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Google lays off its Python team

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Re: Google lays off its Python team

#381

Post by crabbone »

ToxicMegacolon wrote: post #374
crabbone wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> Your point #1 contradicts itself when you say "if they were locals who can simply move on to another job"

OK, I need to clarify: another equivalent job. If you are local in the US, then all local jobs are "somewhat" equivalent (of course they are different, but they are within the same range). But, if you work in India (or any similar country) for an international company, or for the local Indian company -- that's a world of difference.

I'm not from India, but I know this situation from Eastern Europe. India wouldn't be very different in this regard.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#382

Post by tmjor »

mangosteenjuice wrote: post #346
laluser wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This highly depends on your skillset. Most employers with equivalent liquid comp will be HFT, and you will be writing C++. Netflix is the only employer I know of where an Android or iOS IC can make liquid 500k+ TC without RSUs.

What's IC

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#383

Post by crabbone »

emodendroket wrote: post #364
crabbone wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cultural misunderstandings It's funny that you think that being located in Europe the positions will be stuffed with Europeans... I'm in this exact situation: work for American company, while living in the EU. Am not a EU citizen (Eastern Europe / Middle East). More than half of those working with me are foreigners too. Eastern Europe, Middle East, Latin America and India would be the most common origin countries.…

Whether they are or not they presumably speak English well and are familiar with anglophone culture if they’re living in the UK.

There are many layers to "being familiar with anglo culture"... being able to understand technical documentation to a degree won't cut it in many cases.

I went through several stages of learning retroactively (i.e. not appropriate to my age) through dating or having otherwise good relationships with someone from the US. So, for example, I've learned about TV shows like Daria or Dr. Who many years after they came out. (And yes, I've learned about Dr. Who from an American friend, and before that I didn't know there's a thing for more educated Americans where they think that Brits are more... refined, not sure if that's the right word).

I'm married to someone born in the US, so, through her and the need of dealing with the kid who grows up primarily speaking English I've learned nursery rhymes, lullabies and a bunch of kids folklore that I would've never come in touch with in my line of work.

More than that, you can perfectly well live in another country and never really know the side of life of the locals if you are never invited to visit, or don't develop very good relationships with the locals. You might never know what home-cooked food looks like because you'd only have access to store-bought or restaurant meals. (Eg. I didn't know that mac-and-cheese was such a common food in the US until I was invited to visit someone in an informal setting). And there's plenty more of it. It'd take a book to try to enumerate all of these.

This both affects the less formal communication one may have with their peers as well as contributes to cultural mixups especially when it comes to customer-facing interfaces.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#384

Post by cafebabbe »

bitcharmer wrote: post #187
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

> Google is an AI first company Google is an ad first company FTFY

Adtech used AI to make money before it was cool. You wouldn't believe how many ML models are required to build those shitty little pieces of HTML.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#385

Post by tarsinge »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #276
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.

Be real, it’s google. They could layoff 10k every month for another year and still have people lining up from around the world to get in

Google was so impactful in redefining work environment in the 2000s that people have now a very hard time getting over them being now just another old school big corporation. I remember in the early 2010s the aura Google had here on HN was crazy, I guess 10 years are still not enough to destroy that image.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#386

Post by lotsofpulp »

unixhero wrote: post #352
noobermin wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else, shareholders and executive compensation

Ah yes of course, the short term needful.

There are quite a few defined benefit pension funds and 401k/IRAs that depend on the publicly listed businesses’s continuous long term price increases to meet people’s goals of being able to use their “assets” to buy the quality of life they want in retirement.

Certainly does not seem like the “short term” needful to me. US tech stocks are basically carrying a large portion of politically active US voters past the finish line.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#387

Post by tarsinge »

cafebabbe wrote: post #384
bitcharmer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is an AI first company Google is an ad first company FTFY

Adtech used AI to make money before it was cool. You wouldn't believe how many ML models are required to build those shitty little pieces of HTML.

Everybody used AI before it was cool. In fact people avoided the very term AI because it was uncool.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#AI_winter_of_the_199...

> Many researchers in AI in the mid 2000s deliberately called their work by other names, such as informatics, machine learning, analytics, knowledge-based systems, business rules management, cognitive systems, intelligent systems, intelligent agents or computational intelligence, to indicate that their work emphasizes particular tools or is directed at a particular sub-problem. Although this may be partly because they consider their field to be fundamentally different from AI, it is also true that the new names help to procure funding by avoiding the stigma of false promises attached to the name "artificial intelligence".[49][50]

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#388

Post by lotsofpulp »

sitkack wrote: post #136
bsimpson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google pays people by region. As I recall, SF, NYC, and Seattle get full wages, and other geos get discounted by a certain percentage. If you live in the US but not in one of those metros, your pay could be ~15% lower. Yesterday's layoffs seem to have been framed as reorgs. Some teams have been wholly dismissed. Some have been consolidated (two teams -> one team). There does seem to be a pattern that favors people in…

Wages by Geo is a Urs Hözle move, whom should get paid in NZ dollars.

Wages by geo is just “pay the lowest price you can for the requisite quality of product/service you need”, which is what effectively every person does day in and day out.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#389

Post by CydeWeys »

bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #322
CydeWeys wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All SWEs at the same level at Google are making the same compensation (with some exceptions for high-flying AI researchers). They Python SWEs certainly weren't making more than anyone else.

That's not true at all. (Excluding the factor of location), the compensation of a SWE depends not only the level, but also on tenure, on performance rating (and the history of rating), and on stock market fluctuations (whether the stock price was low or high when the stocks were granted). One of the rumors is that the better compensated you are on your level, the more likely you are to be targeted for layoff, because…

None of those depend on the project you're working on, which is my point.

Re: Google lays off its Python team

#390

Post by CydeWeys »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #312
CydeWeys wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's not their intent, they're certainly doing a good job of it. The people running them are cosplaying running a union, without fundamentally understanding what a union really is.
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