Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google lays off its Python team

social.coop

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 476 posts

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#371

Post by nebula8804 »

emodendroket wrote: post #233
xcrjm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's localized to one company it is but that's the beauty of a sector-wide slowdown... where are they going to go instead?

Maybe we can see this as a positive, if it gets bad enough, the people coming into tech from the bootcamps who just did it for the money might move onto other fields.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#372

Post by dcrow0 »

pabloivan57 wrote: post #304
bbrake wrote: post #268

Earlier 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

offshoring isn't limited to India. devs in Canada, Europe, and South America are superb and cheap

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#373

Post by dcrow0 »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #330
twojobsoneboss wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this tech job environment the US google employee is willing to do as many 11:30 nights as needed to keep his high paying tech job, and management knows it

Management is dumb if they think that. You can't announce year long continuous layoffs, and expect people to work hard. What will the hard working employees get in return if they get laid off? Most US Google Employees are smart people, they should know that now is the time to prepare to get off that tech island, and quiet quitting is the way.

if you don't perform, then you get PIP'ed if you don't get PIP'ed, you'll get laid off

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#374

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

crabbone wrote: post #356
ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Nah. This isn't the reason. The reasons to quality drops are economical / just a result of how anyone runs the place. Here are some reasons why quality drops with foreign / powerless workers: * Job is an asset. More so in poorer countries where even a low-paid US job makes a huge difference in terms of earnings in local currency. This is also, to a lesser degree what happens to visa workers. Fear to speak up. Fear to…

The parent comment is about Amazon employees in India.

Your point #1 contradicts itself when you say "if they were locals who can simply move on to another job" --> Indians working India are the "locals" who can move onto another job. And Indian tech industry is very well developed, its not difficult to find another job, certainly not for those working in MAANG companies.

Entirely disagree with point #2, people can learn a language if they use it long enough. And Indians are no strangers to speaking multiple languages. The bilingual population of India exceeds the total population of US.

Its also extremely ignorant (maybe even racist) to suggest that people in India have not seen the equipment or the customers. Frankly, this is the most abhorrent part of your comment for me. Like I said, ignorance, hatred, and racism seeps through in any conversation.

Also, if a company care so much about quality of work, they can ship the equipment to India. Or does shipping not exist there either? Lastly, speaking of Amazon, which equipment is this exactly? Or what customers?

I somewhat agree with your point #3, but for a company like Amazon the hiring process is pretty much standardized. Its leetcode, leadership principles and system design for the higher levels. How much variation in evaluation can there be for such a standardized process?

> Although some may start jumping to conclusions that try to explain this through racial stereotypes...

And it needs to be called out. Unfortunately, it has become all to acceptable to be racist against Indians online. Even in channels like hacker news.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#375

Post by emmy1989 »

zem wrote: post #59
compiler-guy wrote: post #47

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…

[dead]

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#376

Post by emmy1989 »

zem wrote: post #59
compiler-guy wrote: post #47

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…

[dead]

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#377

Post by filoleg »

srockets wrote: post #95
algaeselect wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the internal memegen site, where people post and vote on memes, the AWU folks (they have a red logo around their profile picture, so easy to identify) are basically Debbie Downers. Constantly posting comments or memes shitting on the company. Whatever it is, see red logo around profile picture, you know it's going to be a "this company sucks" comment. They very much give me the vibe of the "late stage capitalism"…

Union's power is in the enforcement of employers to accept collective bargaining (that's why the misnamed US "right to work" laws are so effective at disenfranchising workers). AUW, as it currently organized, lacks that power, so yes, all that remains is bitching. Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees. Had they didn't had memegen to post on, the higher probability more would tunnel the…

> Which is why memegen exists: it is a way to disarm Google's employees.

Are you in PeopleOps and trying to do the reverse-psychology trick with this?

I am only halfway joking. It seems rather strange to me that if memegen is such a helpful tool for Google higher-ups to suppress the employee discontent, given the string of recent memegen changes that caused large uproars from those same employees (removal of downvotes/overall score display specifically).

If anything, those recent memegen changes (along with plenty others) do the opposite of attracting people to memegen. If PeopleOps/higher-ups wanted to incentivize people to use memegen (so that they would waste time on that instead of unionizing), why would they make those massively unpopular changes to it?

Personally, I think Google higher-ups/PeopleOps are, at best, neutral on memegen or, at worst, negative on it. I am almost certain if memegen didn’t exist already since the olden Google days, it wouldn’t have been allowed to get created at the present-day Google.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#378

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #366
ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management is dumb if they think that. You can't announce year long continuous layoffs, and expect people to work hard. What will the hard working employees get in return if they get laid off? Most US Google Employees are smart people, they should know that now is the time to prepare to get off that tech island, and quiet quitting is the way.

RTO has been instituted and there not much you can do to prepare for a whole career change when in the office… And esp for those with families they might be dependent on big tech comp to support their family in high CoL areas, else have to move their kids and school or make big lifestyle downgrades Management holds the cards and they know it. Lesson for workers is to live way below your means while you still can

Last I checked google was in hybrid mode. That is 3 days a week in office max. Also, Last I checked a week was 7 days. Lastly, its not whole career change. Switching from Google to Netflix as a software engineer is not a career change.

I disagree that management holds the cards. Jobs are being threatened whether you work hard or not. You can double your productivity and still be cut in the next round of layoffs (and suffer burnout, stress, depression etc). In such a situation, it makes sense to quiet quit and prepare yourself for the time when you do get cut. Besides savings, the lesson here is to prioritize self over a job every day. In fact, if management did held the cards, they'd make the move that increases productivity and morale, not alienates the entire workforce.

Also I think those with families should be extra motivated to interview elsewhere in the current climate. They should be more scared of getting laid off and ending up jobless than having to move to another city with a new job.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#379

Post by ToxicMegacolon »

dcrow0 wrote: post #373
ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management is dumb if they think that. You can't announce year long continuous layoffs, and expect people to work hard. What will the hard working employees get in return if they get laid off? Most US Google Employees are smart people, they should know that now is the time to prepare to get off that tech island, and quiet quitting is the way.

if you don't perform, then you get PIP'ed if you don't get PIP'ed, you'll get laid off

You will get laid off whether you perform or not is the general rule right now. Thus I feel the best move for employees is to prioritize and prepare for what comes after lay offs.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#380

Post by pjc50 »

Arainach wrote: post #112
zem wrote: 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…

I'm guessing these are related. If every team is potentially responsible for breakages in every product, there's no such thing as a "just chugging along" product and there will be a constant demand to delete products that are not popular within Google.
Post reply on HN