Live data from Hacker News

Google lays off its Python team

social.coop

141–150 of 476 posts

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#141
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary, right? I have to imagine at one point the gap between US devs and European devs is starting to be felt

The team wasn't US based - GP is in .nl...

As others have pointed out, OP is in NL, but the rest of the team was in the US.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#142
post #59

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…

When Wall St. concerns lead to imposing cannibalistic capitalism plans that are pennywise but pound foolish.

Just wait a few years. When they come calling for consulting services, charge them triple.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#143
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about the automated refactoring? How did it work? How was it triggered? How much human involvement was there? Are any parts of it public?

can't say too much about it because it mostly used a lot of internal tools, but it was a combination of writing per-file utilities to do specific code transforms (think something like libcst), and then a framework to scan the google codebase, find affected files, and apply the transforms to them.

Code mods are fun. Were they gated by human PR reviews, perhaps in batches, or applied without review?

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#144
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

It does not surprise me that people shitpost calling an expert "moronic" without any counter arguments.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#146

Google is an AI first company Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products All AI is written with Python. Google lays off all Python team. Segmentation fault

> All AI is written with Python.

Only high-level is written in python, low level is Cuda that is a form of C.

Also, you would think the first to replace workers with AI would be the AI companies like Google.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#147
So Meta invests in open source AI and one of the reasons is to undermine competition from smaller AI companies, like OpenAI, etc. Wouldn’t Python tram at Google serve the same purpose? Building tools for AI and ML and open sourcing it, so that smaller companies wouldn’t have an edge and never become a threat.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#148
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't say too much about it because it mostly used a lot of internal tools, but it was a combination of writing per-file utilities to do specific code transforms (think something like libcst), and then a framework to scan the google codebase, find affected files, and apply the transforms to them.

Code mods are fun. Were they gated by human PR reviews, perhaps in batches, or applied without review?

yes, gated by human reviews based on who owned the code, unless they were completely trivial and then were gated by a single global approver. there were always humans in the loop though.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#150

This is standard recent Google. A year or so ago, they laid off GCP upper tier support to replace them with cheaper workers. PS: I won't say which MAAN_, but the recruiters are half based in India now. Coincidentally, it's a MAAN_ that laid me off previously in a relatively recent timeframe rather than attempt to find me another home internally. Brain explodes. Perhaps MAANGs need to focus more on long-term sustainab…

I'm not convinced demoralization is undesired in all cases; certainly it seems like there was a lot of frustration about workers demanding more pay, remote work, stances on various social/political issues, and so on. Making people demoralized and afraid of losing their jobs is one possible answer to that.

Theoretically you have a point. On the other hand it’s so bad for recruiting. I view companies that do large layoffs the same way I view companies that do a lot of contract hiring. You clearly don’t care about employees and their wellbeing.
Post reply on HN