Google lays off its Python team

Post by emodendroket » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:05 PM UTC

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #219

emodendroket wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might think twice if you looked at the figures; the numbers in this article comparing US and UK wages are astounding: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/britain-white-collar-j... (and this article goes into the rationale too. Basically the idea is you're paying more than you would in a developing economy, but you can trust the team with more autonomy and fewer cultural misunderstandings, so it's an option for…

You know, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to use this divide to actually move to the EU and get residency. Then again, with so many countries having to beef up military spending and facing economic headwinds you really have to question whether all the social / quality of life programs that make europe more livable than the US would be sustainable long term either. Who knows maybe in 30 years Americans ultimat…

Post by emodendroket » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

xcrjm wrote: post #150

emodendroket wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 by emodendroket » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #229

emodendroket wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.

It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:27 PM UTC

nytecode wrote: post #81

mihai_maruseac wrote: post #66

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

Python is only used for prototyping within google. All production ai code is run on c++

Post by zem » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

offbyone wrote: post #206

zem wrote: post #59

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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…

I was your opposite number at AWS for many years. Like you say, it was one of the best jobs I've ever had, but over there it was a career dead end. I wasn't laid off, but I had to leave it to have any hope of growing myself. I feel for ya, zem; if you ever turn up at a PyCon in person, lemme buy you a drink.