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Google lays off its Python team

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Re: Google lays off its Python team

#172
post #14

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.

Very little at the scale of this codebase is still a lot. From where I sit (SRE), I see a lot of Python which is very much mission critical.

is it really Python though ?

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#174
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be my prejudice but when someone talks about offshoring a role, moving it to Munich isn't the first thing that comes to mind. It may be slightly cheaper than California but not by so much that if expect it to be the main reason for doing so.

”Slightly cheaper”? What are the actual numbers we are talking about regarding yearly comp?

TC diffs of 230k vs 350k is what i've seen, for a mid-career SRE

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#175
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

this reminds me of kenton v's complaint about working on infra being so hard

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#176
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are building a new python team from scratch in munich, for whatever reason. yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.

I’m sorry to hear that. 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?

i doubt there is much room for a priority change. as i said elsewhere, we were a pretty understaffed team, so we were already very focused on the highest value internal use cases. we did have a couple of people who also worked on the core python interpreter, but that was only a fraction of their duties, and even our open source and upstream contributions were driven by stuff that google also needed done.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#177
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New version release 1 month ago: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2024/03/whats-new-in-tensorflow-...

Based on the contents of the blog (as that's the only think I can talk about -- I was in the team pre 2022), it's mostly dead. JAX (and Keras) is where the push is now. And, grudgingly, PyTorch

Jax is next level though

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#178
post #78

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They built a prototype (probably in Rails, lol). Thousands of people built Twitter, including many who have never written a line of code in their lives.

Really, no shit, I thought it was one guy and his cat who did all the coding for everything
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