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.
Google lays off its Python team
71–80 of 476 posts
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#72Meta 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.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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…
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?
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#75Where does the source indicate Python team layoff?
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#76i 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.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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…
> 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"
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#78i 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.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#79Google 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.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#80Outside 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.
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