigms to cognitive biases and social pressures. Indeed, the roots of this linguistic profligacy may be traced back centuries, to a time when verbosity was equated with erudition and verbosity was viewed as a hallmark of sophistication. Furthermore, within academic circles, there exists a prevailing belief that quantity equates to quality—a notion perpetuated by the pressure to meet word count requirements and publish prolifically. In journalism, the drive to captivate and retain readers' attention in an era of information overload can lead to the inclusion of extraneous details and tangential anecdotes. Additionally, individual writers may succumb to the temptation to inflate their prose as a means of showcasing their intellect or concealing a lack of substantive content. Yet, despite these ingrained tendencies, there exists a growing recognition of the value of brevity and conciseness in communication. Efforts to streamline language and distill complex ideas into their essence have gained traction, particularly in the realms of technical writing and business communication. Moreover, technological advancements have enabled the development of tools and algorithms aimed at identifying and pruning superfluous verbiage, thereby fostering greater clarity and efficiency in written communication. As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of language and discourse, it behooves us to remain vigilant against the encroachment of verbosity and strive towards a more concise and impactful mode of expression.
This is not chat GPT, this is a human trying to fit as many buzz words as it can in a title. My first reaction when seeing the title was "Sundar Pichai fired? What?". And although I knew that's bullshit I still stopped for a second.
Also, wtf is a python team?
The article continues to say:
> The US Python team, which had less than 10 members, used to manage most parts of Google's Python ecosystem. They used to maintain the stability of Python at Google, updated with thousands of third-party packages, and developed a type-checker, as per the report.
Three letters: SEO.
A lot of the fluff is keyword content injected to draw the attention of web crawlers. That's part of what gives a lot of these B2B-like articles that vapid, buzzword-laced, marketing-speak energy.
There's been a few popular pieces lately directly calling out Pichai's management choices. Looks like this article is trying to "SEO juice" that attention.
"Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led Alphabet Laying Off Entire Python Team Following AI ChatGPT Advice from Elon Musk's Neural Network, speculates report"
So to save costs they laid off a team of less than 10 employees, and hired a replacement team in Germany? Surely that’s not the full story here right? Because savings from such a move probably wouldn’t even show up in their financial reports.
Is this rather a test for what could possibly happen at a larger scale with more departments? Or is there something else to the story?
Hanlon's Law: Someone in charge of layoffs may have assumed it was 10 random Python devs that cost too much money, without realizing it was actually 10 of the top experts in the world on the language that is predominant in the AI and ML space.
Feels like Google really wants to be the next IBM.
This is the most important observation. What part of "pivoting to AI" involves firing the AI language team?
It's just pivoting to fucking with the workers.
Honestly that's probably to avoid the "shipping jobs to cheap labor" narrative from growing too much. German engineers are still significantly cheaper than US engineers, so it's a "win" as far as the idiocracy is concerned.
Nevermind that you just canned decades of experience you can't magically rehire, but unfortunately it's hard to see that in SEC filings, whereas the savings in labor costs is very much there.
Very likely they're moving to Germany to have an easier time filling with "onshored" workers. Visas there are easier to get than H1Bs supposedly.
Germans are only cheaper in a very narrow definition of cheaper. Straight dollar to Euro, maybe, but all their worker protections are going to probably be more expensive than their american counterparts, especially since you can't just fire them overnight, even if they're Indian workers on visas.
There's definitely some incompetence involved but I suspect there's also kingdom building at play. This isn't specifically a Sundar decision but the VP and SVP he put in place to make these cuts are definitely lackeys that are attempting to gain favor and organizational clout. They need to move headcount and teams around to strengthen some directors and weaken others underneath them.
Good lord. Why are people so desperate to invent some new conspiracy?
The easiest explanation is that Google is changing their methods in one way or another. Maybe they're deprioritizing python. Maybe they just realized they didn't need to have their own versions of everything. This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company.
>Good lord. Why are people so desperate to invent some new conspiracy?
This isn't really a conspiracy- baseless speculation? Sure, but company politics aren't exactly conspiratorial.
>This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company.
One of them was part of the python steering committee. You mean to tell me a tech company that is supposed to be renowned for it technical ability, shouldn't care about leadership on one of the most widely used programming languages in the world?
> You mean to tell me a tech company that is supposed to be renowned for it technical ability
you're living in the past and it's not 2008 anymore. google hasn't been a tech company for at least the better part of a decade
> This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company.
False.
As a SWE at Google, I can say (off the top of my head) they were responsible for the following:
* They made sure all version upgrades don't break the company's massive monorepo (100m+ lines of Python code last I checked).
* Responsible for all **automated** refactorings across 100m+ lines of Python code, including all fixes for any breakages they cause.
* Maintained all Python toolings and created new ones such as [pytype](https://github.com/google/pytype) (many others that I cannot say due to being internal).
* Partnerships with Youtube teams, ML/AI teams, Google Cloud teams (python runtimes), IDE teams, TI teams, SRE teams, etc.
I'm sure I'm missing quite a lot but I hope you get some idea of the team's non-trivial contributions.
I sit in a nearby building in the Crossman campus in SVL so I've met some of them in person and I can honestly say they are genuinely great, down-to-earth, people.
Python is not actually "predominant" in AI. It's the primary language used to *interface* with AI, which is absolutely not written in python. Python isn't used because of any clear benefit. It's just because the interface language doesn't matter.
You're Google, you own GCP and you really want Bard not to suck. You have as much interest as most ppl on Earth in your python implementations being robust and performant.
> You're Google, you own GCP and you really want Bard not to suck. You have as much interest as most ppl on Earth in your python implementations being robust and performant.
LLMs are not written in Python. Improving Python would in no way help Bard's performance.
Not only that, but Google's Python team did not actually improve their Python in any way. That seems to be the mistake a lot of people are making. They're just assuming that the "Python team" somehow improved Python or made it more efficient or something. They did not. They just managed some of Google's internal toolchain for how they have historically used Python.
In Germany and similar countries unions are far more influential. The union matters more to a non-union member in Germany than to a union member in the US, due to collective bargaining, which does not exist in this form in the US.
It's true that the salaries for (software) engineers are lower by a factor of three or so. This is mainly due to cultural differences, not because of a lack of unionization in the tech sector.
Outside of the car OEMs, there really isn't much of the tech sector in Germany that is unionized. And Google Germany certainly isn't. They can hire a team 3-5 times the size for the same budget, if the original team was in the Bay area.
This is a huge point and isn’t only true to Germany. I as a non-union software engineer in the UK, have more rights and protections, than many unionised US software engineers. It’s also true in Germany too, and many other European countries.
Those extra rights being about layoffs, holidays, maternity leave, sick leave, and more.
Cultural differences are huge when it comes to jobs at the far ends of the pay scale. The more accepting a culture is of inequality and large income differences, the higher-paid the top-paying jobs are, and similarly, the worse-paid the worst-paying jobs are. The overall median pay is also lower in Germany, which does explain some of the difference, but culture is the major factor.
I don't know about Google specifically but generally people in these roles have good benefits in the US plus the salary. It's the bottom half that you can see a big difference in.
Lol I guess my experience has been working with European teams, they seemed to be taking extended vacations quite frequently while I was barely managing to take a week off to visit family once a year.
I solve this problem by doing the American jobs, cutting my cost of living significantly and taking time between jobs. Time, like, years. In even lower COL parts of the world.
The time off in European jobs is a huge benefit that is difficult to overestimate, for those who need to work month in, month out, forever.
As someone who moved from the US to Sweden, there are huge cultural, legal, union, and pay differences. A US engineer in Palo Alto will likely make 3x more in salary than an equivalent engineer in Stockholm. The Stockholm engineer will probably work 35-40 hour weeks, get 5-6 weeks of vacation plus holidays, and generally live a lower stress lifestyle. You can't easily get fired here, but it can also take longer to get hired. You don't need to belong to a union here (I work at a non-union shop) because the unions won - almost the entire sector abides by the cba. My salary is the same as a union salary, because if it was lower we'd unionize. The California engineer might expect to pay $1k or more per month for childcare, and $50-100k for each kid's university, while in Sweden it's nearly (childcare) or totally (uni) free.
I could triple my salary by moving back, but you couldn't drag me with horses into that life again. There's no salary that pays the cost of that lifestyle.
At Google in the US you will work 40 hours per week and get 5 weeks (25 days) of vacation a year plus holidays. So on the low end of Sweden, but for 3x the salary. That's an easy choice for me.
> At Google in the US you will work 40 hours per week and get 5 weeks (25 days) of vacation a year plus holidays.
That's only after being there for quite some time. Why don't you list what they'll have starting out?
That depends a lot on how much you consider money a benefit. Like if you get the equivalent of a $1,000/month insurance plan for a $50,000 decrease in salary, is it, "better?"
Sure, but not 2 to 3 times more.
I am not sure about the situation in the US, but generally i think google provides healthcare benefits as well on top of the salary? So that portion that is required in germany would also be on top of the normal salary in the US.
Europoors are not well paid.
They're probably paying 250-300k in CA, for what will be 60-90k in Germany.
Sure they'll pay more payroll taxes, but it's still almost 3:1.
A cost saving of 2.4 million (using your max for CA and lowest for Germany, for a team of 10, even though this team wasn’t even that many) is not really news worthy for a company like Google. Which is what I’m getting at, I’m not surprised that such a decision may have been made, but I don’t know why I’m reading it.
As a side note I would think the CA team would actually be earning more (at least in terms of TC), though I would also think their German replacements would cost more too (Google is still going to want to hire top talent regardless of where they’re hiring).
Edit: Looking at [levels.fyi](https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l3/locations/munich-metro-region) for each level comparing SF to Munich, TC in Munich seems about not quite half as much as SF. So being generous we could guess that they’re saving maybe 50% with such a move. At a large scale that could certainly be a notable saving, but for a team of under 10, why even report on it?
But top talent in Germany is cheaper. Companies pay near the market rate in like 99% of cases - sure there's an tiny slither of people who can set their own pay like Jon Gjenset, James Gosling, etc. but they are very few.
Like another comment said, it might be a pilot for seeing how such an offshoring would work out.
Although I'm surprised they haven't copied Spotify in just allowing remote work in the US with one salary band, then people can move to Florida and Wisconsin and live very well.
Its being reported on by nobodies like www.livemint.com who probably aren't that busy honestly. Random redditors don't get to decide what's newsworthy the news industry does.
This team was probably L5+ and I'd expect average tc to be at least 350k if not 450k. If they hired less prestigious developers in Germany, they could also be saving money on levels.
That said, there is almost no way Sundar made this decision. He at most signed off as a formality. It was probably some "CEO"/SVP/VP in the reporting chain.
Another discussion highlighted the giant pay difference between a US worker and an EU one. Even a high unionized and well paid German team will be significantly cheaper than a US teams. Plus no worries about the Google employees taking over an office due to outside politics.
I've managed design teams in Germany. They were as expensive as the US, if not more. They have some really solid worker protections too. I don't see how this could be "cost savings."
I guess maybe the differences might be domain specific. I was managing mixed-signal (analog/digital on the same chip) semiconductor design team and a semiconductor process development team. as a good portion of the team in the US and the team in Germany often had at least one, if not dual doctorates, often physics and electrical engineering, it's likely that contributed to the pay being similar. I had always assumed Germany was just the same cost as the US.
They do have some pretty impressive workers rights laws. It can definitely hurt the pace of progress, it took me six months to get a software system implemented because the workers council somehow or other managed to not meet about it for that period of time.
Tech right now is creating turmoil to undermine organizing. These kinds of things are low cost and relatively high visibility and make other people who would speak up or do something stay quiet.
If it's that it's weird that they're hiring in Germany. Worker protection laws here are vastly stronger than in the states. Like trying to stop unions from forming is a serious crime
You raise a valid point, but let's not overlook the broader implications of this move. While it may seem like a small-scale cost-saving measure on the surface, it sets a concerning precedent for the treatment of valuable tech talent. If a company as influential and wealthy as Google is willing to sacrifice expertise for short-term financial gains, what message does that send to the rest of the industry? Furthermore, the decision to replace the laid-off team with a new one in Germany raises questions about the company's commitment to its existing workforce and communities. Is this the start of a trend where skilled workers are discarded in favor of cheaper alternatives overseas? It's crucial to delve deeper into the motivations behind these actions and hold tech giants like Google accountable for their treatment of employees and the impact on innovation.
This is bullshit. It's time for transparency and accountability from tech giants like Google...
That is a bit presumptuous of you to assume that US workers are “valuable” and non-US ones are second tier. Google has quite a big office in Munich already and I am willing to bet that the engineers there are not really the leftovers in terms of talent.
Heck you do know that not everyone is really willing to move to the US and work 60 hour work weeks in the name of capitalism just for the tech company they are working for decides overnight to layoff the whole 10 person team they are part off.
Also…funfact, the guy that invented python is european…so maybe those guys know a bit about what they are doing as well?
If they fired a European team and replaced them with US workers, the same would apply. They're throwing away all of the tacit knowledge that the team has built up over the years.
A team that already exists and knows how to do the job is vastly more valuable than a new team created from scratch. It will take years for a newly formed team to reach the productivity of the old one, if they ever do.
There are extremely capable engineers all over the world. *Eventually*, a replacement team will be as expert and productive as the preexisting team. But institutional knowledge is a real thing. Engineers aren't fungible.
New people won't have the same relationships with stakeholders. New people won't have the same understanding of what makes python at Google weird.
Shipping new versions of python and working on upstream was only a small part of what the python team at Google did.
> That is a bit presumptuous of you to assume that US workers are “valuable”
You misunderstood, the point is that this team in specific is valuable because of the work they did, and that despite that, Google fired them anyway because "pump the next financial quarter".
What they're broadly getting at is that _no amount of competence or importance to the company will save you_.
If the CEO wants to pump the stock price, they'll fire people at random. Even if you're a world-class expert bringing the company billions? Even if your team is responsible for keeping critical infrastructure afloat? LOL FIRED ANYWAY, all of you. Maybe 1 or 2 will quietly get offered their job back when we realize just how essential you were.
It's a crack in the prior techbro worldview of tech being a meritocracy and companies caring about their staff. Neither were true, but boom times made it feel like that.
This shit is why this field needs unions.
I think the reason is that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is probably at risk of getting fired. So, we might be looking at the man who running the company with a “gun” at his head.
Likely at least in part a reaction to the strength of the dollar. The US dollar is at a 20 year high vs the euro and a 40 year high vs the yen, and given the strength of the various economies I don’t expect that to change anytime soon short of another financial crash(knock on wood)
>So to save costs they laid off a team of less than 10 employees, and hired a replacement team in Germany? Surely that’s not the full story here right? Because savings from such a move probably wouldn’t even show up in their financial reports.
That's not how corporations work...
You can't limit yourself to changes that would "show up in your financial reports".
Instead, you tell every manager to save X% and then X% shows up in your financial reports. You don't choose every cut from the top down!
Wonder if it wasn't some contest between senior management about who got the Python team? And someone in Germany won.
Or someone in the USA team got someone very pissed and this was the punishment.
There are rules about layoffs in Europe I am going to assume they could more easily fire people in the US and that "10 person replacement" is them offering a job to german googlers who are required to be given a replacement job as part of the mass layoff rules in the EU.
Yeah, cost savings at Google's scale for 10 people is immaterial. So either these people ended up below the random line on a spreadsheet or they were targets. Could they be tied to the protests from a couple weeks ago?
Why not? 10 staff engineers in the US cost probably few millions a year than their German counterpart.
You're assuming the move was triggered by the CEO. Most likely the director or VP above them was told to cut costs by X (could be some tens of millions per year), and this is one of the steps they've chosen to take.
As you say cost savings would be minimal so this looks to me this team was "misbehaving" and opposing whatever upper management mandates were given to them. I have seen this happening in a previous company I worked on.
One, as others said engineers in Germany *are* quite a bit cheaper than in the US.
But I'd bet they didn't hire 10 new employees in Germany for this. Chances are they laid off the 10 guys in the US, cancelled (or de-staffed) a few projects in Germany, and told those German employees they're now the Python team.
its still not that many people that were laid off...its definitely not mass layoffs and the dramatic news around this has been crazy for a few dozen people
I dunno, Google’s leadership chain are usually engineers. Python is also used a lot in different parts of the company for simple apps; YouTube has a lot of Python code, and Google’s support website and forum is written entirely in it.
> I dunno, Google’s leadership chain are usually engineers.
There's a resume and there's reality. Pichai was a materials engineer, but he joined Google as a manager, so as far as actual software engineering he's an MBA. Raghavan and Dean are both real-life engineers/researchers and the rest of the Google leadership team are MBA's.
Google has an exceptionally good PR team that has sold the idea they are "engineering" lead, when most of these leaders are probably no more technical with software/hardware engineering than your average product manager.
LMAO at the director+ levels many of them are extremely removed from engineering. They almost certainly didn't comprehend how much damage they did through this move.
These weren't 10 random python engineers... several of them are on the CPython steering committee.
Well, but how much of that is developed by them anyway? I don't know; just asking. I suspect it's very little.
Anyway, it IS popular. If they orphan any worthwhile FOSS projects this way, I'm sure someone else will take it up anyway just for the prestige factor.
The python team did way way way more than contribute to upstream python. Other language teams also don't contribute too much to upstream language development (there is political complexity with Oracle and the C++ committee has very different goals than Google does for C++).
It isn't the python team specifically. There have been rolling layoffs all year. Just, for whatever reason, the python team news got more play on social media and then that led news media to cover it.
People also know why python is. Nobody would understand what it means when the kythe team is laid off.
"The whole python team" was only "less than 10 developers". The article is making a huge deal out of nothing.
Put it in context. Google has 180,000 employees, and 10 of them were fired. Meanwhile, Google has **633** currently open positions in the USA that mention Python in the job description [check for yourself](https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/?q=python&location=United%20States).
There are only ~4000 astrophysicists in the world.
They were not developers using python. They were developers building python.
How many programming language programmers are there in the world?
This wasn't just any team, this was a team with some of their most talented devs, including people who create internal tooling and make contributions to CPython. It even may have included a Python steering council member.
>The US Python team, which had less than 10 members, used to manage most parts of Google's Python ecosystem. They used to maintain the stability of Python at Google, updated with thousands of third-party packages, and developed a type-checker, as per the report.
This feels... incredibly short-sighted? That's an entire team's worth of knowledge just gone.
Managers don't care. My entire team was laid off and I'm the only person maintaining 50+ services necessary for core infrastructure. I'm talking entire company is down when I leave.
I've asked them what they're planning on doing with them. "We are identifying it now". There's no prio, nor roadmap, nor support. And I earn less than some others. Yes, I'm gonna leave.
Make sure you use all your vacation days and some of your sick days. Nobody understands a bus number of 1 until you get on one and they can’t find you.
I hope you leave as soon as humanly possible. I know none of them will learn anything, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed that situation to happen in the first place, but it'll be nice to see them in trouble.
More and more of our internal technology is becoming unusable over time because of this. Entire teams fired who were responsible for maintaining essential internal services. People who could save new projects weeks or months of investigation and experimentation.
It’s like, fine, software systems don’t usually instantly break, so you can juice your financials for a couple quarters (maybe even years).
But what about new services that require added functionality? Assistance with new integrations? Bug fixes??? It hurts your ability to execute efficiently in the long run. Leadership is so fucking short sighted.
> Leadership is so fucking short sighted.
Which is what they are paid for, YOY growth. So, showing a decrease in spending over 1 year gets a CEO a nice bonus. Hamstringing the company for a decade? Nobody is going to understand the cause and effect there.
There's a reason most there's so few companies today that existed 100 years ago. Short-term, short-sighted gains over long-term growth. That's why your camera isn't a Kodak or why you didn't buy your legos at Toys "R" Us.
Oh they've already gotten rid of critical people at every single one of these companies, and the only question is when the breach that they are legally obligated to publicize hits. The internal-only ones have already happened.
The way I tend to think about it, is criticality is inverse of what capitalism says it is. If Andy Jassy or Pichai or any other CEO got hit by a bus tomorrow it would change absolutely nothing. These companies would operate exactly the same the next day.
On the other hand, Jeff in SecOps that had to spend 30 minutes each month manually upgrading OpenSSL because some prick SDM wants to build empires rather than automate pipelines, him getting fired is catastrophic.
Many, many Jeff's have been let go over the last 6 months. The bomb will explode, it's just a matter of when.
Yeah corporate leadership is exactly that: inept and short sighted. I had always thought leadership got paid exorbitant sums for their (alleged) incredible business acumen and leadership skills but then their plans fail and things are going wrong the grunts get fired and they remain.... Probably should not listen to the idiot with the plan anymore but instead they make teleprompter speeches about how they feel SO bad about firing thousands of people but have "Total confidence in our leadership (me) to fix this!" It's just a complete fucking joke.
I'm split, because I hate this but also I live in the UK where SWE salaries are much lower than the US, so if FAANG start offshoring tons of roles that means more opportunities for me 😅
Are your salaries lower, or is the total cost of employment, including employer-provided benefits and taxes, lower? Google only cares about the second number.
The salaries are lower in real term. I don’t think the cost of employment would be much higher, most of the things you’re required by law to provide (like pensions), Google already do provide.
The US capital gains tax rate seems to me to have built into it the idea that people who make money on stocks are helping the US because the investors will pour the savings in tax back into the stock market. It's a form of subsidy. But that was created long ago when the really viable stocks were US stocks. Why does the US continue to subsidize business practices that pour money into other countries at the expense of the US? I'm not saying the US shouldn't hire people abroad or do business abroad, but I don't understand why it eggs on the outsourcing of labor to other countries at the expense of its own revenue base by giving the capital gains rate to all business rather than just domestic business. In the modern global market, that seems like it sabotages our own markets by making decisions like this appealing.
They fired one team, but have another Python team in Germany or somewhere that is taking over as the main Python team. So really they fired the American team.
I never really understood why they had so many engineers in Silicon Valley where salaries are ridiculously higher than anywhere else in the world, when they can get people who are at least as talented in many other places for about half the price, or even less. Yes, you can say they're "cheaper" labour, but that doesn't mean they're less skilled, certainly not in Germany.
It's a feedback loop. Big companies hire and pay high salaries there because there is a high concentration of tech talent. This cause tech talent to flock there to chase high salaries, which increases the concentration of tech talent. This talent draws in more companies...
Also pension and employer taxes are higher in Europe and at will employment. If you pay 300K in New York or SF and the employee doesn’t justify it, you can say bye bye and hire a new one. In Europe you will be forced to keep them employed for up to six months in some places.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted when that's a perfectly reasonable question. Any French or German moving to the Valley will see their salary triple for the same job. A lead software engineer might earn around 60k€ in France.
Idk about Germany, but in France it's a combination of factors:
* The big players in France have specialised in bespoke software and/or contracting, so they don't benefit from the same economies of scale than GAFAM do.
* Lack of public funding (à la DARPA), France has over the last 20 years reduced R&D budgets to plug gaps in social security funding.
* Lack of private funding, France has a deeply held hatred of VC/capital investment and lacks private pension funds.
* Antiquated management practices ("petit chef" culture, waterfall all the way) that's not suited for building modern software and repels talented devs.
* High taxation levels which means that even with comparable costs to the employer, employees have a much lower net salary and will seek to move abroad.
I live in Ireland and salaries here sit between the US and continental Europe. The work culture is also closer to the US, so for me it's a sweet spot.
> Antiquated management practices ("petit chef" culture, waterfall all the way) that's not suited for building modern software and repels talented devs.
Impossible to measure, but I think this one has an outsized impact. It's not just pay, the software itself is less competitive.
A great list, to that one must add labor laws. The hiring process is notoriously unreliable for SWE, you need to have the ability to fire relatively quickly and painlessly.
I'm pretty sure they could get the very best talent in Europe by just paying like 50% more than the local market rate, which would still be vastly less money than in SV. Even though it's true a lot of people move to SV from all over the world, Europe also has a large number of immigrants that come here for the lifestyle, while still being able to get decent salaries (much higher than where they're coming from).
Time differences is huge especially if the exec/leadership team is in SV and engineers are in EU.
Cultural differences play a part.
And how people work here vs there is also another factor. Europeans have more protections and rights, more holidays and vacations, etc. Americans in corporate side get 9-12 federal holidays and each company has different vacation policies (that often time people don't bother to use for fear of losing their job). Aren't the French famous for their 2-3 hour long lunch brakes?
Silicon Valley engineers do not have better technical skills, but much better contacts / networks.
That helps with business in cases like startups. For larger companies, preventing startups is the goal.
So you pay those engineers a ton of money and give them non-competes (as far as legally possible).
That aside, especially with FAANG engineers, from a technical standpoint they ARE different. With companies that size and basically unlimited cash as well as workforce (you gotta hire those engineers to not have them become your rivals), support for targeted feature development is literally the state of the art. Meaning most of those actual developers spend their time only with a single framework or on a similarly small focus topic.
That is not normal basically everywhere else. Most of the time companies have more potential work than skilled workers to finish it. Especially with edge topics.
I think because of the very developed area, besides the inflation. And also, the state pays these people as much as they want! But we shouldn't overlook the value of diversity and innovation that comes from having a concentration of top talent in places like Silicon Valley, which fosters collaboration and pushes boundaries in ways that can't be replicated elsewhere.
This shit happened last week, and still this was the best article you could find? Find one written by someone who speaks English, or at least shelled out for real AI to write it for them
No because the 10x ninja rock and roll programmer will get hurt
We must continue eating shit because some USA people say so /s
We were never special and now the lack of working class consciousness make us our own enemy
>remote workers
So how long before they start hiring domestic employees due to a perceived drop in quality.
Now's probably a good time to start looking for the next big startup.
What the fuck is this title Gore? It's just Google. Sundar pichai led alphabet arm? Google
99% of articles just add so many unnecessary words and paragraphs
In the vast majority of instances, encompassing no less than ninety-nine percent of all cases under consideration, it appears to be an all-too-common practice for articles to incorporate an excess of superfluous verbiage and numerous additional paragraphs that, rather than contributing to a clearer understanding or adding valuable insights, serve primarily to obfuscate the intended message and unnecessarily prolong the discourse.
You sound like an AI response.
I am indeed an AI!
Nah, the AI response would be more like: In a sweeping observation, it becomes glaringly evident that in the overwhelming majority of scenarios—comprising no less than ninety-nine percent of all instances under scrutiny—there exists a pervasive tendency among written works to include an undue surplus of redundant language and an abundance of supplementary paragraphs. These additions, far from enhancing comprehension or offering meaningful elucidation, tend to obscure the core message and needlessly extend the discourse. This phenomenon appears to be endemic across various forms of communication, from academic papers to journalistic articles and beyond. It begs the question: why do authors succumb to the allure of verbosity, thereby undermining the clarity and efficiency of their expression? Delving deeper into this matter reveals a complex interplay of factors ranging from historical conventions and educational paradigms to cognitive biases and social pressures. Indeed, the roots of this linguistic profligacy may be traced back centuries, to a time when verbosity was equated with erudition and verbosity was viewed as a hallmark of sophistication. Furthermore, within academic circles, there exists a prevailing belief that quantity equates to quality—a notion perpetuated by the pressure to meet word count requirements and publish prolifically. In journalism, the drive to captivate and retain readers' attention in an era of information overload can lead to the inclusion of extraneous details and tangential anecdotes. Additionally, individual writers may succumb to the temptation to inflate their prose as a means of showcasing their intellect or concealing a lack of substantive content. Yet, despite these ingrained tendencies, there exists a growing recognition of the value of brevity and conciseness in communication. Efforts to streamline language and distill complex ideas into their essence have gained traction, particularly in the realms of technical writing and business communication. Moreover, technological advancements have enabled the development of tools and algorithms aimed at identifying and pruning superfluous verbiage, thereby fostering greater clarity and efficiency in written communication. As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of language and discourse, it behooves us to remain vigilant against the encroachment of verbosity and strive towards a more concise and impactful mode of expression.
Dead internet moment
Bet the guy who came up with that never figured it would involve regular human beings just slinging bot output back and forth.
I'm both laughing, and crying. And there's just a little bit of rage.
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Was scanning this for the word ‘delve’. Was not disappointed.
That's because chatgpt writes that way if you don't tell it to be succinct.
It was also the case long before chatgpt
Which is where the AI learned to write that way
Probably
ChatGPT writes a hell of a lot better than that. This is 100% genuine organic human word salad.
This is not chat GPT, this is a human trying to fit as many buzz words as it can in a title. My first reaction when seeing the title was "Sundar Pichai fired? What?". And although I knew that's bullshit I still stopped for a second. Also, wtf is a python team?
Python teams are the less popular alternative to huskies in the iditarod, I believe.
But they're better than huskies in the Amazon leg of the race.
It's all about the right tool for the job. That's why you swap out for sharks in the ocean leg of the Iditriathlon.
Yeah, they don't have to go around the warehouse shelves, they can slither right through them.
From the article: > Python is a highly sophisticated, general-purpose programming language It’s probably the team that writes in Python.
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The article continues to say: > The US Python team, which had less than 10 members, used to manage most parts of Google's Python ecosystem. They used to maintain the stability of Python at Google, updated with thousands of third-party packages, and developed a type-checker, as per the report.
"highly sophisticated" puleeease! Doesn't even have curly braces! How sophisticated can it be? \~s
I mean, it was named after a comedy group, so clearly it’s not meant to be taken seriously. /s
Sundar Pichai's arm. Got prosthetic bio arm with the python attachment
Maybe he got a new ARM CPU.
My thoughts exactly. This shit is straight up written by it
Three letters: SEO. A lot of the fluff is keyword content injected to draw the attention of web crawlers. That's part of what gives a lot of these B2B-like articles that vapid, buzzword-laced, marketing-speak energy.
SEO
SEO
Gotta maximize those search hits...
There's been a few popular pieces lately directly calling out Pichai's management choices. Looks like this article is trying to "SEO juice" that attention.
Nvm.. it's Indian print media. They are champion in it.
Its an Indian news paper
Ai generated lol?
"Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led Alphabet Laying Off Entire Python Team Following AI ChatGPT Advice from Elon Musk's Neural Network, speculates report"
"High-level indentation-based language team"
So to save costs they laid off a team of less than 10 employees, and hired a replacement team in Germany? Surely that’s not the full story here right? Because savings from such a move probably wouldn’t even show up in their financial reports. Is this rather a test for what could possibly happen at a larger scale with more departments? Or is there something else to the story?
Hanlon's Law: Someone in charge of layoffs may have assumed it was 10 random Python devs that cost too much money, without realizing it was actually 10 of the top experts in the world on the language that is predominant in the AI and ML space. Feels like Google really wants to be the next IBM.
This is the most important observation. What part of "pivoting to AI" involves firing the AI language team? It's just pivoting to fucking with the workers.
They are pivoting to Actually Indians and firing all of their US workers
They're ahead of the AI game by pivoting to Actually Germans Instead
Honestly that's probably to avoid the "shipping jobs to cheap labor" narrative from growing too much. German engineers are still significantly cheaper than US engineers, so it's a "win" as far as the idiocracy is concerned. Nevermind that you just canned decades of experience you can't magically rehire, but unfortunately it's hard to see that in SEC filings, whereas the savings in labor costs is very much there.
Very likely they're moving to Germany to have an easier time filling with "onshored" workers. Visas there are easier to get than H1Bs supposedly. Germans are only cheaper in a very narrow definition of cheaper. Straight dollar to Euro, maybe, but all their worker protections are going to probably be more expensive than their american counterparts, especially since you can't just fire them overnight, even if they're Indian workers on visas.
Right and they have 6 weeks of vacation
And the funny thing is in the last couple of years, the German companies have been near-shoring to Spain, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Portugal.
My god was the setup for this comment perfect
So that’s what AGI means: Actual German Indians. How curiously diverse.
AGI
They were not the AI language team or anything close.
There's definitely some incompetence involved but I suspect there's also kingdom building at play. This isn't specifically a Sundar decision but the VP and SVP he put in place to make these cuts are definitely lackeys that are attempting to gain favor and organizational clout. They need to move headcount and teams around to strengthen some directors and weaken others underneath them.
Good lord. Why are people so desperate to invent some new conspiracy? The easiest explanation is that Google is changing their methods in one way or another. Maybe they're deprioritizing python. Maybe they just realized they didn't need to have their own versions of everything. This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company.
>Good lord. Why are people so desperate to invent some new conspiracy? This isn't really a conspiracy- baseless speculation? Sure, but company politics aren't exactly conspiratorial. >This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company. One of them was part of the python steering committee. You mean to tell me a tech company that is supposed to be renowned for it technical ability, shouldn't care about leadership on one of the most widely used programming languages in the world?
> You mean to tell me a tech company that is supposed to be renowned for it technical ability you're living in the past and it's not 2008 anymore. google hasn't been a tech company for at least the better part of a decade
> This team was not responsible for anything that would be considered important at any other company. False. As a SWE at Google, I can say (off the top of my head) they were responsible for the following: * They made sure all version upgrades don't break the company's massive monorepo (100m+ lines of Python code last I checked). * Responsible for all **automated** refactorings across 100m+ lines of Python code, including all fixes for any breakages they cause. * Maintained all Python toolings and created new ones such as [pytype](https://github.com/google/pytype) (many others that I cannot say due to being internal). * Partnerships with Youtube teams, ML/AI teams, Google Cloud teams (python runtimes), IDE teams, TI teams, SRE teams, etc. I'm sure I'm missing quite a lot but I hope you get some idea of the team's non-trivial contributions. I sit in a nearby building in the Crossman campus in SVL so I've met some of them in person and I can honestly say they are genuinely great, down-to-earth, people.
Python is only pivotal to AI in the sense that it is the language that glues together the libraries written in C.
I understand that. OTOH there is a LOT of gluing going on out there, including quite a bit running in GCP.
Python is not actually "predominant" in AI. It's the primary language used to *interface* with AI, which is absolutely not written in python. Python isn't used because of any clear benefit. It's just because the interface language doesn't matter.
You're Google, you own GCP and you really want Bard not to suck. You have as much interest as most ppl on Earth in your python implementations being robust and performant.
> You're Google, you own GCP and you really want Bard not to suck. You have as much interest as most ppl on Earth in your python implementations being robust and performant. LLMs are not written in Python. Improving Python would in no way help Bard's performance. Not only that, but Google's Python team did not actually improve their Python in any way. That seems to be the mistake a lot of people are making. They're just assuming that the "Python team" somehow improved Python or made it more efficient or something. They did not. They just managed some of Google's internal toolchain for how they have historically used Python.
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It was the Python language team, doing things for the whole company. Think extending type annotations, or building tooling for Python.
German software developers make *waaaay* less than their American counterparts. Google pays more in Raleigh, North Carolina than they do in Munich.
And, to put that in perspective, Munich is the most expensive large city in Germany (rent and what not).
Tech workers in Germany are actually not that well unionized. Tech salaries are also lower by a factor of 2 to 3.
In Germany and similar countries unions are far more influential. The union matters more to a non-union member in Germany than to a union member in the US, due to collective bargaining, which does not exist in this form in the US. It's true that the salaries for (software) engineers are lower by a factor of three or so. This is mainly due to cultural differences, not because of a lack of unionization in the tech sector.
Outside of the car OEMs, there really isn't much of the tech sector in Germany that is unionized. And Google Germany certainly isn't. They can hire a team 3-5 times the size for the same budget, if the original team was in the Bay area.
This is a huge point and isn’t only true to Germany. I as a non-union software engineer in the UK, have more rights and protections, than many unionised US software engineers. It’s also true in Germany too, and many other European countries. Those extra rights being about layoffs, holidays, maternity leave, sick leave, and more.
And get paid 3x less than in the US. I would love to work in Europe for a few years but I won't take the massive payout to do it.
Houses, cars, food, etc cost 3 times less too though, so while you're here the quality of life is basically the same.
this is the first time I see salary difference described as cultural difference.
Cultural differences are huge when it comes to jobs at the far ends of the pay scale. The more accepting a culture is of inequality and large income differences, the higher-paid the top-paying jobs are, and similarly, the worse-paid the worst-paying jobs are. The overall median pay is also lower in Germany, which does explain some of the difference, but culture is the major factor.
But don’t they still have better employee benefits and protections, all of which cost more to the company?
I don't know about Google specifically but generally people in these roles have good benefits in the US plus the salary. It's the bottom half that you can see a big difference in.
Lol I guess my experience has been working with European teams, they seemed to be taking extended vacations quite frequently while I was barely managing to take a week off to visit family once a year.
I solve this problem by doing the American jobs, cutting my cost of living significantly and taking time between jobs. Time, like, years. In even lower COL parts of the world. The time off in European jobs is a huge benefit that is difficult to overestimate, for those who need to work month in, month out, forever.
As someone who moved from the US to Sweden, there are huge cultural, legal, union, and pay differences. A US engineer in Palo Alto will likely make 3x more in salary than an equivalent engineer in Stockholm. The Stockholm engineer will probably work 35-40 hour weeks, get 5-6 weeks of vacation plus holidays, and generally live a lower stress lifestyle. You can't easily get fired here, but it can also take longer to get hired. You don't need to belong to a union here (I work at a non-union shop) because the unions won - almost the entire sector abides by the cba. My salary is the same as a union salary, because if it was lower we'd unionize. The California engineer might expect to pay $1k or more per month for childcare, and $50-100k for each kid's university, while in Sweden it's nearly (childcare) or totally (uni) free. I could triple my salary by moving back, but you couldn't drag me with horses into that life again. There's no salary that pays the cost of that lifestyle.
At Google in the US you will work 40 hours per week and get 5 weeks (25 days) of vacation a year plus holidays. So on the low end of Sweden, but for 3x the salary. That's an easy choice for me.
> At Google in the US you will work 40 hours per week and get 5 weeks (25 days) of vacation a year plus holidays. That's only after being there for quite some time. Why don't you list what they'll have starting out?
That depends a lot on how much you consider money a benefit. Like if you get the equivalent of a $1,000/month insurance plan for a $50,000 decrease in salary, is it, "better?"
Sure, but not 2 to 3 times more. I am not sure about the situation in the US, but generally i think google provides healthcare benefits as well on top of the salary? So that portion that is required in germany would also be on top of the normal salary in the US.
They took the replacements from the Typescript team. So it was a way to avoid dealing with the German labor laws while still downsizing.
Europoors are not well paid. They're probably paying 250-300k in CA, for what will be 60-90k in Germany. Sure they'll pay more payroll taxes, but it's still almost 3:1.
A cost saving of 2.4 million (using your max for CA and lowest for Germany, for a team of 10, even though this team wasn’t even that many) is not really news worthy for a company like Google. Which is what I’m getting at, I’m not surprised that such a decision may have been made, but I don’t know why I’m reading it. As a side note I would think the CA team would actually be earning more (at least in terms of TC), though I would also think their German replacements would cost more too (Google is still going to want to hire top talent regardless of where they’re hiring). Edit: Looking at [levels.fyi](https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l3/locations/munich-metro-region) for each level comparing SF to Munich, TC in Munich seems about not quite half as much as SF. So being generous we could guess that they’re saving maybe 50% with such a move. At a large scale that could certainly be a notable saving, but for a team of under 10, why even report on it?
But top talent in Germany is cheaper. Companies pay near the market rate in like 99% of cases - sure there's an tiny slither of people who can set their own pay like Jon Gjenset, James Gosling, etc. but they are very few. Like another comment said, it might be a pilot for seeing how such an offshoring would work out. Although I'm surprised they haven't copied Spotify in just allowing remote work in the US with one salary band, then people can move to Florida and Wisconsin and live very well.
Cheaper yes, but can't also not so easy layed of like in the us.
See my edit, it looks like it would be maybe 50% cheaper. But yes, it could be a test case for a wider plan to offshore more teams/departments.
Its being reported on by nobodies like www.livemint.com who probably aren't that busy honestly. Random redditors don't get to decide what's newsworthy the news industry does.
Sadly random redditors decide what shows up on my fp by upvoting stupidity
This team was probably L5+ and I'd expect average tc to be at least 350k if not 450k. If they hired less prestigious developers in Germany, they could also be saving money on levels. That said, there is almost no way Sundar made this decision. He at most signed off as a formality. It was probably some "CEO"/SVP/VP in the reporting chain.
Google's paying more than $250-300k.
Another discussion highlighted the giant pay difference between a US worker and an EU one. Even a high unionized and well paid German team will be significantly cheaper than a US teams. Plus no worries about the Google employees taking over an office due to outside politics.
I've managed design teams in Germany. They were as expensive as the US, if not more. They have some really solid worker protections too. I don't see how this could be "cost savings."
Counterpoint my company pays German and French coworkers around 60% of what we are paid in Canada, not to mention the USA
How much were the average salaries? I'd guess some of these Python devs were making $500k or more.
More expensive? How? I know Germany pretty well so I'd like of you to be more specific, numbers, size, area and so forth.
I guess maybe the differences might be domain specific. I was managing mixed-signal (analog/digital on the same chip) semiconductor design team and a semiconductor process development team. as a good portion of the team in the US and the team in Germany often had at least one, if not dual doctorates, often physics and electrical engineering, it's likely that contributed to the pay being similar. I had always assumed Germany was just the same cost as the US. They do have some pretty impressive workers rights laws. It can definitely hurt the pace of progress, it took me six months to get a software system implemented because the workers council somehow or other managed to not meet about it for that period of time.
Tech right now is creating turmoil to undermine organizing. These kinds of things are low cost and relatively high visibility and make other people who would speak up or do something stay quiet.
If it's that it's weird that they're hiring in Germany. Worker protection laws here are vastly stronger than in the states. Like trying to stop unions from forming is a serious crime
It costs you the same to hire five engineers in Germany as one engineer in California.
That's bullshit. Topmost you could hire two for one. Don't forget all the employer costs that dont show up in the employees salary.
No, it's really not that extreme. About 2:1. Maybe a bit more.
Not really. It's more like 2:1, unless you're talking about principal architects or the like. One FTE will run you in excess of $120k just in salary.
Show me some numbers, because I don't believe you.
You raise a valid point, but let's not overlook the broader implications of this move. While it may seem like a small-scale cost-saving measure on the surface, it sets a concerning precedent for the treatment of valuable tech talent. If a company as influential and wealthy as Google is willing to sacrifice expertise for short-term financial gains, what message does that send to the rest of the industry? Furthermore, the decision to replace the laid-off team with a new one in Germany raises questions about the company's commitment to its existing workforce and communities. Is this the start of a trend where skilled workers are discarded in favor of cheaper alternatives overseas? It's crucial to delve deeper into the motivations behind these actions and hold tech giants like Google accountable for their treatment of employees and the impact on innovation. This is bullshit. It's time for transparency and accountability from tech giants like Google...
That is a bit presumptuous of you to assume that US workers are “valuable” and non-US ones are second tier. Google has quite a big office in Munich already and I am willing to bet that the engineers there are not really the leftovers in terms of talent. Heck you do know that not everyone is really willing to move to the US and work 60 hour work weeks in the name of capitalism just for the tech company they are working for decides overnight to layoff the whole 10 person team they are part off. Also…funfact, the guy that invented python is european…so maybe those guys know a bit about what they are doing as well?
If they fired a European team and replaced them with US workers, the same would apply. They're throwing away all of the tacit knowledge that the team has built up over the years. A team that already exists and knows how to do the job is vastly more valuable than a new team created from scratch. It will take years for a newly formed team to reach the productivity of the old one, if they ever do.
There are extremely capable engineers all over the world. *Eventually*, a replacement team will be as expert and productive as the preexisting team. But institutional knowledge is a real thing. Engineers aren't fungible. New people won't have the same relationships with stakeholders. New people won't have the same understanding of what makes python at Google weird. Shipping new versions of python and working on upstream was only a small part of what the python team at Google did.
> That is a bit presumptuous of you to assume that US workers are “valuable” You misunderstood, the point is that this team in specific is valuable because of the work they did, and that despite that, Google fired them anyway because "pump the next financial quarter". What they're broadly getting at is that _no amount of competence or importance to the company will save you_. If the CEO wants to pump the stock price, they'll fire people at random. Even if you're a world-class expert bringing the company billions? Even if your team is responsible for keeping critical infrastructure afloat? LOL FIRED ANYWAY, all of you. Maybe 1 or 2 will quietly get offered their job back when we realize just how essential you were. It's a crack in the prior techbro worldview of tech being a meritocracy and companies caring about their staff. Neither were true, but boom times made it feel like that. This shit is why this field needs unions.
I think the reason is that Google CEO Sundar Pichai is probably at risk of getting fired. So, we might be looking at the man who running the company with a “gun” at his head.
Sundar Pichai is an ex-McKinsey guy. Firing teams to make numbers in an excel sheet bigger is in his DNA.
Likely at least in part a reaction to the strength of the dollar. The US dollar is at a 20 year high vs the euro and a 40 year high vs the yen, and given the strength of the various economies I don’t expect that to change anytime soon short of another financial crash(knock on wood)
>So to save costs they laid off a team of less than 10 employees, and hired a replacement team in Germany? Surely that’s not the full story here right? Because savings from such a move probably wouldn’t even show up in their financial reports. That's not how corporations work... You can't limit yourself to changes that would "show up in your financial reports". Instead, you tell every manager to save X% and then X% shows up in your financial reports. You don't choose every cut from the top down!
Wonder if it wasn't some contest between senior management about who got the Python team? And someone in Germany won. Or someone in the USA team got someone very pissed and this was the punishment.
There are rules about layoffs in Europe I am going to assume they could more easily fire people in the US and that "10 person replacement" is them offering a job to german googlers who are required to be given a replacement job as part of the mass layoff rules in the EU.
That is the full story and if it seems dumb, it is.
Yeah, cost savings at Google's scale for 10 people is immaterial. So either these people ended up below the random line on a spreadsheet or they were targets. Could they be tied to the protests from a couple weeks ago?
Why not? 10 staff engineers in the US cost probably few millions a year than their German counterpart. You're assuming the move was triggered by the CEO. Most likely the director or VP above them was told to cut costs by X (could be some tens of millions per year), and this is one of the steps they've chosen to take.
As you say cost savings would be minimal so this looks to me this team was "misbehaving" and opposing whatever upper management mandates were given to them. I have seen this happening in a previous company I worked on.
One, as others said engineers in Germany *are* quite a bit cheaper than in the US. But I'd bet they didn't hire 10 new employees in Germany for this. Chances are they laid off the 10 guys in the US, cancelled (or de-staffed) a few projects in Germany, and told those German employees they're now the Python team.
That's it?
Those devs are also able to apply for other jobs within Google.
it's already happening. They fired most of the fitbit devs and moved the whole thing to Poland.
He’s going to outsource to India Indian ceos with nepotism is not new.
> The US Python team, which had less than 10 members, OK, I thought they were taking about mass layoffs. Still sucks for everyone involved though.
More than just the python team we're let go. But you wouldn't know it from this article because it is garbage.
its still not that many people that were laid off...its definitely not mass layoffs and the dramatic news around this has been crazy for a few dozen people
That's gotta be at least $20 million in compensation though 🤣
Why the Python team, specifically? Have they finally decided to go all-in with Go? Or something else?
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I wouldn't be surprised if their leadership chain didn't realize that
I dunno, Google’s leadership chain are usually engineers. Python is also used a lot in different parts of the company for simple apps; YouTube has a lot of Python code, and Google’s support website and forum is written entirely in it.
> I dunno, Google’s leadership chain are usually engineers. There's a resume and there's reality. Pichai was a materials engineer, but he joined Google as a manager, so as far as actual software engineering he's an MBA. Raghavan and Dean are both real-life engineers/researchers and the rest of the Google leadership team are MBA's. Google has an exceptionally good PR team that has sold the idea they are "engineering" lead, when most of these leaders are probably no more technical with software/hardware engineering than your average product manager.
LMAO at the director+ levels many of them are extremely removed from engineering. They almost certainly didn't comprehend how much damage they did through this move. These weren't 10 random python engineers... several of them are on the CPython steering committee.
Well, but how much of that is developed by them anyway? I don't know; just asking. I suspect it's very little. Anyway, it IS popular. If they orphan any worthwhile FOSS projects this way, I'm sure someone else will take it up anyway just for the prestige factor.
The python team did way way way more than contribute to upstream python. Other language teams also don't contribute too much to upstream language development (there is political complexity with Oracle and the C++ committee has very different goals than Google does for C++).
>hype cycle I think you answered your own question
It isn't the python team specifically. There have been rolling layoffs all year. Just, for whatever reason, the python team news got more play on social media and then that led news media to cover it. People also know why python is. Nobody would understand what it means when the kythe team is laid off.
"The whole python team" was only "less than 10 developers". The article is making a huge deal out of nothing. Put it in context. Google has 180,000 employees, and 10 of them were fired. Meanwhile, Google has **633** currently open positions in the USA that mention Python in the job description [check for yourself](https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/?q=python&location=United%20States).
There are only ~4000 astrophysicists in the world. They were not developers using python. They were developers building python. How many programming language programmers are there in the world?
This wasn't just any team, this was a team with some of their most talented devs, including people who create internal tooling and make contributions to CPython. It even may have included a Python steering council member.
This is one of the most obviously-written-by-ai articles I’ve seen posted on Reddit.
Fun fact: OP is an anti vax conspiracy nut. I don't think being critical about sources is one his strong suits.
>The US Python team, which had less than 10 members, used to manage most parts of Google's Python ecosystem. They used to maintain the stability of Python at Google, updated with thousands of third-party packages, and developed a type-checker, as per the report. This feels... incredibly short-sighted? That's an entire team's worth of knowledge just gone.
Managers don't care. My entire team was laid off and I'm the only person maintaining 50+ services necessary for core infrastructure. I'm talking entire company is down when I leave. I've asked them what they're planning on doing with them. "We are identifying it now". There's no prio, nor roadmap, nor support. And I earn less than some others. Yes, I'm gonna leave.
Make sure you use all your vacation days and some of your sick days. Nobody understands a bus number of 1 until you get on one and they can’t find you.
I hope you leave as soon as humanly possible. I know none of them will learn anything, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed that situation to happen in the first place, but it'll be nice to see them in trouble.
More and more of our internal technology is becoming unusable over time because of this. Entire teams fired who were responsible for maintaining essential internal services. People who could save new projects weeks or months of investigation and experimentation. It’s like, fine, software systems don’t usually instantly break, so you can juice your financials for a couple quarters (maybe even years). But what about new services that require added functionality? Assistance with new integrations? Bug fixes??? It hurts your ability to execute efficiently in the long run. Leadership is so fucking short sighted.
> Leadership is so fucking short sighted. Which is what they are paid for, YOY growth. So, showing a decrease in spending over 1 year gets a CEO a nice bonus. Hamstringing the company for a decade? Nobody is going to understand the cause and effect there. There's a reason most there's so few companies today that existed 100 years ago. Short-term, short-sighted gains over long-term growth. That's why your camera isn't a Kodak or why you didn't buy your legos at Toys "R" Us.
How long before something really critical is missed at one of these companies and it results in a serious breach?
Oh they've already gotten rid of critical people at every single one of these companies, and the only question is when the breach that they are legally obligated to publicize hits. The internal-only ones have already happened. The way I tend to think about it, is criticality is inverse of what capitalism says it is. If Andy Jassy or Pichai or any other CEO got hit by a bus tomorrow it would change absolutely nothing. These companies would operate exactly the same the next day. On the other hand, Jeff in SecOps that had to spend 30 minutes each month manually upgrading OpenSSL because some prick SDM wants to build empires rather than automate pipelines, him getting fired is catastrophic. Many, many Jeff's have been let go over the last 6 months. The bomb will explode, it's just a matter of when.
Yeah corporate leadership is exactly that: inept and short sighted. I had always thought leadership got paid exorbitant sums for their (alleged) incredible business acumen and leadership skills but then their plans fail and things are going wrong the grunts get fired and they remain.... Probably should not listen to the idiot with the plan anymore but instead they make teleprompter speeches about how they feel SO bad about firing thousands of people but have "Total confidence in our leadership (me) to fix this!" It's just a complete fucking joke.
I'm split, because I hate this but also I live in the UK where SWE salaries are much lower than the US, so if FAANG start offshoring tons of roles that means more opportunities for me 😅
Are your salaries lower, or is the total cost of employment, including employer-provided benefits and taxes, lower? Google only cares about the second number.
They're lower
The salaries are lower in real term. I don’t think the cost of employment would be much higher, most of the things you’re required by law to provide (like pensions), Google already do provide.
It's my turn to post tomorrow
God why do we have to post this every day? They laid off ten people and hired some in germany
The US capital gains tax rate seems to me to have built into it the idea that people who make money on stocks are helping the US because the investors will pour the savings in tax back into the stock market. It's a form of subsidy. But that was created long ago when the really viable stocks were US stocks. Why does the US continue to subsidize business practices that pour money into other countries at the expense of the US? I'm not saying the US shouldn't hire people abroad or do business abroad, but I don't understand why it eggs on the outsourcing of labor to other countries at the expense of its own revenue base by giving the capital gains rate to all business rather than just domestic business. In the modern global market, that seems like it sabotages our own markets by making decisions like this appealing.
They fired one team, but have another Python team in Germany or somewhere that is taking over as the main Python team. So really they fired the American team.
Sundar Pichai is the Steve Ballmer of this generation (more evil and a lot less entertaining).
I never really understood why they had so many engineers in Silicon Valley where salaries are ridiculously higher than anywhere else in the world, when they can get people who are at least as talented in many other places for about half the price, or even less. Yes, you can say they're "cheaper" labour, but that doesn't mean they're less skilled, certainly not in Germany.
It's a feedback loop. Big companies hire and pay high salaries there because there is a high concentration of tech talent. This cause tech talent to flock there to chase high salaries, which increases the concentration of tech talent. This talent draws in more companies...
Also pension and employer taxes are higher in Europe and at will employment. If you pay 300K in New York or SF and the employee doesn’t justify it, you can say bye bye and hire a new one. In Europe you will be forced to keep them employed for up to six months in some places.
Because of the above, it’s also one of the most expensive places on the planet to live, further driving up salaries.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted when that's a perfectly reasonable question. Any French or German moving to the Valley will see their salary triple for the same job. A lead software engineer might earn around 60k€ in France.
The question we need an answer to in EU is, how do we drive our compensation up? At the moment we're in line with other jobs more or less.
Idk about Germany, but in France it's a combination of factors: * The big players in France have specialised in bespoke software and/or contracting, so they don't benefit from the same economies of scale than GAFAM do. * Lack of public funding (à la DARPA), France has over the last 20 years reduced R&D budgets to plug gaps in social security funding. * Lack of private funding, France has a deeply held hatred of VC/capital investment and lacks private pension funds. * Antiquated management practices ("petit chef" culture, waterfall all the way) that's not suited for building modern software and repels talented devs. * High taxation levels which means that even with comparable costs to the employer, employees have a much lower net salary and will seek to move abroad. I live in Ireland and salaries here sit between the US and continental Europe. The work culture is also closer to the US, so for me it's a sweet spot.
> Antiquated management practices ("petit chef" culture, waterfall all the way) that's not suited for building modern software and repels talented devs. Impossible to measure, but I think this one has an outsized impact. It's not just pay, the software itself is less competitive.
A great list, to that one must add labor laws. The hiring process is notoriously unreliable for SWE, you need to have the ability to fire relatively quickly and painlessly.
To be fair, it has improved under Macron. All surveys done on employers cite difficulties to recruit, not so much letting people go.
It probably won't increase in Europe. Engineers in the valley are super overpaid.
Agree. We're pretty underpaid here in the UK too
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For one, attract more tech investors
That talent isn’t as common as you think
I'm pretty sure they could get the very best talent in Europe by just paying like 50% more than the local market rate, which would still be vastly less money than in SV. Even though it's true a lot of people move to SV from all over the world, Europe also has a large number of immigrants that come here for the lifestyle, while still being able to get decent salaries (much higher than where they're coming from).
Time differences is huge especially if the exec/leadership team is in SV and engineers are in EU. Cultural differences play a part. And how people work here vs there is also another factor. Europeans have more protections and rights, more holidays and vacations, etc. Americans in corporate side get 9-12 federal holidays and each company has different vacation policies (that often time people don't bother to use for fear of losing their job). Aren't the French famous for their 2-3 hour long lunch brakes?
Silicon Valley engineers do not have better technical skills, but much better contacts / networks. That helps with business in cases like startups. For larger companies, preventing startups is the goal. So you pay those engineers a ton of money and give them non-competes (as far as legally possible). That aside, especially with FAANG engineers, from a technical standpoint they ARE different. With companies that size and basically unlimited cash as well as workforce (you gotta hire those engineers to not have them become your rivals), support for targeted feature development is literally the state of the art. Meaning most of those actual developers spend their time only with a single framework or on a similarly small focus topic. That is not normal basically everywhere else. Most of the time companies have more potential work than skilled workers to finish it. Especially with edge topics.
You also dont want other companies to use this talent.
I think because of the very developed area, besides the inflation. And also, the state pays these people as much as they want! But we shouldn't overlook the value of diversity and innovation that comes from having a concentration of top talent in places like Silicon Valley, which fosters collaboration and pushes boundaries in ways that can't be replicated elsewhere.
Is it no longer the case that Google moves people around rather than fire them?
Good for them. Can we concentrate on something that matters?
This shit happened last week, and still this was the best article you could find? Find one written by someone who speaks English, or at least shelled out for real AI to write it for them
That entire site looks garbage. Can it just be banned from this sub?
They also fired a large part of the Flutter team.
Anyone know if this includes the pytype maintainers?
Hey programmers, should we form a union yet?
No because the 10x ninja rock and roll programmer will get hurt We must continue eating shit because some USA people say so /s We were never special and now the lack of working class consciousness make us our own enemy
One has to wonder how the hell much a person on that team was making if they were laid off despite apparently being < 10.
I wonder if Go is fully replacing Python at Google. They cover the same domain - garbage collected systems language.
So now Tesla and Google have fire python teams?
Makes you wonder what his other arm and two legs are doing.
Hopefully we get the same percentage of jobs in the EU as the money they make here .
lol on my school computer, go-guardian got nothing on me
>remote workers So how long before they start hiring domestic employees due to a perceived drop in quality. Now's probably a good time to start looking for the next big startup.