How is moving all your labor offshores at all reasonable? It seems like this should just be straight up an illegal practice if the talent is plentiful in your own country. This is just accelerating the demise of your own country.
Google lays off its Python team
311–320 of 476 posts
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is definitely true, but Google pays US employees very well. Layoffs dramatically increase profits. That’s been a meaningful driver of their growth and margin in recent earnings reports lately. There are, of course, many benefits to US hiring - a strong talent pool, maintaining a team in the same region/timezone, etc. Google can easily hire back Americans in a few quarters if they need to. Join the alphabet worke…
I would support the AWU if they were actually monomaniacally focused on worker issues like they're supposed to be (specifically I'd love to see a main focus on preventing offshoring). But instead it seems like they spend most of their time fighting the same kind of culture wars you see on college campuses, most recently Palestine. I don't agree with their views on that issue, and thus they've turned me off completely…
I always assumed these culture war unions were fostered precisely to make unions unpalatable.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#313Playing Devil’s Advocate - why does Google need a Python team when they made Go?
Because they have Python code that needs to be supported. The ML ecosystem, for example, is much larger in Python than Go.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#314You all help fuel these companies. Don't complain.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python is only used for prototyping within google. All production ai code is run on c++
Yes, production code is C++, but the way the models are built is Python code, colab, save via Orbax/TF SavedModel, etc and then serve in C++. All (most, to hedge it) development is done via Python. I don't directly develop the models, I played with some for fuzzing [1] and I'm working on security for them [2]. And, before joining GOSST, I was leading the OSS DevInfra team in TF. I still have the most number of commit…
Hello! Can I ask you for some random career advice? I am mid-career, in a low-level mgmt position but want to return to being an IC. My team's tech stack is Python and Kotlin, but in my position I don't get to code. I code for fun at home but it gravitates towards Python (as it is highly relevant for doing Deep Learning work). My question is if I ever go into a backend role, what language best lets me get into a deep tech position at a MANG. With Python's limited use in production in MANGS, I don't see how I'll pass the Leetcode coding interviews. I used to do distributed systems a long time ago and really miss it (Did professional work in C,C++, Java, Go and Erlang/Elixir but it has been a while). I have a child now that takes up a lot of time, so I can't invest in getting good (again) in too many languages. I also have generally bad memory (remembering all the functions in std lib in Java or STL in C++ is just impossible anymore). I generally love coding but my algorithms are pretty rusty too. Advice on how to pick a darn tech stack? Thank you.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how exactly do you think ads get served?
Poorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein. Sometimes with additional overhead referred to as "targeting" which gives a worse outcome and user experience, regardless, over simpler implementations that serve to inform. Targeting forgets causality, typically. Next comes YELLING-LOUDLY-TO-COME-DOWN-TO-THE-LOCAL-CAR-DEALERSHIP-FOR-NO-MONEY-DOWN-OFFERS phase of advertisements,…
Sounds like you should start a trillion dollar ad business! Or if you're worried about ethics start a "niche" billion dollar ad business that only serves ethical ads!
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> got married, had kids, bought a house
I lived in the US on a temporary visa and it's wild to me that people would put down roots in any country without a clear path to permanent residency.
When you read the conditions attached to your employer-sponsored non-immigrant visa it makes it pretty clear that you're not in the country to settle permanently, you're there to work for the duration of your visa and that's all.
Some people seem to ignore that and just trust that neither their employer nor the US government will screw them over.
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#318Google 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++
I retired (after 18+ years at Google) last August, and as of that date A LOT of production code used languages different from C++ -- Go, Java, Kotlin, AND Python, plus a few more (Rust, Dart, and many others). In my successful, long career at Google I did use C++ (I had "readability" in C++), but rarely: only when "ridiculous scalability" was needed.
For example, collecting Stackoverflow posts about GCP products, and distributing the needed subsets of them among vendors and employees in tech support to potentially answer, comment, edit, vote on, re-tag, &c, used to be all Python (and the "scale" was a few hundred or thousands of posts and people at a time -- ridiculously small "by Google `production` standards", and perfectly adequate for the much-higher-programmer-productivity Python has always afforded... I know, because I did the vast majority of that coding, including maintenance, ongoing monitoring of performance, and VERY occasional optimizations if and when monitoring showed them to be desirable).
That was the core of my job for my last several years at Google -- I won't even list the many other NON-prototyping tasks I did in previous years (decades, almost), the vast majority of them in Python. And -- the majority of my performance reviews during those 18+ years were rated "exceeds expectations", so it seems that world-class Python skill (which clearly was crucial to me getting a hiring offer back in 2004, though, alas, visa issues delayed my start to early 2005) were extremely useful for at least some of us Google engineers.
Alex
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moving things to india sounds like a great idea, except the 13-15 hour difference in communication. it's all well and good until you're in Cupertino and taking an 11:30 pm call because they have 0 hours of overlap... guess you can force them to work US hours, but that goes to culture as well. Are they trying to show that India's workplace is more compliant and they'll just do what corp types will tell them?
I worked at Amazon for almost 10 years and I hate, repeat hate working with India teams. Their quality is subpar, period. No other way to put it
quality is at par with price you pay
Re: Google lays off its Python team
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is Netflix still included? They should be kicked out, I haven’t heard anything tech about the, for years now. Then we can go with Meta Apple Google Amazon, or MAGA for short. Ok, not a good look that one.
Because they still pay $500k cash.
The thing with Netflix is that they have such few open roles and there are plenty of other liquid high comp companies that pay similar. It was all about the original stock growth that just stuck I guess