161–170 of 476 posts
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Memegen is a way for employees to vent with no action taken by leadership. It serves its intended purpose.
No further action taken by employees as well. If memegen didn’t exist, some might be inclined to escalate, actually forcing leadership to do better.
Meta is clearly driving most of CPython efficiencies. The projects listed are mostly stable so it's smart of Google to let the community drive it forward and they just use it ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.) Python inside Google, for non-AI stuff at least, feels quite a bit different than with different defaults than t…
> ("we had managers that were extremely good about work life balance" and "marathon not sprint" should tell you all you need to know.) That's how all jobs should be though. The only time anyone should be sprinting is if the building is on fire. I guess Google is moving to a 9-9-6 schedule, and they want to do it in Munich where they can pay peanuts for it.
Google used to be about working smartly and not grinding just for grind's sake, which is totally respectable. At some point, however, that became Google's external brand as well, and went in the head of the people being recruited. The result is, recently, people self-select and optimize for joining Google precisely for "work-life balance." i.e. if you want to actually work and get paid for performance, you are better off joining Facebook. Google ends up with the rest of the folks who join with the expectation of low expectations.
Outside of the ML groups, Google really doesn't like Python and there's very little of it in the codebase. This move isn't surprising in that light. Also, Google is IBM at this point, so I would expect a lot of IBM-like moves.
These days if you are doing serious work, you simply use Java. Especially if you want something running for years. Java is really the only option you have.
A decade back I interviewed at a major telecommunications firm. Python was the new fashion then, they were trying to rewrite a fairly big Java code base to Python. Anyway I didn't get the job. My friend did. After a few years of this they realised, Python was not a serious alternative for an application of that nature. And abandoned it midway.
I know several other banks that have had a similar arc. Python is an amazing glue language and perfect for lots of automation and adhoc glue work. Its just not meant to be a serious alternative for long term, stable applications which are typically written in Java/C++.
Other languages like golang have come up in the past. While they are really good for smaller applications. They are just not there for something serious. 'Simplicity' has different meanings in different contexts. Either way, I think both Python and Java are here to stay and will be used for tasks where they are good at.
But we are now past the 'Python for everything' days.
Why not just retrain the python team to another language? I mean, software engineers are not really language specific, they can learn other languages if needed.
They were maintaining Python itself, likely very well (as one would expect) compensated. It’d be a waste to have these devs do product development.
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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…
This is sad. Google just keeps getting worse from people perspective. And keeps getting better for shareholders.
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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…
Frankly, it sounds like a dream job for me too, to be responsible for a particular technology and make sure that it works for all your internal (and external) users.
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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.
It does not make sense at all. Python cython is a complex ecosystem. It is very difficult for new engineers to pick up speed.
Do you think there is some priority change? Like more focus on internal use case, instead of upstream contribution?
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