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Google lays off its Python team

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Re: Google lays off its Python team

#401

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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…

> That is 3 days a week in office max. Also, Last I checked a week was 7 days.

Apparently weekends don't exist for you?

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#402

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I have similar experience but with Americans. They knew very superficially about the business and completely dependent on our Indian team to get them out of their troubles. Troubles caused by again not knowing and just trusting another team (donno where they were from) to handle their issues. This isn't a one off case either. So get off your high horse. Both countries have qualified and unqualified people in tech and…

I gotta agree with the parent comment about teams in india. No high horses required. Just seemed like a bunch of Bootcamp grads not caring about work and quality. There were, of course, some competent workers there, but most seemed to have gotten hired through favoritism, not competency. India seems to have this reputation that the entire population is made up of tech geniuses, but they have a similar ratio of idiots…

The geniuses came to the USA and became people like Satya Nadella

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#403

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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

Racist much? I work out of Europe and manage teams both in India and Europe. My experience have pleasantly gotten better with Indian teams. If the quality is sub-par then perhaps you're not a good manager? perhaps failing upwards?

I am from Europe and I have worked with many Europeans, Americans and Asians. Quality of sub-contractor colleagues from India was, same as from anywhere else, directly proportional to what the company paid for them. Good pay = skilled and hard-working. Cheap labour = barely any skills and hardly working.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#404

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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.

Isn’t that why anyone does any job? Even if you love tinkering with computers the reality of a job involves a lot of other stuff.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#405
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…

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Re: Google lays off its Python team

#406

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then why not MAAANG?. Much better acronym, but then I just say big N.

We can still call Alphabet Google, just like everyone calls X Twitter. Clunky rebrands don't have to be accepted by everyone. Edit: Personally I'm in favor of sorting by present market cap, so it's MANGAM.

Google never rebranded. It's still Google. They just had all these unrelated moonshots like Verily and Waymo that didn't make sense to keep pretending were a part of Google.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#407
post #59

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…

sorry to hear about the situation at google, would love to help out. we connect laid-off engineers to startups. if anyone from the team is interested here is our discord server https://discord.com/invite/Bnp5zyc8nM

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#408
post #56

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.

Well over 100m lines of Python as has been publicly stated several times over the years is not "very little".

In a codebase of 13+ trillion lines it's very little.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#409
post #59

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…

My guess: the people in your group have very high salaries and they want to dump them. I would not be surprised if they hire people to make a new team at some point in the future.

I run HR at a small software company reports and my HR person has a lot of friends in HR at FAANGs. For 10+ years we've been talking about hiring and salaries at Google (and others). It's just crazy to me how high salaries have gotten. I know someone that switched from Google to FB when they made $750k at Google and got $1M at FB.

I said all this to say: I've talked to a bunch of people over the last 6 months that know someone laid off and: 1) they had a very high salary, and 2) the group they were in was hiring.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#410

This is standard recent Google. A year or so ago, they laid off GCP upper tier support to replace them with cheaper workers. PS: I won't say which MAAN_, but the recruiters are half based in India now. Coincidentally, it's a MAAN_ that laid me off previously in a relatively recent timeframe rather than attempt to find me another home internally. Brain explodes. Perhaps MAANGs need to focus more on long-term sustainab…

Support team is one thing. Google's Python team was a small team, most of which were also on the Python steering council or Core Python developers. These people had decades of experience in Python. Their knowledge and community connections is irreplaceable.

I'd fathom to guess that it's not even worth Google's time to replace a ten people team. It's probably just a KPI sent from the top -"Replace a few people to earn your bonus this year". Constructing useless KPI, when you cannot come up with interesting ones.
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