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Google lays off its Python team

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Re: Google lays off its Python team

#111

Post by rtpg »

zem wrote: post #78
_giorgio_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#112

Post by Arainach »

zem wrote: post #77
zem wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

> 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 d…

> 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!"

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#113

Post by tom_ »

JSDevOps wrote: post #92
vinni2 wrote: post #44

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

[flagged]

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.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#114

Post by madaxe_again »

fragmede wrote: post #102
zooq_ai wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338

Your point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#115

Post by stevage »

zem wrote: post #59
compiler-guy wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

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?

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#116

Post by UncleMeat »

fargle wrote: post #29
nineplay wrote: post #13

> 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 o…

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.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#117

Post by smsm42 »

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.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#118

Post by UncleMeat »

fargle wrote: post #60
zem wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multi…

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.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#119

Post by fragmede »

madaxe_again wrote: post #114
fragmede wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really doesn't jive with this description of how much they were doing. Let me guess, this mythical two person team could also build Twitter and Uber over a weekend? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338

Your point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.

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.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#120

Post by dotancohen »

zem wrote: post #59
compiler-guy wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

  > very large projects with a one-file-at-a-time architecture (this was my primary job at google, ama)
Is there any place where we could see such tools? A lot of the scripts that I write are contained in a single file, and I'm sure that there would be much to learn from seeing such project scripts. Thank you.
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